The Girlboss Is Dead. We Are OK with That.

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Man buns, dabbing, ombre hair and the #girlboss … all things from 2016 that are now deceased.

If a decade ago the girlboss was rising and grinding and leaning in, now she’s on her farm co-op in a prairie dress, warning her Instagram followers about pesticides and Big Pharma. There’s this feeling today that female hustle is kind of embarrassing — very “pick-me” energy — just trying too hard, which is the opposite of cool.

On this episode, Katelyn and Roxy offer a postmortem on a trend that we were very much part of. We leaned in, we showed up, we pitched and hustled and advocated for ourselves. Katelyn wrote a book about why it was OK to be a girlboss for Jesus, basically. All the same, we’re not super sad to see the girlboss era end. We may not be living on farms (yet), but we’re over here finding some joy in long walks and a decent night’s sleep.

The question now is (or maybe it always was): What role does work play in a well-ordered life?

This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.

KATELYN BEATY: Roxy, as executive editor at RNS, you have a lot of responsibilities on your plate. At the time of this recording, you are running from meetings to meetings. You also have a lot going on outside of work. So let me ask you the question you’ve probably heard many times. How do you do it all?

ROXANNE STONE: One of my best friends, also my roommate Jonathan, once got me, you know, one of those dopp kits that just says “get it together.” And even though I feel like I get a lot done, I still sort of feel like a mess a lot of the time. So my answer is no, I don’t know that I do. I just make it look like I do.

BEATY: How do you perform uber-competence is maybe the better question.

STONE: In this decade of my life I have some better routines around my work. So like getting up earlier, getting into the gym if I can, or going for a long walk if I can’t. Like, yeah. You know, some of these things where I feel like in earlier stages of my career, I didn’t have a very good disconnect. And so I felt stressed all the time. And I feel like now I have a little bit better of an off button.

BEATY: So it’s hard when like your screen and where you do your work is also where you do all these other things in life. Like, I know. And you don’t go into an office that physically disconnects you when you leave from the work.

STONE: It does help that I no longer live in such a small New York apartment that my desk is like next to my couch. Now there’s like a little bit of separation.

BEATY: I do find, yes, a good walk, even just like 30 minutes, end of the day, really helps. I do think figuring out some kind of routine to disconnect is really good. And I have learned that two of my previous coping mechanisms, scrolling and alcohol, don’t actually really help in the long run.

STONE: I think there’s growing evidence toward that.

BEATY: Experts agree: doomscrolling, alcohol, not going to help you long-term.

BEATY: From Religion News Service, this is “Saved by the City,” a podcast from two Christian women who leaned in in our 30s and lived to tell the tale. I’m Katelyn Beaty,

STONE: and I’m Roxy Stone.

BEATY: Earlier this year, there was this trend on Instagram where a bunch of people were posting photos from 2016. I think in part just to highlight, like, “Oh my gosh, that was a decade ago,” which is a bizarre thing to grapple with. In a lot of ways, 2016 felt like such a more innocent time. Like before the pandemic, before AI as we know it now, before the current administration. What were you up to in 2016?

STONE: Oh man. I kind of think 2016 was one of my best years. Like, I had lived in New York for a couple years at that point. I felt like I had a friend group, a church, a community. I’d kind of figured out how to Airbnb my apartment when I wasn’t there, so I had like a little extra income stream coming in, ’cause I was traveling a lot for work. Yeah, I really think that I was having a good time in 2016.

BEATY: You had kind of hacked life.

STONE: Yeah, I felt like it. And I was several years at that point after my divorce. I feel like it was one of the years where I wasn’t dating anyone, but I felt really empowered in my life.

BEATY: Mmm. You were empowered to lean in, perhaps.

STONE: I was probably leaning in.

BEATY: Wait, where were you working at that time?

STONE: Barna.

BEATY: Yeah. Okay.

