4 days Ago
Most women have already had more than enough of the girl power slop this week, thanks to Lauren Sánchez getting her future husband to blast a bunch of women wearing catsuits into space for publicity. If Katy Perry wittering on about “putting the ass into astronaut” wasn’t enough to make you wish for a quick death in the cold vacuum of space, another round of Meghan Markle doling out business self-help advice might have you reaching for the airlock. Read more If this were a self-help podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan would be perfectly pitched.
The Duchess of Sussex knows her way around the lingo – she’s all about “showing up with love” and “talking about self-work”. We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity.
In terms of actual entrepreneurship advice, the heavy lifting is very much up to her guests. This week’s is Reshma Saujani, founder of nonprofits Girls Who Code and Moms First, who first met Meghan at Kensington Palace in 2018. Read more Saujani is prepared to get into the nitty gritty, her experience as a second generation Indian immigrant, being bullied at school and attempting to assimilate as a minority, her crushing defeat when she ran for office in her early thirties.
Meghan demurs on sharing any new information on her own struggles, offering cute platitudes such as suggesting life’s failures don’t “break you” but “break you open for the possibility of more”. We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity.
Ostensibly the theme of this episode is about “fighting for what you believe in” (great!) and “redefin[ing] what it means to be a female founder without just running ourselves into the ground” (huh??). Any revolutionary zeal is reserved for achieving money and status, then. It does get interesting when Meghan and Saujani discuss their path to motherhood, the impossibilities of balancing family life under late capitalism, but while they circle the issue they’re far too wary of naming the problem they wish to address.
Meghan has proven herself deft at deploying a careful yet headline-grabbing tidbit in each episode Meghan has proven herself deft at deploying a careful yet headline-grabbing tidbit in each episode. Last week’s was her mention of a postpartum pre-eclampsia diagnosis. This time she alludes to her miscarriage, Saujani having spoken about losing five pregnancies over 10 years.
It could be a watershed moment for discussing the biological and emotional realities of miscarrying, but Meghan quickly ties it in a bow of business-ese. A loss in the work sphere is similar to miscarriage “in some parallel way”, she suggests, because “you have to detach from the thing you have so much promise and hope for, and to be able to OK at a certain point to let something go, something go that you planned to love for a long time”. I can’t speak to these very different kinds of grief being comparable.
Saujani graciously accepts it, suggesting Meghan could be reading from her own diary. But equating love for work and love for family raises my hackles. Harry and Meghan at the Invictus Games in Vancouver in February 2025.
(Aaron Chown/PA) So too their discussion of trying to combine running a business with motherhood. They concur that if women could just be more open about their struggles, and be granted more flexible hours and parental leave, the problem could be solved. The lack of maternity leave is an American scandal, but no activist struggle has resolved with a polite request.
Meghan is touchingly open about how much she loves motherhood, even the unglamorous late nights doling out cough medicine to sick kids. “Mom” is her “favourite title”, and even when she’s apart from Archie and Lilibet she scrolls through photos of them on her phone. Harry has to cajole her into taking some time to bathe or work out, she recounts.
Has the prince not heard of the mental load? Left very much unsaid is that most people on the planet have to struggle with supporting their loved ones in some capacity while earning enough to survive Left very much unsaid is that most people on the planet have to struggle with supporting their loved ones in some capacity while earning enough to survive. Turning up to a meeting in a sweatshirt because you’re running on minimal sleep is not the relatable act of rebellion Meghan thinks it is. By the time she is spouting a half-baked ramblings about “how we teach this generation, who might not feel as inspired to do some of the change-making that we know has been so fundamental” I was ready to buy a one-way ticket beyond the Karman line.
We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. It’s all a highly individualistic and choice feminism approach to discussing the fundamentals of equality.
Do these high-powered wealthy women have staff, does everyone at their companies have generous wages and insurance and parental leave policies? Can all these employees make school pick-up and be “crushing it” in their careers? Saujani, whose Moms First campaign in fairness is advocating for the above, has the most clear-eyed take on the situation. She knows it’s bad she tried to keep up with her work schedule after a breast biopsy. She knows the outlook is dire, that she “may die with women having less rights than when I was born,” she says.
But who exactly is rolling back those rights and how is to taboo to discuss. Fighting for one’s beliefs has limits, clearly. Between women gushing about wearing lipstick on rockets and this 45-minute meditation on having-it-all, I feel about as positive towards female empowerment as William Shatner felt about space.
It’s a cold dark void ready to suck the life out of you. Read more.
