High-Powered Career Woman

Few things excite Charlotte more than orchestrating a hostile corporate takeover.

"If Angelica is ever going to make it in a male-dominated power structure, she’s got to eat, breathe, drink and sweat self-esteem."

— Charlotte Pickles, Rugrats, "Princess Angelica"

What does it take for a woman to succeed in the male-dominated corporate world? She's got to be independent, strong-willed, no-nonsense, and most importantly ambitious enough to not let blatant and persistent sexism stand in her way to success. She's got to be a High Powered Career Woman.

Almost always a Lady in a Power Suit and often sporting Power Hair, these characters are portrayed as gutsy Determinators with big aspirations. They are typically attractive and stylish out of necessity, in order to be at least acknowledged by their male peers and superiors.

Personality can vary. The vast majority are highly competent and hard-working as a baseline. Many start off as a Plucky Girl or Go-Getter Girl and later harden into an Ice Queen or Iron Lady after years of dealing with ostracization due to sexism in the workplace and outside, from those who disapprove of the not traditionally feminine career focus. When they reach the top of the corporate ladder, don't expect them to get any nicer, either. Focusing predominantly on their careers, these versions are often socially inept outside of business matters. Other depictions, however, overlap with The Social Expert, as these women rely on their superior interpersonal skills to solve problems in what is typically coded as a more "feminine way." Those who don't ever harden may end up as the Plucky Office Girl, who often serves as a foil for this character.

This portrayal of women saw its rise in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside second wave feminism and the push for equal opportunity for women in the workforce. Common for the time period, the trope first focused on women overcoming the societal barriers to their success in traditionally male-dominated occupations by ignoring or shrugging off any sexism that may come their way and instead, simply working harder, their efforts being rewarded with career success on par with any man's.

However, this trope was quickly deconstructed as from its early days, many portrayals depict women as too focused on their career at the detriment of their romantic and familial lives. Quitting to Get Married frequently shows up as a resolution to these conflicts, as does My Biological Clock Is Ticking. Should they decide to pursue their career goals instead of romance and family, such women are often portrayed as Married to the Job and criticized by the wider society. Some discover that Wanting Is Better Than Having, as the success doesn't make up for the personal and familial life they sacrificed to get it. Often, these women end up Lonely at the Top, the narrative implying (either intentionally or not) that their Ambition Is Evil. Taken to its logical conclusion, several end up a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a Girlboss Feminist. On the occasion that they are able to maintain a romantic life long enough to get married, these deconstructions' partners are often shown to be resentful, Henpecked Husbands and their children, neglected and distant from them because these career-focused women are Maternally Challenged or simply too busy to care about what their kids are up to. Despite the numerous Unfortunate Implications, there's plenty Truth in Television to this Double Standard.

More modern takes have worked to rebuild the trope. While the character may still face conflict between their personal and private lives, the issues are not as all-encompassing, due to better work conditions and more understanding partners who willingly take on more of the childcare responsibilities. And while older depictions have had the character grit their teeth through workplace sexism or win one over a single sexist colleague, recent depictions are more likely to have these characters call out and challenge sexist corporate culture en masse as part of their climb to the top.

Note: simply being a female White Collar Worker does not qualify as this trope.