STONE: This was post-Relevant. Post-Relevant, pre-RNS. I was at Barna. This is before I met the guy I moved to San Diego for, and yeah, I mean, I was like bicoastal. I was like living in New York, but Barna was in California. I don’t know. I felt pretty cool.

BEATY: It was a good year for me too. I quit my job at Christianity Today.

STONE: That’s right.

BEATY: I was on CNN for like three minutes talking about evangelical women’s response to the Access Hollywood tape. And I also published a book called “A Woman’s Place.” Let me see if I can remember the subtitle: “A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, Home, and World.” A book is such a capture of your thoughts in a very specific time.

STONE: Like, literally.

BEATY: Yes, and like, that’s just the nature of the thing. You’re never going to be able to avoid that. Looking back, it was basically like, it’s okay to be a girlboss for Jesus.

STONE: I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it that way. Your book, I mean. But it was kind of—

BEATY: Of that era. It was like Sheryl Sandberg–inspired, but like for evangelical women.

STONE: Yeah. Like, it’s okay. Go to work. You can have your work and your family and your Christianity as a woman. There was a need for the book, even if now we’re like, do we really want to be girlbosses for Jesus?

BEATY: I’m pretty sure “girlboss” is like cheugy.

STONE: Girlboss has entered cringe territory, for sure.

BEATY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the rise-and-grind hustle culture, it just doesn’t have the same appeal, for reasons we’ll get into. The girlboss is maybe now on like a farm in a prairie dress, warning her Instagram followers about pesticides and Big Pharma.

STONE: And where did her male counterpart end up? I would say that the girlboss parallel on the male side was like the tech startup guy with the vest, the fleece vest.

BEATY: Yeah, where is he now? He’s probably very excited about the AI revolution. He’s either that and very rich, or like on an ayahuasca retreat somewhere. Or he’s like a red pill influencer, and like, whatever he’s doing, he’s probably protein maxxing. And he’s in his forties now, so also fiber maxxing.

STONE: Is that a thing in your 40s specifically?

BEATY: Doctors recommend it.

STONE: Okay.

BEATY: Because of colon health.

STONE: Do you want to tell us about your colon health?

BEATY: All right. So it’s been a decade since “A Woman’s Place” came out.

STONE: Yep.

BEATY: I would not write it the same way now, but like, when you’re a single 30-year-old, it’s much easier to tell other women to lean in for Jesus when you have that like energy and drive.

STONE: Yes. I did have a lot of energy in my 20s and 30s. Yeah, yeah.

BEATY: For work.

STONE: Uh-huh. Man, I was like running marathons when I was at Relevant. I do not know how I did that. When I think back on that, the work was so intense, and then all of us were like, let’s go run together afterward.

BEATY: After work?

STONE: Or before. Yeah. There was like a group of us at Relevant that were training for marathons together, and so we would like sometimes do 6 a.m. and sometimes do like 7 p.m.

BEATY: It was literally hustle culture.

STONE: I didn’t do anything else. Yeah. Yeah. So it was literally hustle culture.

BEATY: Reflecting on my time at Christianity Today, where— 

STONE: You were the first female managing editor and the youngest managing editor.

BEATY: Hashtag girlboss. Thank you for fulfilling our agreement that you bring this up every season of “Saved by the City.” Yeah, I don’t think I necessarily had aspirations to become the CEO or to join the kind of C-suite, in part because that building is really weird.

STONE: So weird.

BEATY: It’s now a veterinarian’s office. But I definitely just assumed that getting a promotion, pay raise was the point. Like, that was a big part of why you worked so hard, is to get higher into like the masthead at a magazine like Christianity Today, in part out of the sense of, the more power, influence you have, the more you can direct this organization in good ways. Like, you can change the system from within. And that so much of the lean-in movement was basically encouraging women to take up more space in the workplace so that workplaces could be more equitable or fair or better for everybody.

