The Rose Gold Notebook in the Swag Bag

Sometime around 2014, I started seeing the same words printed on everything. On tote bags. On coffee mugs. On a notebook printed in rose gold foil that someone handed me in a conference swag bag. Girl boss. Boss lady. Boss babe.

And to be honest, the first time I saw it, I was excited. I thought it was great. After years of feeling like I had to apologize for being ambitious, for wanting anything at all, especially as someone who got an MBA and worked in male-dominated fields, I was so excited to see this movement of women who were essentially given permission to want things out loud, to charge money, to take up room, to call themselves the boss.

At the time, I was in my early thirties with four year old twins and a brand new baby at home, and I was building my business from the ground up. What I didn't see, because I don't think any of us could really see it yet, was that it was the same thing we had already experienced, just in pink.

It was still hustle mentality. It was still, you want this? You've gotta work harder than everyone else. You have to want it more than everyone else. You have to sacrifice whatever it takes to get to this level of success. And maybe in exchange, after you've hustled and sacrificed for years and years and years, then you'll get to be one of the ones who finally made it.

That's not new, y'all. That's literally the oldest thing out there. Somebody just printed it in shiny rose gold and pink and sold it back to us as liberation and empowerment.

What Girl Boss Culture Left Exactly Where It Was

And I do want to tell you what it actually cost, because it took me time to see it for what it was.

It didn't change any of the reasons that corporate America didn't work for me. It didn't change any of the challenges that most of us are facing in our day to day. It didn't change one single structure. It didn't change the mental load. It didn't change needing support for childcare. It didn't change having no one to call on to be your backup when your kid gets sick. And it certainly didn't change who gets paid and who does this for free.

It changed the vocabulary and left the system exactly where it was.

So for over a decade, a whole generation of us got sold more empowerment, and what was delivered was the same systems in cuter fonts with better branding. And when it didn't work, we got told that you didn't want it badly enough. You aren't high vibe enough. You need to work on your mindset.

I call this patriarchy in pink, and I'm done being polite and making excuses for it. Let's get into it in this new episode.

Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective® and your host for the Promote Yourself to CEO® podcast.

I have been digging deep into this Matriarchy Would Never series because it really, really gets me fired up. And I think if you are in my generation of women, you're maybe Gen X or elder millennial, then you completely understand this frustration that so many of us are feeling right now, the exasperation when we realize that everything we've been promised our whole lives was not real.

Barbie Had Every Career and We Believed It

If you were in my generation, you remember Barbie and how she had every single possible career. You could get a Barbie veterinarian. You could get a Barbie doctor. You could get a Barbie zoologist. You could get Barbie as an art teacher. You could get Barbie in any possible career you could possibly think of.

And for us, in that generation, it was such a huge thing because it was the first time girls were being told you could be anything that you wanted to be. So we took that at face value. We all went to college at record numbers. We got more degrees than anybody. We went into professional fields and got amazing career opportunities.

But the rest of the world, the rest of the culture, the rest of society didn't catch up. And that's where we are today, where we are still being sold that we can be anything. But what hasn't been said to us is that if you want to be anything, you still have to do everything in order to achieve it.

And that is the problem that I have, and that's what I'm trying to break down here and help us see what is happening, because only when you can see clearly what is happening and deconstruct it can you figure out a better system, one that actually works for us.

So today's episode is all about the bad advice that has been sold specifically to women by women in the language of feminism and female empowerment. And my goal is that by the end of this one, you'll be able to name what you're looking at, you'll be able to name what we're all experiencing, and that will be so helpful in understanding why something isn't truly working for you and give you some insight into what to look out for.

What Patriarchy in Pink Actually Means

So I call this patriarchy in pink. It is using the language of female empowerment, of feminism, while still selling patriarchy. The structures, the systems, the institutions are not changing. They're just making it cuter.

It's hustle culture with a girl boss filter on it. It's still an extraction model where we are still focused on extracting your labor, my labor, everyone's labor. And even if you are getting paid for that labor, there's still the dependence on the unpaid labor that we need to speak about.