Compare Office Lady, Sexy Secretary, and Sassy Secretary. Contrast House Wife and When You Coming Home, Dad?. Frequently used to Show Up Chauvinists. Depending on how proactive and effective/genuine the character is in their fight against sexism, they sometimes overlap with Straw Feminist or Soapbox Sadie.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• AD Police Files: The episode "The Ripper/The Paradise Loop" features Caroline, who explains that long ago she had been competing for CEO of her current company, however a man got the job because he concocted a falsified chart that compared her menstrual cycles to her productivity. To alleviate the concerns of the company's board of directors, she had most all of her female organs replaced with cybernetic versions. There no longer being any reason to keep her from becoming CEO, she ends up getting the job. In time, the same man came to work under her and they fell in love and eventually married. She later discovered he had cheated on her with a Paradise Loop prostitute leading to her becoming the titular Ripper of the episode out of revenge.
• All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku: Akiko Natsume is the head of a powerful corporation. She is also estranged from her husband and her son and exhibits some light Maternally Challenged traits. In one episode, she invites them, and Nuku Nuku, to her mansion to try and patch things up. Her effort at preparing a meal involves her believing that you wash rice with dish soap, and she burned the fish to inedibility.
• Ouran High School Host Club: Haruhi's deceased mom is portrayed as a Plucky Girl version of the trope in Haruhi's few memories of her, flashing Haruhi a cheesy grin in a Power Suit as she confidently tells Haruhi she's going to win her next court case. Haruhi is quite open about her admiration of her mom's career ambitions, her own self-confidence and career goals modeled after her mom's, and her indifferent approach to her own gender is also informed by her parents' disregard for traditional gender roles.
• You're My Pet: Sumire Iwaya is a competent, independent, and successful career woman with degrees from the prestigious Tokyo University and Harvard University. However her success and confidence, paired with her impressive stature, makes many men see her as intimidating and at the start of the story, her long-time boyfriend breaks up with her because of that. The rest of the story focuses on Sumire trying to find the right guy secure enough to be with her. She ends up marrying Momo, who despite being younger than her, encourages her to pursue her career rather than Quitting to Get Married, and is more than happy to support her ambitions.

Comic Strips

• For Better or for Worse: Thèrése is implied to work in finance and she’s beautiful, well-dressed, smart and powerful. Unfortunately, she’s also in a work that emphasizes that a woman’s highest calling is to be a wife and mother. So she’s demonized by the cast (especially her ex-husband) for being one of these.

Films — Animation

• Purl: Deconstructed. Feminine, pink anthropomorphic ball of yarn Purl is hired to a male-dominated start-up, and immediately has trouble fitting in. She knits herself into a power suit to become One of the Boys, giving up her girly things, until she notices a new ball of yarn hire getting the same treatment she used to. She reaches out and makes Lacy feel included, and over time reverts back to her former appearance while remaining competent in her job, which has brought in more diverse hires.