STONE: How did that go? I mean, I think you’re right. I think there was kind of a sense of like, okay, men have been doing it forever. And like, look where that got us. A lot of war and sexual abuse in the workplace and all this. Like, let’s let women have their turn and maybe they can do it better. The thing is, is like Sheryl Sandberg was at Facebook.

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: And I don’t know that we think that Facebook is so great.

BEATY: I shop every day on Facebook Marketplace, so it’s fine. No, I’m just kidding. You’re highlighting the fact that it’s easy for someone in a tech executive position to tell other women to lean in without acknowledging her own incredible privilege. And she’s basically asking women to join organizations and corporations that are perhaps creating more harm in the world than good.

STONE: I think we might say that now about Facebook. And I don’t know. I mean, I do think that there was like, within the tech world, some advancements in terms of like maternity leave and fertility care that probably had something to do with women being in leadership in some of those companies.

BEATY: Uh-huh.

STONE: But either a lot of those like millennial-led women companies are gone, or you see things like Facebook, where now we’re sort of like, ah, were they really that different?

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: And I’m not saying that’s because of Sheryl Sandberg. But I think we’re all just a little more cynical now that like, just because women are in leadership doesn’t mean it’s gonna be any better.

BEATY: Yeah. Is it really good for women to be tech executives when they’re creating products and platforms that are having such a negative effect on the broader culture?

STONE: Interestingly, it doesn’t seem like there are any women in the sort of like new tech bro era, like the AI — are there any women leading big AI? Or maybe they have that — like, this is what I feel like was the other thing of the sort of girlboss era, is that a lot of girlbosses ended up as the right-hand person.

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: Over and over and over again. Like Sheryl Sandberg. Like, they sort of got the COO—

BEATY: COO, yeah.

STONE: They got the like chief operating officer position, you know. So maybe there’s some of those in AI.

BEATY: Sure. It’s very complementarian. Sam Altman needs a helper, a helpmeet.

STONE: Uh-huh.

BEATY: I think of the girlboss very much of that era as, you know, Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elizabeth Warren’s “Nevertheless, she persisted,” which was then put on like a million mugs and T-shirts. We love to create products to show our — that’s the most millennial thing ever, is, how do we create a product to be bought and sold that can mark your identity if you have this consumerist item? And then of course, like the Me Too movement really taking off in 2017.

STONE: Yeah.

BEATY: In the sense that all of these men in top positions of power, they’re not to be trusted, obviously. There’s so many men in every industry who have abused their power. And like, this is what happens when women don’t have positions of influence in different industries. So it’s like, Time’s Up. That was also an organization of the time that came.

STONE: It was. I mean, it was kind of heady, you know? Like, it was like women were moving up in the world, getting positions of power. There was like a legitimate possibility of a woman for president. And there was this like sense with the Me Too movement that like, wow, we’re really making something right. We’re calling this thing out, and people are listening and companies are making changes, and we’re seeing powerful men fall.

BEATY: People who seemed like untouchable, where their predation had been kind of an open secret in their particular industry for decades, were finally actually paying consequences, whether getting fired or facing lawsuits or going to court. Like, things were actually happening to those people. It seemed like real accountability.

STONE: Yeah, and I think it was. And I think it was. But apparently, along with girlboss, the Me Too movement is like a little cheugy.

BEATY: Is it the Me Too movement or the hashtag MeToo?

STONE: I think it’s the hashtag that’s cringe or like kind of the sort of every woman needing to have her Me Too story and posting it online. I don’t know that it was like Gen Z is like, roll our eyes, there’s no abuse in the workplace.

BEATY: Right.

STONE: But just more of like the performative nature of it.

BEATY: Yeah, millennials do love to do that. Like, mmm, maybe what feels cheugy or cringe about it is like the immediate turn to self-disclosure on the internet?

STONE: Yeah, probably. Which in its own way feels like a lost innocence. Like, there was a time when we were all like very self-disclosing on the internet, thinking that that was, I don’t know, good to do.