Here's what it's not. I'm not talking about women having ambition or making money. That is valuable, right? That is what we are all here to do. I run a business. You run a business. We have some sort of ambition. We want to create a successful business.

If you're like me, you got bills to pay. In fact, if you're really like me, you might be the breadwinner, too. I'm the sole breadwinner, and as of the most recent stats, something like 40% or more of women are the breadwinners in their homes, and that number is increasing all the time. Women are making money, and we want more women to make money.

The challenge here is when the entire model, the entire system, the infrastructure underpinning everything still runs on extraction and still assumes an unlimited supply of you. There is still invisible labor that is happening and that you are still responsible for.

When Entrepreneurs Became Celebrities

So before we dig into specifically the patriarchy in pink, I have to call out a major shift that has been happening in my lifetime, and probably yours. You've probably watched this shift yourself.

See, we didn't used to have celebrity CEOs and celebrity entrepreneurs. When I was growing up, if somebody said they were an entrepreneur, a lot of people took that as shorthand for unemployed, that you didn't have a job and you weren't building a real business. That was hugely different from what my parents considered themselves as small business owners. They had legitimate businesses, real businesses, right?

And suddenly, through the '80s and '90s, especially through the early 2000s and 2010s, we saw this massive shift, especially with the internet boom, with tech booms, where being an entrepreneur became sexy. It became cool.

That is something we all have to pay attention to, because then with that sexiness of entrepreneurship came the hope that you could start something and suddenly become a millionaire. You could have the next big startup. You could have a big exit. And of course, that's very attractive to a lot of people.

So we rebranded entrepreneurship from something kind of flaky, where no one does it, this is just for people who are pie in the sky, who are just hoping that they're gonna make it big but they're not actually building anything real, to entrepreneurship becoming mainstream as something ambitious people do. You're going to create this amazing business from scratch.

And I think it's important to call out that shift, because what has also happened with this is those entrepreneurs becoming celebrities. This is such a major change from how business was done for decades. No one really cared about the CEO unless you happened to be in the business world.

Even when I was getting my MBA, we weren't studying tons of CEOs unless those CEOs had started becoming big brands themselves. I remember at the time I was getting my master's degree, everybody wanted to know about Steve Jobs because he was a big name CEO, and it was right when Apple was starting to soar again. I remember when those brightly colored laptops came out right when I was getting into college, and by the time I was in my master's degree, if you had an Apple laptop, that meant you were a creative person, you were an ambitious person. It really was this whole new revolutionary brand.

Nobody Gets Platformed by Accident

And so speed up a little bit, we get into the 2010s and when I was talking about girl boss culture, and now it has become normal that if you are going to be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to be a celebrity within that specific space.

And why is this important? It's important because celebrity culture does bring in a different lens to this. I think it starts to make things seem normal when they're really not, and it brings a lot of attention, but it doesn't necessarily bring smart business strategy.

So no one gets platformed by accident, right? And with this surge in celebrity entrepreneurship, this surge in online marketing, this surge in social media, it has become expected that if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, or if you're trying to model a successful entrepreneur, that they are a celebrity in some way. They are platformed in some way. They have a large audience in some way.

So the business gets built around this celebrity entrepreneur persona. This personal brand is really, really key and important, and this is one of the challenges with patriarchy in pink. It's still putting the individual at the top of the patriarchy pyramid.

Putting a Woman at the Top Is Not Matriarchy

Just like I shared in the last episode of The Matriarchy Would Never, in patriarchy, everything's a hierarchy. So there's the one person at the top who gets all of the resources, who gets all of the power, who gets all of the visibility, who makes the most money, and it takes a huge amount of people underneath them to support that and make it happen.

And I want to be clear that just putting a woman in charge does not mean we have a matriarchy. A lot of people think that is all matriarchy is, is reversing patriarchy and putting a woman in charge. That's not matriarchy.

Matriarchy is not about one person having power over everyone else. It's not about one person having access to the most resources. It is about a more communal model where the people in the center of the model are those who are the most vulnerable, the children, the babies, the mothers, the elderly, the disabled, and everything in the model is designed around sharing resources, sharing power.