Films — Live-Action

• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy: Veronica Corningstone is beautiful, ambitious, and ruthless in her pursuit to establish herself in the traditionally male-dominated and highly sexist world of televised news anchoring. So much so that she sabotages Ron's teleprompter to get him to swear live on-air and get him fired, all so she can get him out of the way to be the face of the channel. Notably, she softens towards Ron over the course of the film as the two date and in the sequel, she is far less career and ambition-focused now that she has a family with Ron. In fact, she once again sabotages Ron's life in that film, but this time it's to keep him focused on being a good father.
• The Devil Wears Prada:
  • In her role as the editor-in-chief of a renowned fashion magazine, Miranda Priestly is a Mean Boss, feared and revered for her Ice Queen tendencies that have taken her to the top of her industry. When she is introduced, she is treated as The Dreaded and has no qualms dissecting Andy's holier-than-thou opinion regarding the fashion industry within minutes. As the film shows, being Married to the Job came at the cost of her personal life: she has a streak of failed marriages behind her and her latest husband divorces her towards the end of the film.
  • Andy subverts the archetype. The film sets her up to follow in Miranda's footsteps, with Andy entering her position as Miranda's assistant completely unprepared for the work as she looks down on the industry as superficial. To do her job well, however, she realizes it takes far more effort and that she has to be more like Miranda: a stylish and self-confident woman that prioritizes her career over her relationships, which causes Andy's boyfriend to break up with her at the climax of the film. By the film's end, Andy chooses to walk away from the cutthroat world of fashion.
• His Girl Friday: Hildy Johnson might be the Ur-Example. She is a woman with a successful career in a male-dominated field, journalism. When working she wears a jacket and hat very similar to her male colleagues. She is highly respected by her male coworkers, all of whom treat her as One of the Boys. She is involved in a Love Triangle between her fiance, who wants her to be a feminine wife, and her ex-husband, who is her editor and wants her to continue working with him.
• I Don't Know How She Does It: The film explores the lives of four women who are different depictions of this trope.
  • Kate is a White Collar Worker of some sort, who struggles to manage Family Versus Career and is shown to be overworked and exhausted, falling asleep after trying to initiate sex with her husband. She is shown to be one of only a few women in her office and has to contend with casual sexism from her colleagues as she strives for their recognition. By the end of the film, however, she chooses family and takes on less work in the office.
  • She is contrasted by Momo, a junior research analyst in the office. Momo is beautiful, highly ambitious, and disapproves of Kate's lifestyle because Kate doesn't focus on her career more. This becomes a dilemma for Momo when she later realizes she is pregnant and has to figure out whether or not she wants to put aside her ambitions for the child she's now carrying.
• The Intern: Downplayed with Jules Ostin, a modern-day startup founder who others find difficult to work for, and who is so busy she's constantly 1-2 hours behind schedule. As her company tries to scale their runaway success, she struggles with the Career Versus Family question, pressured to choose between hiring an outside (notably male) CEO and spend more time with her family, or keeping control over the company she built. This is exacerbated by her husband's affair with one of the class moms. In the end, she argues that she is vital to the running of her company, realizing that less work won't solve her family issues. She is also encouraged to slow down and connect more to her employees by her elderly intern, Ben.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Hope van Dyne starts out Ant-Man as a cold chairperson on the Board of Directors at Pym Tech, who ousted her father from his own company out of spite, allowing Darren Cross to become CEO. However, once she got wind of Cross's plan to replicate her father's Ant-Man technology and sell it to HYDRA, she works behind Cross's back to do the right thing. Her time with Scott and reconciliation with her father help soften her approach, and by the sequel, she's left her career woman side behind. Lampshaded by Luis in Ant-Man and the Wasp, who calls her first film bob haircut "all business".
  • See Peggy Carter under Agent Carter below.
• Miss Sloane: The titular character is a cold, cutthroat, and highly competent lobbyist who is so ambitious that she willingly takes on lobbying against the notoriously difficult-to-counter American gun lobby just for the challenge. In the film, we learn that she actively defied Family Versus Career by deciding long ago that her work is her passion and doesn't want anything to distract her from it.
• The Proposal: Margaret is the domineering, Ice Queen, CEO of a publishing company in New York, who is suddenly forced to prioritize romance over her career (albeit superficially) when she is confronted with deportation for not being an American citizen and decides to fake a marriage with her assistant Andrew to keep her resident status. As a Rom Com, she naturally warms up to Andrew and knocks down some of the walls she's built.
• Set It Up: Kirsten, Harper's boss, is a prominent sports journalist with a strong personality. This has made her capable enough to start her own news website, but it also means she drove away every man who was interested in her because she knew they couldn't handle her success.
• To Die For: Parodied. Suzanne is convinced she's going to be a big success in TV, and to do it, she becomes a Lady in a Power Suit who wears matching skirt sets everywhere and spouts "self-help" wisdom. She's actually just reads the weather.
• Working Girl:
  • Tess McGill's arc throughout the film is to become this. As a Plucky Office Girl, she is tired of being a grunt in the typing pool and having her ideas ignored. She changes her Noo Yawk accent, gets an Important Haircut, and poses as the boss of her company in order to stop her actual boss (ironically another woman, rather than a man) taking credit for her idea. This is portrayed as an empowering thing. The film ends with her in an equal relationship with love interest Jack and her in a corner office at Trask Industries, implying she will not have to choose work over love. Jack in fact fell in love with her in part because of her intelligence.
  • Katherine Parker is the boss in question, and in contrast to Tess, her Ambition Is Evil. While she looks like The Ace with the connections, education, and poise that Tess admires, she undermines Tess's business idea and sells it off as her own.