BEATY: Or using copious hashtags, because like hashtags were seen as—

STONE: So many hashtags.

BEATY: Contributing to some kind of movement. Like, post your Me Too story as a way of—

STONE: Right.

BEATY: Garnering attention for how prevalent the issue of sexual predation is. I don’t want to be too cynical about that impulse. But I do also see how it feels — you know, we’re posting on these hashtags on platforms run by people who perhaps do not have our best interest in mind.

STONE: Well, right. I’m not ready to dismiss the era of Me Too and what came of that. And also, like, even the maybe stuff that feels a little performative, I think, contributed to the sense of momentum, the change that actually did happen. So we can do further postmortems on Me Too and hashtags and wokeness, which I think was like the next version of Me Too. We could do that another time.

BEATY: That’s a lot. We’ll just—

STONE: We’ll just do an autopsy on girlboss today.

BEATY: Yeah, we have a lot of autopsies lined up, apparently. We’re gonna do an autopsy of woke-ism. Listen to us. Oh my gosh.

STONE: Woke 1.0. It was a little silly. That was a quote. That’s not me saying that. Was it AOC? Well, or maybe she said it was a little crazy. A little crazy. She said a little crazy.

BEATY: Isn’t that fascinating? Okay, let’s do the girlboss autopsy. We’ll call it the Coroner Wears Prada.

STONE: Yes!

BEATY: Did you see the new “Devil Wears Prada“?

STONE: I did. I felt like that captured so much of what did not age well about this. I thought it was so distasteful. I mean, it was fun, of course, and the outfits were amazing, but like, I just thought it was like everything — it captured everything that could be said negatively about the girlboss messaging. Like, okay, so you gave your whole life to the — that, anyway.

BEATY: Yep. Yeah. No, I agree. All right. So what happened to the girlboss? How did she die?

STONE: I think a lot of it happened in the pandemic.

BEATY: Yeah.

STONE: There were real consequences in the pandemic. Like, women were disproportionately laid off. Women of color were even more so disproportionately affected. Moms—

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: Like, a lot of the girlbosses had become moms, and now they were essentially having to like homeschool their kids and also still do their jobs. And there were plenty of husbands and dads who helped out with that. But I think there’s a lot of data out there that shows—

BEATY: Operative word being “helped out.”

STONE: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of data that shows that really those responsibilities fell on moms. And I think that was so exhausting. Just so exhausting. And then you’re also like maybe worried that people you love are going to die, and you don’t know whether you can send your kids to school. And I think there was just a feeling that like the whole apparatus that said you can have it all as a woman just kind of like crumbled, and there was this sense like, oh no, we can’t. We can’t actually have it all or do it all.

BEATY: So COVID permanently damaged the girlboss.

STONE: Yes.

BEATY: Right. You had already alluded to this: the various scandals involving women CEOs. Like, there were all these brands of the girlboss era that were women-founded, women-led, very branded pink feminist. Actually, the originator of the hashtag #girlboss, Sophia Amoruso, founder of the now-defunct Nasty Gal, which I’m personally still grieving, was accused of creating a toxic work environment. Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier, same issues. Audrey Gelman, who helped found The Wing. Did you ever go to a Wing? The Wing co-working space, exclusively for women.

STONE: I don’t even remember that one.

BEATY: There were a couple different locations in New York, but they were in other cities. Miki Agrawal, the self-proclaimed SHE-EO of Thinx, those period—

STONE: I did think she was clever. And also the period underpants felt like a revolution, but then they ended up being toxic, like literally. For your body.

BEATY: Well, she apparently ended up being toxic too. She was accused of sexual harassment by many people in the workplace. So dang. Yeah, it’s kind of like, okay, so these women rose to the top, created these female empowerment organizations, and then they treated their colleagues really poorly and like harmed people who were working for their company. The dream of the girlboss doesn’t feel as like appealing if you’re gonna be a jerk as you like climb your—

STONE: Hashtag SheToo.

