It happened to me first — headlines portraying me as a “toxic leader” when I had to make the same, often unpopular, decisions that my male peers did without critique. For them, it’s called Founder Mode, and it’s celebrated (a proper noun! With its own merch! And trademarks being filed as I write this!). For women, it’s called “toxic”. After my “fall” in 2016, I watched an incredible cohort of female founders come up behind me. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me and that they had it all figured out. They were my friends, but it was hard to watch them win. I secretly muted their Instagram accounts. Why was I the only piece of shit female founder? What did they possess that I didn’t? Was it my upbringing? Maybe the media was right. These women took big swings, raised huge rounds, and were held up as examples for countless other women who for the first time saw that their aspirations might actually be within reach. And then, one by one, they were canceled. Our responsibility wasn’t just to pave the way for women, but to do it perfectly — and when we weren’t examples of whatever warped mutation the word Girlboss (which is now immortalized in the Merriam-Webster dictionary) had come to symbolize, we were “toxic.” No one expects men to build a utopian workplace that cures institutional biases, but we were expected to do just that. This is all too complex for an X post, and I’m not making excuses for anyone. Today, posts like this are out of character for me because, like them (as the non self-appointed consigliere for scorned Girlbosses, I know), we’ve all been told to keep gender out of the conversation. The media’s glee surrounding the “fall of the Girlboss” has committed, at scale, more harm than any pretty, young, white (let’s call it what it is), often unrelateable female founder could ever do. The phenomenon reminded a generation of women what we’d been told for eons: be nice and stay in your lane, or else.