Literature

• Pumpkin Pie by Jean Ure has Jenny's mother, who's always flying in and out as a major career girl, while her dad is the stay-at-home parent. Jenny's friend Saffy even thinks that it's weird to have the mother be the workaholic.

Live-Action TV

• Agent Carter: The titular Peggy Carter is an aloof, no-nonsense woman who has to overcome the sexism of 1940s America in order to rise above the menial desk work she is given to become a full-fledged S.S.R. agent and co-found S.H.I.E.L.D. along with Howard Stark. She's The Ace when given the chance to shine. While she was similarly depicted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films she appears in, as the protagonist of the tv series, this aspect gets played up and explored even more so.
• Ally Mcbeal: The titular Ally is a notable subversion. A Harvard Law grad who works for a Boston Law Firm and leaves after being sexually harassed by her boss for another firm in the first episode, Ally's narrative arc seems to be set up to follow the trope. However, it is quickly made apparent that unlike most versions of the trope, Ally is a hopeless romantic, who is just as motivated by love as she is her work (perhaps even more so), and she's a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander and The Ditz. She often has wild Imagine Spots, daydreams about the problems she faces, and has glaring holes in her knowledge about legal issues, despite being a lawyer. The character was subsequently criticized in the media as being anti-feminist and demeaning to women because of these traits, culminating with the character gracing the cover of TIME Magazine with the headline, "Is Feminism Dead?"
• Big Little Lies: Renata is a highly-respected executive who feels she can't be as present for her young daughter because of it.
• Cheers: Rebecca Howe is introduced as the highly competent and cold new owner of the eponymous bar after former owner Sam sells it at the end of the fifth season. Unlike Diane, Sam's Slap-Slap-Kiss co-star who Rebecca was written to replace, Rebecca consistently rebuffs Sam's advances and keeps things strictly business. She's also extraordinarily ambitious, wanting to climb her way to the top of her company. However, we see that outside of the bar, Rebecca is a mess in a way that deconstructs a lot of the core elements of this trope: she naturally lusts after powerful men which leads her to pine over her much older superiors, she's decided to only date men who can help her career tossing "the self-made woman" ideal out the window, and she often devolves into hysterics when a wrench gets thrown into her plans. Much of this depiction is part of the series's larger critique in the later seasons of corporate culture as being soulless, unnecessarily cutthroat, and unfulfilling in the long run.
• Deconstructed in The Cry of Mann. Courtney's an ambitious, intelligent, and hard-working woman who came up with the idea for the Battle Machines that not only changed the tide of the "warr" but also made MannCorp as rich and powerful as it is. However, despite this, she was constantly pushed aside and her husband Tank took the credit, leading her to grow bitter and resentful of him and his company, and spurring her to start sabotaging the company as soon as Tank disappeared.
• CSI: An early episode has the team investigate the death of a woman who worked at an S&M club (where the recurring character of Lady Heather is introduced). The woman's death was caused by a man using her as a surrogate for his domineering, high-powered lawyer wife who is heavily implied to be this trope. When they suggest testing his DNA against samples found on the murdered woman, he angrily tells his wife they should check the DNA of their infant son, as she hasn't allowed him to be intimate with her in years.
• Damages:
  • Patty Hewes is a cutthroat celebrity corporate litigator who owns her own law firm, neglects her tearaway son, and will kill someone (or, more likely, arrange to have them killed) before she'll give up a case.
  • Ellen becomes Patty's protege right out of law school, and carves out her own successful career, first at Patty's, then at the DA's office. While Ellen clearly has the potential to be an equally ruthless lawyer (showing herself in Season 3 to be just as capable of dirty tricks), she opts to not be like Patty and becomes a committed mother, neglecting her career as a result.
• Dark (2017): Claudia Tiedemann was a bright kid and a high achiever in school who grows up to be a downplayed version of this trope as an adult. She's appointed as the director of the Winden Power Plant in 1986, the first woman in that in the entire country, which more implies Claudia's ambition rather than making it a focal point of her narrative arc. This promotion doesn't improve her strained relationships with her father and daughter, which she struggles to navigate in part because of her lack of people skills that toe the line between awkward and outright Ice Queen.
• Desperate Housewives:
  • Lynette is presented as a very successful marketing executive, Depending on the Writer. Before getting married, she was something of a business shark, but she gave that up before the start of the show to be a House Wife. Her main storylines often revolve around Family Versus Career conflicts and the strain they place on her marriage to Tom, made all the more dire as she has five children to help parent. In the first season alone she sabotages a promotion Tom would receive that would take him away from the home more often, which leads to him becoming a Househusband and her returning back to work.
  • She's also contrasted with Nina, her Mean Boss in Season 2, who is portrayed as ruthless, childless, and prepared to destroy Lynette's career over her not prioritizing her job over her family commitments more.
• Dynasty (2017): Fallon Carrington is depicted as a ruthless and determined executive who will do anything to prove she belongs in the male-dominated world of business. Her Establishing Character Moment has her tricking two arrogant male executives into giving her information by posing as a ditzy stewardess. Her family is very proud of her as a result.
• Girlfriends:
  • Joan is a straight example. She is a bit neurotic and high-strung, and her goal is to make partner at the law firm she works at, all the while trying to figure out how to connect with her bosses and overcome their sexist and periodically racist assumptions about her. A few episodes in the series include her and friend/work colleague William debating whether or not he should defend Joan against the sexism or if it's biased to assume he should intervene because he's the sole other black person in the office. He advises Joan to toughen up in order to get respect.
  • Joan's oldest friend Toni is a Foil for Joan. The most glamorous and superficial of the group, Toni is a successful real estate agent with billboards of her business all across town. However, she subverts the trope because, unlike Joan, Toni would be more than happy being the trophy wife to an even more successful husband who takes care of her needs. This perspective often puts her at odds with Joan and resident Granola Girl Lynn. She ends up getting her wish, marrying a well-off dentist, but her marriage proves to be far less than ideal.
• Grey's Anatomy: Cristina Yang is the medical field take on this trope. She sees cardiac surgery as her calling, is unabashedly ambitious, and has the surgical skill and talent to back it up. She's cold and calculating, has a veritable house of emotional walls built up, and is willing to do just about anything to ensure she climbs to the top of the cardiac surgical world, which endears her to very few of her peers outside of Meredith, her "twisted sister." Over the series, she is constantly battling with chasing her ambitions and figuring out just where romantic love and family fit in, if they can: she sacrifices her own credibility to help Burke out in surgery when he suffers hand tremors both out of love and for a chance to perform surgeries and twice she spirals after realizing she's pregnant, despite never wanting children of her own because it would take time away from her career.
• Insecure: Molly is an impeccably well-dressed, career-driven attorney who struggles to get noticed at her law firm, not because she is a woman, but because (she believes) of systemic racism blinding her firm from seeing her worth. She also struggles in her dating life, partially because she applies the same clinical and critical approach she uses for work to her relationships. In later seasons, however, she leaves her firm to work at an all-black law firm where her efforts are more readily recognized. She also learns to be less critical in her relationships and begins to date /eventually marry her coworker Taurean, who approaches work and life in a way similar to Molly.
• Law & Order:
  • In the Season 17 episode "Corner Office," the Villain of the Week was a Bad Boss who tries to control everything about her company, fired employees for not using pre-approved words when talking to the press, had the entire office building bugged, and had her Gold Digger girlfriend kill the executive who was blackmailing her for the bugging. She spent the entire episode accusing everyone of hating her because she was a powerful woman.
  • In the revival episode "Impossible Dream," the charismatic female CEO of a medical startup prides herself on the image of being a powerful woman in a male-dominated field who had to fight an uphill battle to get to where she is now. She's not willing to let anything tarnish this reputation, even if it means letting fake cancer tests that give results at random hit the shelves...at least until falsely accusing the victim of abusing her conveniences her, knowing both her status and the charged nature of the accusation would put the lawyers in a position vulnerable to public backlash, making it seem like any attempt to convict her would just be evidence of a biased and hostile justice system trying to keep a powerful woman and (alleged) abuse survivor down.