BEATY: Wait, but Thinx, the period underpants, are also like bad for your body?

STONE: I’d have to go back and look it up. But they found that it was leaching some kind of things that are bad for your body, for your hormones.

BEATY: Unfortunately, there is like a very sensitive, vulnerable opening in your body at the very place where the Thinx underwear resides. It turns out that’s a bummer.

STONE: Yeah, I know. I also think there’s — back to the autopsy. I think there’s been just a general like souring on corporations and corporate culture. Again, I think some of this even happened during the pandemic, when it was this sense that like, are you really as important as your productivity? And then I think, you know, we’ve just had pushback toward billionaires, toward CEOs, toward this like widening class gap. And I just don’t think that women in general, or society in general, like has the same trust in institutions as they once did, and that includes corporations, which feel very much at this point like, oh, they’re wearing their capitalism on their sleeve. You know, there isn’t like the same kind of the employee being treated like family or whatever. It’s like, no, you are a cog in the machine. And I think for women who maybe imagined they could have it all, there is, I think, a growing sense that like, do I want it all?

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: Why would I want to give so much of myself to a corporation that—

BEATY: Could lay me off at any—

STONE: Any moment, which they did. I think also layoffs are a big reason people started feeling this way. You know, like, okay, I sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears for this company, and then they laid me off at the drop of a hat. And like, why did I do that?

BEATY: Like, corporations can’t love you back.

STONE: I have a friend who, like, in the couple weeks leading up to her wedding, was like pulling all-nighters for work, like working till two or three in the morning on this big project that was due. And also like trying to finish planning a wedding.

BEATY: Hmm.

STONE: Then like two months after she got married, she got laid off. And she kept saying — and that was a moment for me where I was like, wow, that was not worth it. That was not worth like the way that that ruined that very like happy season of your life, in a time when you should have been celebrating and being able to like be excited about your wedding and—

BEATY: Yeah. Right.

STONE: For what? Like, now this company is like a line on your resume, and that’s—

BEATY: Yeah. Maybe the girlboss didn’t die. She just is really tired and like laid on the couch and never got up. Like, I think, especially as women of our generation, trying to excel at work while also having a family, managing a household, trying to invest in a marriage or partnership or friendships, have any semblance of a hobby or leisure, things that are not kind of paid work. Trying to do that all and still be like happy and healthy and feel fulfilled, it just doesn’t sound appealing in the same way. Like, something really has to give. And having it all doesn’t even seem that appealing anymore if it’s going to mean that you have to sacrifice your physical health. I mean, right.

STONE: Yeah. And you really start to think about that a lot more as you get older.

BEATY: Mm-hmm. We wouldn’t know anything about that, but—

STONE: We’re ageless. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of reasons the girlboss is dead or collapsed on the couch, but definitely the vibes are very different now among women and the world of women online too. I think it’s just like nobody’s really quite talking about women’s success and women’s achievement and women’s like ambition in the same way anymore.

BEATY: Throughout my 20s, into my 30s, I felt like I had kind of endless supplies of energy for work and that I derived the energy from work. Like checking things off a list, or getting things done, or pulling together, you know, another issue of the print magazine, or releasing an episode of the podcast. Like, there was a steady supply of dopamine hits from accomplishment and achievement that like worked for me, has worked for me for a pretty big part of my adulthood, like in the workplace. And then maybe 18 months ago, I started feeling that those dopamine hits just weren’t working anymore. Like, ending a lot of work days feeling depleted rather than satisfied, or like, yes, you checked these two things off the list, but now you have five more things on your list. Like, kind of like endless amount of work, coupled, I think, to some extent with isolation that comes from working remotely. So kind of a lack of camaraderie.

STONE: I think that’s a big one.

BEATY: And then just being in a position in my day job where I have a lot of responsibility, and I have a lot of internalized responsibility from being like a good oldest daughter who like can be depended on to get the things done.

