Pretty, Broke, and Financially Irresponsible - How Social Media Sells Neoliberal Feminism

Women have always had a complicated relationship with money, or rather, society has always had a complicated relationship with women having money.

For most of modern history, women were legally excluded from economic independence. In the UK, married women could not open bank accounts in their own name without a husband’s permission until the 1970s following the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) (Pugh, 2018). Credit cards were routinely denied to them. Financial dependence wasn’t a stereotype but a policy.

Today, women work, study, invest, rent, and graduate at higher rates than men (OECD, 2022). Yet culturally, the perception hasn’t caught up. Women are still framed as impulsive spenders, emotionally driven consumers, and less reliable economic actors. The irresponsible shopper. The girl with the shopping addiction. It made sense, historically, to depict women as financially incapable when they were excluded from financial power. But once women entered the economy, the justification for excluding them had to evolve. Social media doesn’t openly argue that women are bad with money. Instead, it creates an environment where femininity is expressed through consumption and then uses that same consumption to question women’s seriousness. The result is a powerful loop: women are encouraged to perform control over their lives while being judged for the very behaviours that performance requires. This dynamic reflects what is often called neoliberal feminism. Rottenberg (2018) describes neoliberal feminism as shifting feminism from political struggle to individual self-optimisation. Instead of challenging unequal economic structures, it encourages women to manage themselves better within them. Inequality doesn’t disappear; success is framed as managing it correctly through discipline and self-management. Rather than demanding redistribution of power, neoliberal feminism emphasises resilience, confidence, and self-investment as the path to equality (Holin & Guillot, 2023). Instead of saying women can’t handle money, culture now implies they don’t handle it properly.

This logic becomes most visible not in parliaments or workplaces, but in culture, specifically in the environments where young women now learn how to live: social media.

In the age of TikTok and Instagram, feminism isn’t argued, it’s aestheticised. You don’t dismantle systems anymore. You optimise yourself inside them. The ‘clean girl’ wakes up at 6am, journals, drinks matcha, moisturises, and looks effortlessly put together. The ‘that girl’ plans her week in Notion and jogs before her lectures. The soft girl rests, but only in a curated way. All promise empowerment, confidence, control. But what they actually offer is a market solution to structural problems. These are not just trends: they are behavioural expectations. The popularity of the ‘that girl’ trend, viewed over 2 billion times, signals less a shared success than a shared pressure: the pressure to appear stable even when life is not. Social media doesn’t just reflect culture. It prescribes behaviour. Participation in these aesthetics is not purely voluntary; digital platforms reward conformity and invisibilise deviation (Abidin, 2017). Research shows consumption itself increasingly happens for the purpose of posting about it; 84% of users report engaging in ‘social media-centric consumption’, where the value of a purchase depends on the reaction it receives online (Kour et al., 2023). In this environment, satisfaction shifts from the experience to the engagement attached to it (likes, comments, views), making performance central to everyday consumption (Kour et al., 2023).

Instead of asking why young people are permanently tired, broke, and anxious, the algorithm offers a routine. Instead of asking why rent consumes most of your income, it offers a morning schedule. This is the essence of neoliberal feminism: freedom redefined as self-discipline (Gill & Orgad, 2018).

But the popularity of these routines only makes sense when placed next to the difficult economic reality they sit on top of. The material conditions facing young women make the promise of control especially powerful. 56% of women aged 18-30 describe their finances as uncomfortable (Young Women’s Trust, 2023). 32% couldn’t afford essential items last year. 1 in 4 fell behind on rent or bills. Rent now takes around 29% of income nationally and over 31% in London (ONS, 2024). Nearly half of UK adults experience financial insecurity (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2023).

Young women are not broke because they bought a £8 matcha. These outcomes are tied to wages, rent inflation, and insecure employment, not budgeting mistakes. Yet the cultural language surrounding them rarely stays structural for long. This ‘aesthetic’ economy cannot function if problems are structural, because structural problems require collective solutions. So the crisis is personalised: You’re not underpaid. You budget badly. You’re not exhausted. You lack discipline. You’re not precarious. You’re disorganised. Economic conditions become interpreted as behavioural outcomes rather than material ones.

Faced with structural insecurity, culture offers a behavioural explanation, failure stops looking economic and starts looking personal. Here comes the humiliation stage. After encouraging consumption, social media mocks women for consuming. ‘Girl math’, the viral joke where purchases become ‘free’ if justified creatively, spread across platforms and brands. On the surface, harmless. But its popularity revealed something deeper: women’s financial behaviour is inherently irrational. Men speculating on crypto is ambition. Women buying skincare is irrationality. Cultural narratives frame masculine financial risk as initiative while feminised consumption becomes incompetence. The contradiction is striking: platforms encourage women to curate beauty, wellness, and lifestyle as identity, then use that same consumption to question their credibility.

The joke quietly sets the boundary of acceptable behaviour.

Pleasure online is allowed, but regulated. Rest must look productive, leisure must look intentional, and enjoyment must look controlled. Activities are acceptable when they demonstrate self-improvement rather than escape. This creates pressure not just to live well, but to appear to live well, even during economic instability. Messy pleasure, laziness, anger, excess, political frustration, breaks the script. So pleasure becomes labour. A performance of stability during instability. Women anticipate judgement and regulate themselves accordingly, producing carefully controlled versions of leisure and emotion (Banet-Weiser, 2018). And when that performance slips, the judgement is immediate: irresponsible. This matters economically because credibility shapes who gets listened to. If women are seen as impulsive consumers, their analysis of rent, wages, or labour conditions is dismissed as emotional rather than rational. Because economic credibility depends on perceived rationality, feminised consumption becomes political disqualification. Economic suffering becomes lifestyle failure.

Research shows women are significantly less comfortable expressing political views online than men (UN Women, 2021). Not because they lack opinions, but because online spaces treat them as personalities before participants. Women are hyper-visible culturally but under-recognised economically. They’re seen but not believed. And that serves a purpose. A generation of young women navigating unaffordable housing, precarious work, and rising costs is less politically threatening if portrayed as unserious spenders rather than economic actors. If financial struggle is interpreted as lifestyle, it does not require policy response.

The issue isn’t that girls enjoy beauty, fashion, or comfort. The issue is that these are used as evidence against their legitimacy as economic actors. Pleasure becomes proof of irresponsibility. Consumption becomes proof of incompetence. Femininity becomes proof of economic illiteracy. Real empowerment would mean economic security regardless of aesthetic, housing you can afford, wages you can live on, and political legitimacy without performing austerity. Neoliberal feminism does not remove economic pressure; it teaches women to internalise it. Young women remain everywhere in culture but marginal in economic authority.

Pretty. Broke. And not taken seriously.

Bibliography:

Abidin, Crystal (2017), #familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor. Social Media + Society.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah (2018), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny.

Duke University Press. Gill, Rosalind and Orgad, Shani (2018), ‘The shifting terrain of sex and power: From the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #MeToo’, Sexualities, Vol.21, No.8.

Holin, Sandrine, and Guillot, Apolline (2023), A Guide to Neoliberal Feminism (Philonomist).

Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2023) UK Poverty Report 2023.

Kour, Gurpreet, Webster, Emily and Shah, Denish (2023), Consuming for Content? Understanding Social Media-Centric Consumption, Journal of Business Research.

OECD (2022) Education at a Glance.

ONS (2024) Private rental affordability, UK.

Pugh, Martin (2018), Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1914-1999. Palgrave.

Rottenberg, Catherine (2018), The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford University Press.

UN Women (2021) Online Violence Against Women Report.

Young Women’s Trust (2023) Annual Survey on Young Women’s Finances.