So to get back into what I mean by patriarchy in pink, what happens in this model is, again, we're still ending up with tons of celebrity entrepreneurs because that's where this has moved. And the people who get platformed the fastest, who grow the biggest audiences, who get the most attention, are going to be, by default, the ones who are able to leverage their privilege.

And there is an intersection here that is really important to call out. When they are able to leverage the privileges that signal that you are a good girl and a valuable woman, as deemed by white supremacy, you are going to be able to basically manufacture trust faster than any credibility could earn it.

So that could be privileges like pretty privilege, whiteness, thinness. All of those things are being leveraged in this celebrity entrepreneur culture. And all we have to do is look at who's on business magazines right now, who's on the cover of the business magazines, who's leading some of the biggest business podcasts or being featured on the biggest business podcasts. You will see this as I call it out.

And the offer underneath a lot of these celebrity entrepreneurs is, do what I do, and you can have what I have. If you do what I did exactly the way I did it, you too could be just like me. If it works, awesome, then she was right. But if it doesn't work for you, then it's your fault. You didn't do it right. You didn't want it hard enough.

So this isn't about women making more money, okay? It is about leveraging the systems of oppression against other women. It's about leveraging the systems of patriarchy, the systems of white supremacy. It's about leveraging these things, showing off privilege and status in order to get people to pay you.

The Arizona Mastermind and the Rented Everything

The last episode was about the matriarchy would never assume you are the safety net, and I was breaking down the invisible labor that keeps our lives running and how that has continued to be something that holds women back under a patriarchal system. In this episode, I want to talk to you about the advice that has been sold to women by women at a premium that has literally been weaponizing our own oppression against us.

So I remember when I started to feel like the women's entrepreneurship space was becoming a lot like the emperor has no clothes, and it was when I flew out for a weekend of pure masterminding with a group of women who I absolutely love and respected.

We had met through different programs we'd been a part of and conferences we had attended, and we decided that instead of signing up for another retreat or another mastermind experience, we were gonna facilitate our own. So we flew out to Arizona for a long weekend to talk all things business. And of course, as we're talking, we are comparing notes about what we had seen in the women's entrepreneurship and small business space, things that we were just baffled by.

We talked about women who were signing up for these coaching programs that were multiple five-figure investments for the year, and a lot of these coaching programs were encouraging all those clients to do a full girl boss rebrand.

And when they were doing these rebrands, these brands would come out of these mastermind programs in a very formulaic way. Suddenly everybody's brand looked exactly the same, maybe slightly different color palettes, but they were all renting designer clothes from Rent the Runway. They had designer bags next to them. They had the red-bottom Louis Vuittons because that is a status signal.

Some of these even had gorgeous, multi-million dollar Airbnb homes that they were doing the photo shoot in. We even heard about them renting cars or renting private jets just for a photo shoot. And that made my stomach turn a little bit, because I realized how many people were using these kind of status signals and using luxury goods to bypass our critical thinking and make people think that they were extremely wealthy and extremely successful.

The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand

Kelly Diels named this the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. And once I started to read her work, I couldn't unsee what she was talking about. She really broke down how women are sold using lifestyle, using the language of female empowerment.

And it doesn't matter what the product is. The product could be anything, and the Kardashians are a great example of this. However you feel about the Kardashians, they have sold us everything from makeup to underwear to jeans. They can sell us just about anything, and people will buy it because it makes them feel like they're just that much closer to having that Kardashian lifestyle.

That has exploded across women's entrepreneurship and small business as the way that we are supposed to market ourselves and position ourselves. The way that we're supposed to sell to other women is to showcase our lifestyle using the language of female empowerment.

And if we dig even deeper into it, there's another layer of specific archetypes we can tap into. My friends Maggie Patterson and Dr. Michelle Mazur really talked about this on their podcast, Duped. They were two of the women at the peer mastermind retreat that I was talking about earlier in this episode, and it was conversations with them that really started to make me question everything.

They shared these particular archetypes that they were uncovering, and it was mind-blowing to me to see how this was being literally crafted and created to get people to stop thinking critically, and to get them to basically sign up and say yes to whatever was being sold to them.

