“Lazy girl jobs are my favorite, all I do is copy and paste the same emails, take three to four calls a day, take long breaks, take more breaks, and get paid well.”
So reads the text splashed across TikTok user @raeandzeebo’s video, as her 1.3 million viewers took a spin on her desk chair. It is accompanied by the hashtag #lazygirljob, which has been used more than 17 million times, and it usually depicts similar selfie-style videos of young female workers in their offices expressing a similar sentiment.
“I love my job as a lazy girl,” tweeted another TikToker. “I don’t have to talk to people, I only go to the office twice a week. Literally just to hit some numbers, eat candy, catch up with co-workers, and get a decent paycheck.”
A lazy girl (LGJ) job is typically a non-technical role that requires little interaction with colleagues and entails mainly repetitive tasks such as answering emails or drafting documents from templates – think of Marketer or Customer Success Manager role. They check the essentials: safety (no physical hazards), flexibility, good benefits, a base salary that covers lifestyle expenses, and minimal stress. It also offers “clearly defined roles where responsibilities are unlikely to change,” says Gabrielle Judge, 26, a former lazy girl job holder and now the creator behind the “Anti-Work Girl Boss” brand, through which she advocates for LGJs and offers career advice geared to Generation Z.
The goal of LGJ is to find balance and cope with the 9-to-5 grind, she explains, and to ensure that mental energy—and extra hours—that would otherwise be wasted on an unappreciative employer can be redirected to the things that matter: feelings, family, travel, and a social life.
A reaction to the hustle and bustle culture that defined the 2010s decade, LGJ is the latest trend to emerge from Gen Z’s anti-work and anti-capitalist attitudes. Remote work, an unforgiving economy, and strained professional connections have left Gen Z prioritizing the boundaries of work and life and hating the grinding culture that has gripped millennials. The trend is a retaliation for the similar genre work trend chips of the previous decade: the “downhill” and “girl boss” eras, which were defined by encouraging women to constantly swim for career success. LGJs might suggest that it’s possible to be a “girl boss” while resisting the urge to go above and beyond at work.
Women are tired of going all out, breaking glass ceilings. It’s really frustrating when the guy next to us gets the job or the promotion, says Anvi Barman, the former product manager who founded Generation She, a job support and networking platform for Gen Zers. The point from her point of view is: why not be a little lazy if she gets the same result as being proactive?
“We don’t Wants To be lazy,” Barman says luck. “We just don’t want to work hard in a system that works against us.”
The Girl Slacker is ready to get out of the Girl Boss
The LGJ trend is not a step back to the 50’s era, mad men“Women’s Jobs” is cool, because it’s a throwback to the 2010s, says Susie Welch, an author and professor of management at New York University’s Stern School of Business who has expertise in leadership and career development. The working women of the 1950s—strong men’s secretaries, assistants, etc.—didn’t Wants to be classified into those roles. “Their noses were turned up in front of the glass and they were just like us in! ” Says luck. “But they were relegated to meaningless jobs.”
Women have since worked hard to get rid of this mold. The feminist movement in the 1960s helped bring more women into the workforce and saw the Equal Pay Act working women became famous in the 1990s pop culture with TV shows like Sex and the City And Murphy Brown, and the women’s empowerment movement reached a profitable fever pitch in the 2000s as the eras of Lean In and Girl Boss converged. Both Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso and then Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg They presented different ways for their millennial and Gen X counterparts to achieve ambition in the workplace. Mentalism has taken working women by storm.
But nearly every high-profile female boss walked out of Suite C in quick succession in June 2020. And while Sandberg called her book “a kind of feminist manifesto,” today’s young female workers say leaning in is not an option for most women. Their response—which is LGJ, Welch says: “Well, Cheryl, we tried to lean in but we just don’t like it. We decided to lean in.”
General Zers, Welch imagines, feels like no one owns you when you bow down. “When you tend to work, your company and your career begin to own you,” she said. They fight back, saying, Not so fast, and I’m not sure I want this deal. ”
Generation Z is hardly the first group to resent their bosses, but their entry into the workforce during an unprecedented global health crisis has made them less reticent than their predecessors in fighting for what they want at work; Shouting “lazy girl” in the same sentence as “jobs” reveals their disregard for favors.
Younger workers struggle with ambition out of college because they don’t connect deeply with their professional work, says Paul Tripp, a business coach at management consulting firm AceUp. luck. He said that the disconnect between their vision and that of the company does not motivate them, making the job “literally just a paycheck”.
That’s not a bad thing, according to the judge, the anti-labor girl boss. Her Generation Z audience watched as millennials were “guinea pigs” of the painful economy they inherited, she said, leaving them with an “existential rage.” Through this lens, wanting an LGJ isn’t so much a step back as it is an honest admission that work isn’t everything.
Gone are the days when people willfully sign up for jobs that require late nights or weekends, even in high-intensity sectors like tech, says Tiffany Depa, a career coach and employment consultant. She adds that her clients always ask her how they can find meaningful jobs that don’t leave them sleeping with their work phone. “By acting with your wages mindset, I think we’ve all been out there — women especially — getting paid to trash and kill ourselves for a thankless job,” she says.
But even though LGJs are supposed to be accessible, having one requires levels of innate privilege. “People can’t just say, ‘I want a lazy girl job,’” Deepa says. “There are marginalized communities to think about: people who haven’t had a college education and can’t necessarily work a lazy girl job. They have to do what they can to make ends meet.”
“The lazy girls have met their match
But this is a Gen Z job trend that may have a very short life: Many of the lazy-girl jobs — ones that allow workers to idle and require little effort or creativity — could soon be automated with AI, and it already caused more than 4,000 layoffs in May, with the number likely to rise as more industries and companies integrate with the new technology. Welch and Tripp both believe that LGJs will not survive the upcoming culling, and Gen Zers will have to be more productive than AI — or provide unique services to avoid being replaced.
“AI will deliver an efficient new employee, if you will, and all of a sudden, that other employee is going to be challenged, especially if he’s a lazy person on the job,” says Tripp, predicting that many of the jobs eliminated will be in corporate writing, data analysis, or assistive work like scheduling.
Welch adds that it’s a “risky proposition” with another trade-off: real wealth, something she doesn’t think young workers are given up on despite their desire within the confines of work and life. She says Generation Z could do just fine with LGJ paying $70,000, but they also have to realize that they won’t get vacations or own homes.
“If you want to remove work as an intellectual or emotional component of your life and almost take on a factory-work mentality, that’s the anti-American dream,” she says. She believes that if you put the lazy workers to work, they will agree to give up that desire for nice clothes, vacations in Bali, or a second car. “This is the piece that seems to be neglected.”
Regardless of its demise, the lazy girl trend still points to an important manifestation of Generation Z’s anti-work mentality. It adds to the overall pattern of the younger generation desiring to exist as easily as possible within the parameters of capitalism, and not to feel bound by traditional notions of productivity. The fact that a blunt term like LGJ resonates so deeply “really makes it a battle cry from workers to companies,” says Deepa, the recruiter.
And for all that terminology, it’s not just about women; Al-Qadi estimates that 30% of her community is men. “People ask, ‘Can I get a lazy boy job?'” The judge laughs. “I’m like, Of course! It’s a new age of frontier work.”