• Mad Men: This is Peggy's story arc on the show. She starts off as just a receptionist but dreams of more and the show follows her pursuit of becoming an advertising executive during the late 1950s and '60s. She frequently faces overt sexism from just about everyone she works with (including but certainly not limited to taunts from Sexy Secretary Joan and false accusations of her sleeping with Don to get the job in the beginning), which morphs her into an Iron Lady of sorts by the series end, in contrast to her Plucky Office Girl role in the beginning. She also struggles in her personal life in finding a balance between Career Versus Man. By series' end, she gets both in the form of co-worker Stan.
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Likely the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier for live-action television. The show was revolutionary for its time (airing in 1970) and was lauded as a landmark for second-wave feminism because it featured an unmarried, independent, career-focused female protagonist. Mary Richards — played by the titular Mary Tyler Moore — is a sincere, kind, optimistic 30-year-old woman trying to make a career for herself as an associate producer for a news broadcast in Minneapolis. Unlike later versions of the trope, the show does not introduce a lot of conflict between Mary's romantic life and career, with most of Mary's boyfriends sticking around only for an episode or two.
• Succession:
  • Shiv Roy is bitingly sarcastic, emotionally closed off, and just as ambitious as her siblings to become the successor of her father's media empire. Despite being arguably the most Book Smart of the Roy siblings though, it is clear that Logan refuses to truly consider her as a future successor because she is a woman, something that both Kendall and Roman throw in her face at different points in the series. She also has a strained relationship with her boyfriend (later Henpecked Husband) Tom, with it being unclear how much she genuinely loves him vs knowingly settled for him. The only thing keeping her from being a fully straight example is that, unlike most examples of this trope, Shiv is genuinely not the most competent businesswoman and has rather poor business sense due to a lack of experience (unlike Kendall) and people skill (unlike Roman). This makes her confidence and determination come off more as foolish arrogance and self-righteousness.
  • Rhea is extremely powerful within the Pierce family and she appoints herself the go-between for the potential Roy-Pierce deal. She spends much of her time alternating between manuevering against the Roy kids, convincing each that she thinks they're capable of being the CEO, and getting in Logan's good graces through subtle suggestion. She then betrays them all, with her clear ambition being to take over herself. Having apparently succeeded, though, she's named CEO...which backfires on her massively because the Roys just got implicated in a huge sex scandal.
• Supergirl (2015):
  • Where Calista Flockhart subverted the trope as Ally McBeal, she plays it straight as Cat Grant. Cat runs Catco Worldwide Media in Season 1 and is a serious, whip-smart Deadpan Snarker with very exacting standards, which her intern Kara struggles to meet. She also tends to ignore or demean her employees, except for those who have earned her respect. However, Kara looks up to her as a role model, and Cat encourages Kara to be more confident (in her way), unwittingly mentoring Supergirl in the process. She also justifies that she has had to be this way to make it in a male-dominated industry, referencing how she came up from the bottom under Perry White.
  • Lena Luthor took over her adoptive brother Lex's company after he went to jail, and later buys Catco to save it from going under. She retains much of the expected Luthor aloofness while also being driven to make a positive impact through science and tech. However, this drive sometimes manifests in negative ways, as she is prideful, Can't Take Criticism, and has a lot of unresolved trauma from being raised in the cutthroat Luthor family. She softens through her friendship with Kara, and later the rest of the main cast though she does a brief Anti-Villain turn during Season 5.
• The White Lotus: Nicole from Season 1 is a CFO at one of the biggest search engine tech companies in the world that has recently been struck by controversy, and she's the only breadwinner in her household. She rankles at the mildest hint that her position came in some part due to the controversy, asserting she climbed the corporate ladder on her own. She has a semi-permanent professional air to her, something her House Husband Mark and daughter criticize her for, and is only somewhat attentive to the interior lives of her children, who she very obviously both doesn't fully understand and doesn't seem that bothered to understand. And of course her husband struggles with feeling emasculated and impotent in the family next to her success.