So I'm gonna credit them and kind of give a high level overview. I will link to their podcast episodes where they talk about these different archetypes, but I think this is so important to call out, because in patriarchy, the goal is extraction. It's all about, how can I get what I want from you so that I win, not so that we win. And that's the problem with all of this. It's not about us winning collectively, it's about one person winning over everybody else.

The BFF Next Door and the Woo Woo Crew

So let's talk through some of these archetypes. You've probably seen these, especially online, and then been frustrated when they tell you that the only way to do what they did is to start selling your lifestyle in this way as well.

So the first one is the BFF next door. This archetype is someone who shows up online as your unpretentious best friend. And these are the people who build huge followings, are just like everybody else, just like you, just a regular mom, just a regular girl. You can have all sorts of different variations of this.

But the thing here is it's a lot of curated vulnerability and simulated intimacy. And with the BFF next door, it doesn't have to be the most polished or the most luxurious, but you develop this parasocial relationship with them. And the reason that's dangerous is it switches off your critical thinking of due diligence. You feel like you already know her, and you feel like you already trust her.

And don't get me wrong, the point of marketing is to build that know, like, and trust. But when you're building it through curated vulnerability and simulated intimacy, it can cause a lot of harm. And that's what I'm saying with a lot of these. They can cause harm when it's shutting down your critical thinking.

The next archetype is the woo woo crew. I know a ton of the woo woo crew. I have been in the yoga space for decades. I definitely am someone who identifies as more on the woo woo side, and these are the people who talk about abundance and manifestation and alignment, all of which is fantastic. I love all of these topics.

The challenge is when they use toxic positivity and gaslighting to shut down any problems. So where we see the critical thinking shut down here is when there's something real happening and you bring up that problem, you bring up this issue, and they don't want to talk about it. This is not the space. We keep it high vibe here. And they are not open for conversation around it. That is toxic positivity. That is gaslighting.

I saw a ton of this happen in the 2016 election, the 2020 election, the 2024 election. During the pandemic years, during Black Lives Matter, we saw a huge split between the woo woo crew where suddenly I was shocked to see how many went down the alt-right pipeline. It was terrifying to me to watch this happen, and I was absolutely shocked.

The Luxury Lifestylers

Then there are the luxury lifestylers. And again, this is kind of what we were talking about at this mastermind retreat where we were talking about all of the fakeness of this lifestyle that these people were somehow supposed to be living.

But when you really understood what was happening, you realized this is all Rent the Runway. This is all rented designer bags. These are probably rented red bottom shoes. These are rented fancy, flashy cars. These are rented private jets. None of it is verifiable.

And these are also the people who are the most likely to inflate revenue claims. The luxury lifestylers love to talk about how much their home is worth that they're staying in. They love to talk about how much money they're making. But the problem is none of that is verifiable, and they're not talking about any other part of it.

If all they're telling you is how much revenue they're bringing in, but they're not talking about how many people are on their team, are they paying their team well, how much does it cost to run a business that size, what else is going on behind the scenes? Usually, it's positioned as if they are doing it themselves. There's no credit given to other people. There's no credit given to what it really takes behind the scenes to maintain that level of luxury lifestyle, if it is real or not.

There are many other archetypes out there. I just wanted to call out some of the most common I see when it comes to the women's entrepreneurship space.

And what I'm not saying is that using archetypes for personal branding is somehow wrong or manipulative, because inherently it's not. We're gonna use some more context and nuance and discernment to unpack it, though, because where it does become a problem is when it is not authentic, when it is not congruent with the actual person running the business, when this is something that has been cultivated intentionally to get you to override your own judgment.

The Difference Between a Culture and a Cult

When what is being commercialized is an identity, it is buying a shortcut through their relationship-building process. Because when something looks like something you already know and trust, internally, instinctually, as humans, we're like, okay, I know where to fit this person, and you already start to trust them a little bit more. So you don't go through all the steps of due diligence that you might have done on a stranger, because this person doesn't arrive to you as a stranger.

