It’s 2018. The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded this week to three reporters (two of them women) for exposing a powerful man who abused that power to allegedly assault, harass, and intimidate countless women. The number-one book on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction is titled Dear Madam President—and it’s exactly what it sounds like; a guidebook directed at the young girl or woman who will one day be the first female president of the United States. It’s conveniently timed, as women are running for public office in unprecedented numbers (the political organization Emily’s List says 25,000+ women have contacted them to learn more about running for office since the 2016 election).
At the same time, some of the most effective movements demanding change are being led by children in middle school and high school. And a year after the first Women’s March, over a million women took to the streets a second time to march in support of progressive values. Beyoncé continues to take over the world (and shatter live streaming records). And women are banding together across industries ranging from advertising to entertainment to venture capital to support each other and demand a shift in power structures. They are all saying #TimesUp.
There’s a lot to protest and to seek to change—even beyond the in-your-face bad behavior among so many men in positions of power and beyond the disregard for women exhibited by our current administration. A few examples: On average, Latina women earn $0.54 for every dollar a white man earns. Native American women earn $0.57 for every dollar a white man earns. And trans women earn less than their cisgender counterparts. We have a long way to go when it comes to acknowledging and elevating the voices of trans people.
Women-run businesses consistently outperform the average, and yet, only 2% of the venture investments made in 2017 went to them. That’s not about a lack of interest in entrepreneurship; 26% of you own your own businesses, and many of the rest of you tell us you’re interested in owning a business one day—so you’re already proving that theory wrong. It’s about sexism, in many cases.
When we think about the big picture, we want to help make change.
And that’s where our most deeply rooted hopes and dreams reside. That’s where our purpose comes into sharpest focus. At Girlboss, when we think about the big picture, we want to help make change. We want to create opportunity and knock down the obstacles that stand in your way. We want to call out tokenism and create spaces where many women can thrive—and help each other make progress and advance. We want to shift paradigms so that women who climb to the top don’t feel that they need to pull the ladder up behind them. We want to give voice to women who have done amazing things—and allow other women of all backgrounds and experiences to access those experiences, and the lessons learned through them. We want to create opportunities for all of you to have meaningful conversations with us and with each other about what success means in your lives, and consider how those definitions change over time. And we want to back those conversations up with the tools and connections you need to stride in the direction of that success, in every facet of your life.
These are big, lofty goals, and we’re just getting started on our path to achieving them.
Our next step on that path has been challenging, exciting, and interesting—and mostly tactical. It’s involves this website and the design refresh you see here today, as well as all the under-the-hood work that supports it. Our aim here is to create an experience that’s clean and simple and fast—but also fun and uniquely our own. It’s meant to be an experience that’s rooted in all of the signals you’ve sent us over the past year. So, here’s what you need to know about our hopes and dreams for this site.
It’s fast.
First and foremost, this experience should be fast. We only used system fonts. We don’t have any weird pop-ups or doodads to slow down the load time or to distract you from the reason why you’re actually here: the content.
It’s intuitive (sort of).
We built this thing to be mobile first. That means you swipe from category to category and scroll endlessly—even on desktop. It might feel a little weird at first, but only 10% of you are on desktop to begin with, so let’s call a spade a spade.
It’s fun.
There’s a lot of color here. Each category is noted with a different color (work is green, money is a coral-ish pink, wellness is yellow, etc), and you see those colors play in different ways on category pages, in related content, on article pages, and more. Those are visual cues that tell you where you are—and they’re also supposed to feel fun and immersive. We’re trying not to take ourselves too seriously here at Girlboss. We talk about serious things, but we hope to inject a bit of wit and humor into everything we do. And all of this color-soaked goodness should reflect that.
It’s useful.
This is a big one. We know that some people may never wander over to our website (although, you’re obviously not one of them), and we’re totally fine with that. We strive to inspire and delight and inform people where they are—whether that’s on email, on social, through podcasts, or IRL at our Rallies. But if you are visiting our website, we want you to walk away feeling like you got something meaningful out of the experience of spending time with us. We want to make things that open your eyes to new ways of thinking, and that offer you life and work and money advice that legitimately helps you advance and grow and save and evolve. That’s what this site is built to do—to make it easy to find the tools and tips and insights we’re offering up, while being transparent about how much time you might need to spend with a story or podcast or video to get what you need out of it.
If we accomplish all of those things and can populate this experience with great writing and multimedia storytelling that delivers on our mission, we’ll have gotten it all right. But more likely, we’ll get a few things wrong along the way—and we want you to hold us accountable. Tell us what you love and what you could stand to see less of. Tell us where we can do better and where we have blind spots. And as we work on the inevitable bugs on this brand-new site, give us your brutal honesty with a side of patience. Because we’re stepping into this brave new world, and an era of rapid change, with a touch of trepidation. But we’re filled with hope at the same time. That’s our definition of success—for the time-being, anyway.
