Hey,

There is a peculiar hierarchy in the language of the internet. Someone can review technology and become a tech creator. Analyse basketball and become a sports commentator. But beauty, fashion, lifestyle, motherhood and everyday consumption – spaces heavily populated by women – have become almost inseparable from another word: influencer.

Influencer culture is about ads, overconsumption, manufactured intimacy, an endless list of things we apparently need to buy. But, criticism of the industry seems to have tangled up with contempt for the women working inside it.

Over the next three editions, we’re looking at women and the creator economy through three questions: RESPECT. POWER. PRICE.

Inside this #Edition87:
👉 Part I - Respect ft. Creator Economy
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Why some kinds of internet work become expertise, while others become “just influencing.”

Say someone is a chef or an entrepreneur and the title points toward a skill. Say someone is an influencer and the title often points toward the audience instead. And, the difference gets interesting when the work revolves around things culture already considers feminine.

Not what does she know? But who is she influencing?

🧠Expertise has a hierarchy — and gender helps shape it…
Prestige is something culture adds. And there is evidence that gender matters to how we distribute it. A 2025 American Sociological Review study traced occupational language across 127 billion words of American English from 1900 to 2019 and found that as occupations became more culturally stereotyped as female, their perceived prestige and potency tended to decline.

This research gives us a much older backdrop: work associated with women repeatedly had to fight harder to look like work.

🎬 Influencer work is disguised as ordinary life…
Apply makeup. Get dressed. Make dinner. Decorate your apartment. Talk about your relationship. Recommend something to a friend. None of that looks like labour. Still doing it professionally involves scripting, filming, editing, analytics, negotiations, contracts, community management, photography, styling and the endless maintenance of an audience…

Media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy spent years studying this contradiction. Her research describes digital cultural production in fashion, beauty and lifestyle as highly gendered “aspirational labour.” Work that is frequently made to look like passion, leisure and self-expression. “Feminization of social-media labour” similarly argues that aesthetic, emotional and promotional work can become socially or economically invisible precisely because we already associate those behaviours with femininity.

Offices disappeared… So did our ability to recognise labour.

💅 We have been calling women online frivolous for a while…
Back in 2016, digital-culture researcher Crystal Abidin released an academic paper: “Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?” Her research examined female Instagram influencers in Singapore who turned “selfies” into deliberate commercial work. She called its underestimated productive power “subversive frivolity.”

Perhaps frivolous does not always mean there is no value here. We have just not decided to value this kind of thing yet.

⚠️ Of course influencer culture deserves criticism…
Undisclosed ads. Impossible beauty standards. Constant consumption. Questionable health advice. Every week apparently produces another thing we absolutely need.

Criticise all of it!
But, “This business model encourages overconsumption” is different from “Why does she think anyone cares what she has to say?” One critiques a system. The other is interested in her right to occupy the position at all.

You can have the audience, employees, revenue and the ability to sell something out overnight… and still hear: But what does she actually do?

💸 Economic value and cultural respect are not the same thing…
And while culture was still deciding whether any of this counted as real work, something else was happening. Some of these women were accumulating something traditional media had once controlled: direct access to an audience.

And once you have the audience, the question changes:
What can you do with the power it gives you?

Part II comes this Friday — POWER.

💬 Ideas for the week when life starts sounding like a deadline.

🎬 WATCH: Ingrid Goes West (2017)
A dark comedy about obsession, performance and the strange economy of being seen. It’s exaggerated, but it captures the moment where a woman’s online life becomes both aspiration and something people feel entitled to mock.
🗂️ EXPLORE: The Creative Independent
An ad-free site full of interviews, essays and practical wisdom from working artists across writing, music, design and visual culture. What I like for this edition is that it insists on something the internet often forgets: creative work has a process, even when the finished thing looks effortless.
🪞 TRY: Name the Work
Pick one creator you follow and look at a single post differently. Notice what actually happened: concepting, styling, scripting, filming, editing, copywriting, negotiating, selling, community-building… Then ask: At what point did we decide all of that was “almost nothing”?

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

🩺 Perimenopause Business Is Booming: Menopause care is finally getting more investment and access, but the rise of telehealth and hormone-focused startups is also raising questions about overdiagnosis, marketing and profit.
🤖 AI Is Still Learning From Biased Data: A new BBC episode looks at how gender bias in datasets can shape AI tools used in hiring, translation, voice tech and more.
⚖️ Abortion Bans Are Delaying Care: U.S. providers say patients are reaching clinics later as state bans force longer travel, higher costs and more complicated routes to care.
🏏 Mumbai Cricket Introduces Equal Pay: The Mumbai Cricket Association will give women and men the same graded annual retainers, a first for an Indian state cricket body.
🎸 Olivia Rodrigo’s Festival Raises $20M: Daisy Chain Fields brought an all-women lineup to California and raised $20 million for organizations supporting women and girls.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

Before “creator” became a career category, Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) was already testing how seriously the internet would take a girl with taste.

At 11, she started Style Rookie, writing about fashion from her bedroom. As the blog grew, so did the disbelief — including suspicions that someone older must be behind the work. A few years later, she founded Rookie, an online magazine built around the inner lives, creativity and intelligence of teenage girls. Eventually, work had to become undeniable before the girl doing it was allowed to look serious.

✨ Know more at tavigevinson.world

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