And it's important to know that, again, every business has a brand, every person has their personal brand. We are talking about when it is engineered to bypass someone's critical thinking.

And the tell here, if it's being used against their very own community and clients, is whether people have the freedom to question and challenge it. This is the difference between a cult and a culture. This is the quote from Adam Grant. He says, "The difference between a culture and a cult is whether people have the freedom to question and challenge the way things are done."

When Maggie was writing about these different archetypes inside of the women's entrepreneurship space, she was talking about how fragile these brand personas are. It takes so much work to maintain this brand persona, so any kind of criticism is shut down immediately to protect the brand. If the image that they are portraying, that they have very carefully crafted, is the asset, then criticism is not feedback. It is damaging.

And this is why, within these businesses, if you come to them saying, this isn't working for me, I'm getting stuck here, I'm not getting the result that was promised, instead of getting a real answer, you get told something along the lines of, work on your mindset. Raise your vibration. Get out of your own way. You are in scarcity.

That isn't a coaching philosophy. That is asset protection, and that is a red flag. That is a big red flag.

What This Model Does to a Woman Over Time

So you might be listening to this and going, okay, Rach, I do not want to be anywhere near any of this. Keep me away. Maybe you've experienced personally what I have been talking about. Maybe this has not been your experience.

The reason I wanted to deconstruct a lot of this is that for so many of the women I've talked to over the last almost 20 years of working with women entrepreneurs, this has been their introduction to small business and entrepreneurship. It has been female lifestyle empowerment brand. It has been patriarchy in pink.

And the most damaging, dangerous part of it to me is what happens once they've said yes, they've put their hard-earned money into a program, into a product, into a service, and then they were so defeated when they didn't get these amazing results that were promised.

And slowly, as they were told that it's their mindset and they just need to work on that more, they need to want it harder, they need to hustle harder, it starts to chip away at their confidence. And it starts to train them not to ask better, sharper questions. It tends to train women to think that it's internal, that there's something wrong with her.

It trains people out of asking, hold on. Does this really work for me? Does this work for how I want to show up? Does this work for my values? Does this work for the people I'm here to take care of and serve? Or is it treated like you having any questions is somehow a lack of commitment?

I think it's so dangerous when this patriarchy in pink model pushes the only definition of success as money, as revenue, and all we get are revenue claims, but we don't hear anything else about what it looks like behind the scenes.

We don't hear about how profitable that was. We don't hear about whether that allowed them to actually live the life they want, or if they're having to work 24/7 in order to maintain it. We didn't hear about what the team needs to actually look like. We didn't hear so much. We can only see the big numbers they tell us.

We can see the big audience size, but that doesn't tell us anything about if people are buying. We can only see how big and loud and flashy a launch was. It doesn't tell us if it actually made money or if it barely broke even.

And when things aren't working, when you don't get results, if the explanation is never the program, it's always your mindset, that is not okay with me. That is incredibly dangerous.

Audit the Structure, Not Yourself

We want to make sure that women have real foundational business training. That's why I'm here at The CEO Collective®. We want you to understand how to build an offer that people actually want, how to build delivery in a way that you can consistently get the type of results people signed up for, how to make sure that you not only get people great results, but that they want to keep working with you because the results are so powerful. We want to help you figure out how to get in front of new people without exploiting your own life to do it.

So the good news is you don't have to become a celebrity entrepreneur to have a successful small business. Thank God, right? That's just a myth that has been told and sold to us over and over and over again over the last 20-something years.

And when you look out over the broader context of culture, when we look at reality TV culture, when we look at celebrity culture, when we look at influencer culture, even athlete culture, it's become more and more popular to become an entrepreneur and a small business owner. First time ever, and it is radically different than how businesses were talked about before.

So it's so easy to get swept up into, because this is what we're seeing. This is who's on the covers of magazines. This is who's on interviews. This is who is featured in podcasts, is gonna be the celebrity entrepreneurs. But the good news is you don't have to opt into that. You don't have to do that.

And in fact, I don't even blame the women who are upholding this model, because this is just what they were shown, and it worked for them at least once. It worked for them at least a couple times if they're still doing it. They just didn't have another model of what it could look like.