STONE: Mm-hmm.

BEATY: I just noticed that smaller things, smaller stresses at work, became really big for me, and it was showing up in physical symptoms that I think I now understand as kind of classic signs of burnout. And this is a cliché, but I think it’s true. Like, I think our bodies are often telling us something before we have the language to rationally process what’s going on at a deeper level.

STONE: The evidence is growing in that field also.

BEATY: So I don’t really know what to do with that. I mean, I say all of that still very much caring about work, valuing work. I think it’s totally a false binary to then think like, well, then your true fulfillment is in gardening. Or like, I think some of the tradwife conversation online is a very simplified and shallow reaction to girlboss culture. But I am becoming more interested in sources of meaning and fulfillment beyond work, productivity and achievement, which is like a very huge shift for me.

STONE: We’ll just say ditto to all of that. I really began to feel that in the pandemic when I was alone a lot and especially early on when I was in New York and — it was before you could really even go outside, and I had these weird like panicky feelings that if I died on a Friday night, like, no one would even worry about me until Monday morning when I didn’t show up for work. And it felt really dark, where I was like, oh no, the only people in my life are the people I work with over Zoom, you know? And all I am is productivity. None of that was true. Like, obviously, like, my parents cared a lot about me, and my friends, but I felt so isolated and alone, and like all I was to the world was the productivity that I could do. And that’s the only place I had enough value to be missed. And that felt dark. And that was a time where I started to find healthier rhythms that helped me differentiate the rest of my life from my work life.

BEATY: Yeah.

STONE: And to be in my body more. But I also think — and I don’t want to get too far into this, but you know, I think there are things that I gave up for work that I wish I hadn’t. And I can’t like blame, oh, it was all those years of working that kept me from remarrying earlier or that kept me from having kids. Like, there is not a one-to-one like causation there. But I think I let work be enough for so long that it fulfilled me enough to not like worry about some of those other things or like pursue some of those other things with the like aggressiveness that—

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: —a little urgency might have offered. So again, I don’t want to like make a whole generational claim about that, but I do think, you know, you’re seeing a lot of conversations now about this idea that, you know, oh, women who delayed having kids so that they could have this successful career are like maybe now finding out it’s too late, like they waited too long, or like fertility isn’t just like a magic—

BEATY: Yeah.

STONE: —wand, fertility treatments. So I think that’s a consequence of an era that said the workplace can give you your fulfillment.

BEATY: Mm-hmm. Yeah. There have been all these memes that have popped up in the tradwife era that we’re in, the kind of backlash to girlboss feminism, about like, at the end of the day, your diplomas can’t take care of you, or your resume can’t take care of you.

STONE: Right.

BEATY: And I really hate that.

STONE: No.

BEATY: It’s only women who that’s directed to. And so I really want to resist a kind of false binary of either you can center your identity on being a wife and mother and find fulfillment in building a family, or you can seek some kind of personal fulfillment in your profession and have an amazing career, but you have to choose. Like, there are women who have both. Maybe I just wish that the girlboss era had been a little bit more honest about the sacrifices. That it wasn’t just all like upward and to the right and that women face some real limitations in terms of the timing of their lives that men do not. And no amount of like personal can-do attitude can overcome that.

STONE: And we’re not moms. I also wanna like recognize that if we had a mom on here that also had been like — like a lot of my friends that like were really leaning in, they are so tired. And I think — I mean, we talked about it with the pandemic, but I also just think that there’s a whole parallel culture of like mom rage that happened in this era, where it’s like, I think a lot of moms, millennial moms, who really leaned into their careers and also had kids, like, especially if they couldn’t afford to pay for child care—

BEATY: Child care.

STONE: Yeah. Or they didn’t live close to family, which of course a lot of them didn’t, because we moved for work.

BEATY: Right.

