The girl boss can’t come to the phone right now … why?
Because she’s dead and in her place the Gen Z ‘Lazy Girl Worker’ has been born.
The early 2000s were all about female hustle culture.
Women were ambitious, unapologetic and dedicated to their work at any cost.
Millennials were obsessed by titles, status and racing to the top.
Things were so intense that a book titled #GirlBoss by business woman Sophia Amoruso became a bestseller.
It was a time of uncomfortable high heels, very tight skinny jeans and owning three phones or whatever the metaphorical equivalent of that was.
Hustling was the other main feature — non-stop hustle until you’re burnt out and begging to book into a Bryon Bay retreat culture.
Thanks to Gen Z the culture has shifted and the Lazy Girl trend has emerged as an antidote to girl boss hustle culture.
Young women don’t want to smash the glass ceiling.
They want to be happy and wear baggy jeans while doing less.
Lazy is a confronting term but at its core the Lazy Girl work trend just means that some young women have traded in ambition for work/life balance.
They aren’t staying back to meet impossible deadlines, instead they are going for walks for their mental health.
Gen Z women have chosen balance over career progression.
They aren’t interested in going above and beyond for their employers but they are prepared to do exactly what they were hired for.
They meet expectations but they don’t exceed them.
Gabrielle Judge, 26, is an American that credits herself with starting the ‘Lazy Girl Job’ trend on TikTok.
The hashtag has over 14 million views now and Judge encourages women to find jobs that work for them.
“I started the trend Lazy Girl Jobs, which is just a way to describe jobs with work-life balance,” she told news.com.au.
So why the word lazy? Wouldn’t the Bare Minimum work trend make employers less anxious?
“I added ‘lazy’ into the term because Lazy Girl Jobs offer so much work-life balance it should feel as if you are almost operating at a lazy state when compared to the American Hustle culture,” she explained.
It’s a concept that has caught on and young women are creating content on TikTok to brag about doing less at work.
“I was born for a Lazy Girl office job. I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one, take breaks whenever I want and be the office baddie,” one creator shared.
“This is your sign to get you a Lazy Girl job where 90 per cent of it is just copying and pasting stuff,” a TikToker shared.
Another revealed the benefits of getting a Lazy Girl job and you’ll be relieved to know it doesn’t involve you working yourself to the bone just so you have something to brag about on LinkedIn to a bunch of people you don’t even know.
“I have a Lazy Girl job where I sit at my desk 9-4 and post invoices in my own time and can read or watch Netflix or TikTok and get paid decently an hour,” she bragged.
While another young woman mentioned that her job is basically just “copy and paste” and all she has to do is take five calls a day and she still earns a “nice salary.”
Somewhere a girl boss pioneer like Ita Buttrose is rolling her eyes.
Gen Z women aren’t just rejecting girl boss culture they are rallying against it.
Angelica Hunt, senior marketing lead at diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy, The Dream Collective, explained that the trend shouldn’t surprise to anyone that is paying attention to what young women want.
“The Lazy Girl trend addresses an ever-growing misalignment between companies and individuals, where non-inclusive workplace cultures are no longer being accepted.”
Hunt stresses that Gen Z are designing a working life that “works for them” and it is because they’ve witnessed Millennial and Boomer burnout.
“They’ve learned from their parents’ generation that pouring your whole life into work at the expense of all else may not be paying off as much as they once thought.”
Interestingly, Hunter doesn’t think the younger generation should change their thinking and start working harder.
Instead she said that “pinning” Gen Z as the generation that doesn’t want to work is missing “opportunity to understand where they are coming from,” and the trend should be addressed head on.
“If we address it, we create better, more inclusive, and happier workplaces where people genuinely want to be – is that not beneficial for everyone?”
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