When they're running these businesses on the only playbook that's ever been handed to them, they're still facing the same things that the rest of us face. They still have the same financial pressure at home. They probably still have the same invisible load that we talked about in the last episode. They still have families to take care of, kids to get to school, relationships they're trying to put time into, health they're trying to take care of. And at some point, there will be cracks in their business when they realize how patriarchy in pink was not designed for them.

And that's what happened for me, too. There were cracks that started to become visible when I realized the model was not gonna work for me. And once you know better, you do better, right? I have tried things in the past, I have run things in my business in the past that I would not do now. I have used urgency in the past that I would not use in that way now. I have used sales tactics in the past that I would not do now. I learned this model before I unlearned it.

So what I am trying to share in this is, one, shine a big-ass spotlight on things that are happening so that we are aware of it, deconstruct it a little bit, and then start to say, okay, as the cracks become more visible, what gets built instead?

The patriarchy in pink has a lot of cracks in the foundation, because the foundation still assumes that there is support at home that's keeping your life going, from the first episode. The matriarchy would never assume that you are the safety net. But patriarchy in pink still assumes that the mental load is handled, that the invisible labor at home is getting taken care of, that the kids are getting fed, that everything is still happening even while you're doing this.

So the matriarchy would never, in my opinion, sell you a transformation and hand you a one-size-fits-all playbook. The matriarchy would never sell you a transformation, this huge promise, and then the minute you're bumping up against a challenge or a problem and it's not working for you, say, you just need to try harder. You need to hustle harder. You need to want it more. You're not working on your mindset. You're not high vibe enough.

Okay, this has been a really intense episode to record. I've been sitting here for about three and a half hours, stopping and starting and stopping and starting and trying to make myself be more concise and not get off on too many tangents. It could easily have been a six-hour or more episode, because this is the work that I have been doing behind the scenes deconstructing for myself. And to be honest, there's not a lot of resources or models to follow here for what I'm diving into, or at least that I've found. There are some, but just not a ton, and it's definitely not what I feel like is mainstream.

So if you've been sitting through this episode doing a quiet inventory of, oh my gosh, I've seen that, I know exactly what you're talking about, I want you to know that this is not an audit about you and something you might have done. I want you to audit the structure and the system, okay?

I want you to be thinking about how we have systemically been trained to do these things, and questioning is going against the system. Anytime you're questioning it, you're pushing against the system, and every time we've been within these systems and we've tried to push back and ask questions and say, this isn't working for us, and then we're told we're the problem, it makes us trust ourselves a little less. And you start multiplying that over years and across industries, and you start to see how this has chipped away at the impact women in business can make.

In the next episode, part two really, because this again could've been a six-hour episode, I want to talk more specifically about what gets taught everywhere as good marketing, as marketing best practices, and why most of it was built and designed to stop you thinking critically rather than helping you to decide. And the thing I found out about where those tactics actually came from, which changed how I see a lot of the small business space.

Finally, coming up on Tuesday, October 20th at 12pm ET, I'm running the CEO Ceiling Assessment live and free. This is gonna be about an hour-long workshop where we're gonna walk through five areas of your business where you are maxed out, meaning you're at your limit. You're at max capacity. You cannot do any more.

And once you identify where your capacity is most maxed out, you'll understand what the constraint is and have more clarity into what the next step is, what the first thing that you need to focus on is to free up that capacity and help you actually build that more sustainable business. The details are at theceocollective.com/ceo-ceiling-assessment, and the link is in the show notes.

And if this episode made you feel something, feel some way, have some thoughts, come talk to me. I'm on Instagram. I'm trying to get some reels out around this topic too, so hopefully I will get that done in the next day or two. I'm really active in the DMs. I would love to hear what's coming up for you as we're going through this.

This is not my typical content, but it is something that has been taking up a lot of my brain space as I have been thinking about it. So I really want to hear from you, and what is landing, what your thoughts are.

Okay. I'll see you in the next episode, where we're gonna deconstruct some marketing best practices and turn them into a more equitable, more matriarchal approach to marketing. I'll see you then.