STONE: Right. And it was like, holy cow, it’s just a really exhausting hamster wheel. And my friends in that stage of life love their kids. Most of them love their jobs, but they also just kind of—

BEATY: Mostly their kids.

STONE: But I think they’re really bearing the strain of this idea that she could have it all.

BEATY: They’re not able to do it all.

STONE: Right. Yes. Right. And I think in that instance, a lot of times you always feel like you’re dropping the ball somewhere. Yeah. But speaking of loving my job, would love to give a shout-out to the wonderful workplace that does support work-life balance and support—

BEATY: “Saved by the City,” of which we are immensely grateful.

STONE: Religion News Service is an independent, award-winning source of global reporting on religion, spirituality, culture and ethics.

BEATY: From the nuns, N-U-N-S, to the nones, N-O-N-E-S, RNS covers religion like none other.

STONE: We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for future guests and topics. Drop us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts, or shoot us an email at sbtcpodcast@religionnews.com. We’d love to hear from you.

BEATY: So, “A Woman’s Place” came out ten years ago. A book, as I said, is a reflection of how you thought and felt at a very specific moment in history. There’s no way of getting around that. So I just have to accept that it reflects how I was thinking about these things when I was much younger.

STONE: I kind of wanna — we’re not saying abandon the work, you know, or that women shouldn’t still be ambitious.

BEATY: I’m really glad that I wrote that book, because I was pushing back against an attitude in evangelical spaces that professional paid work for women is just inherently suspect, for a lot of the reasons that we’re already talking about. Like, at the end of the day, it’s ultimately going to take you away from your central primary calling, which is to be a mother. And you can’t have both, and you better choose the right path early on. And if you don’t, you’ll be sad, or you’ll be giving up on God’s plan for you or something. And I just want to reject all of that. Like, still.

STONE: Yes.

BEATY: I am on the record to say I think that is crap. I think that as image bearers, we’re invited to work, we’re called to work. That calling extends to both men and women. And I do continue to believe that women’s presence in leadership and participation in the workplace does actually matter. Like, I don’t think that we would have the positive ramifications of the Me Too movement today if it were not for women in the workplace. And I also think that it’s okay for work to be just work.

STONE: Right.

BEATY: And if it’s just work, it allows for other really important, meaningful activities of human life to kind of take up more space. Like, I don’t think that exhaustion and burnout and just pressing in continually at your job is good, is the point, is what God requires for anybody.

STONE: Yeah.

BEATY: And so I wanna say, like, if I wrote the book today, I would still say, like, yes, I want young women to advocate for themselves in the workplace, to know how to ask for more pay, to say yes to more responsibilities, to find good mentors, and like, to maybe have more measured expectations of what work can give you in terms of your fuller identity and life fulfillment.

STONE: Bravo. And I’m glad we’ve given you this podcast and this episode as a moment to — not as a mea culpa for your book, but as an epilogue.

BEATY: As an epilogue.

STONE: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want women to quit working. I think work is a beautiful and good and important thing. And also, we need paychecks. Like, the single family income doesn’t work anymore. So even if you don’t want to, you probably have to. I do think it’s just like a righting of the order of things in your life.

BEATY: Mm-hmm.

STONE: I don’t want to start another cringey hashtag, but I do think that like workplaces have to create a culture that allows for men and women to have lives outside of their work and value outside of their work. And I think this kind of constant drive for more productivity, more productivity, more profit, it doesn’t do anyone of any gender any good.

BEATY: Neither of us will ever use a hashtag again. I think that’s the takeaway from this episode.

STONE: Hashtag no hashtags.

STONE: “Saved by the City“ is a Religion News Service production. The producer is Jonathan Woodward. Our editor is Fred Greenhalgh.

BEATY: Chaz Russo put together our look, and Martin Fowler wrote our theme music.

STONE: We are Roxy Stone

BEATY: and Katelyn Beaty.

STONE AND BEATY: Thanks for listening.