Theatre

• The Heidi Chronicles: Heidi's childhood friend Susan Johnston becomes this by the 1980s as a media executive, having started out as a Straw Feminist who wanted to create change from within the system. Despite saying she took the job to champion women's issues, she becomes the type of shallow, stereotypical dealmaker who turns a personal lunch with her friend into a business deal. She represents the aspects of second-wave feminism that Heidi, an idealistic art scholar, feels betrayed by.

Webcomics

• Parodied in this installment of Hark! A Vagrant, with a businesswoman talking on four telephones at once, or wearing her huge-shouldered double-breasted jacket while having sex.

Western Animation

• Bojack Horseman pulls a Decon-Recon Switch of this trope through Princess Carolyn, who starts the show off as a straight example: always on the move, continuously thinking of new plans and ways to clean up after Bojack's messes as his manager, a woman who always lands on her feet even if the worse should happen. The show later explores the toll such a lifestyle has taken on her, as she has little personal life or bonds with those outside of her job. She tries to have a baby later on with then-boyfriend Ralph Stilton, only to miscarry due to her older age and low fertility. However, by the end of the series, she has adopted the child she's always wanted and is married to her former assistant Judah, the only person who takes work just as seriously as she does and is more than willing to support her any way he can.
• Daria: Helen Morgandorffer is the quintessential high-powered career woman: she's an extroverted, independent, strong-willed, practically-minded and attractive attorney, typically shown in a skirt suit, rocking Power Hair. She's one of the few adults shown to be fairly competent but is not the strongest presence in her daughters' lives due to her being a Workaholic, prioritizing work over family more often than not.
• Family Guy: Parodied in "Long John Peter" when Quagmire, Joe, and Cleveland are at the bar and the TV is playing a clip from a fictional show called ''Busy Business Lady Whose Life Is Missing Something But She Doesn't Realize It Because She's So Busy With Business''. In the clip, a Lady in a Power Suit harriedly answers phones ringing off the hook, turning down meetings because she has more meetings she has to get to. A male colleague enters the room and asks her out. When she tries to turn him down as she's too busy, he interrupts her saying, "Over the next 90 minutes, I'd like to show you all of your problems can be solved by my penis."
• Gravity Falls: Mabel attempts to channel this in "Boss Mabel" when she bets Grunkle Stan she can run the Mystery Shack better than he can by being nice and polite (complete with shoulder pads). While at first she acts as a Benevolent Boss, the employees' antics cause her to crack down on them, acting like the very person she was trying to prove wrong. However, Grunkle Stan also admits he was wrong about being mean all the time, since his failure to say the word "please" caused him to lose their bet.
• Rugrats: Charlotte Pickles is beautiful and glamorous, primarily seen hurrying about in a power suit, barking orders at her rarely-seen assistant Jonathan over her cellphone, and paying little mind to her family life. When she does take the time out of her schedule to look after Angelica, she encourages Angelica to be as independent and strong as possible so she can succeed in the future in a "man's world". In the few storylines she features in (usually involving Angelica acting out even more than usual), she often has to figure out how to better balance her Career Versus Family.
• Talespin: Rebecca Cunningham sees herself as this. Unfortunately, what she considers to be hard-headed business plans are often closer to Zany Schemes. She runs Higher for Hire well enough on a daily basis, having a much better grasp of finances, networking, and so on than Baloo ever did, but has convinced herself that this means she understands the practicalities of air delivery better than she actually does. She sometimes prioritises work over her daughter Molly, but really tries not to.

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