The Gen Z women turning their backs on hard work for ‘lazy girl jobs’

When Gabrielle Judge finished university in 2019, she got a job at a software company in the tech industry.

She had studied computer and information systems security – a subject most parents would consider to be a good bet for securing a well paying, steady job.

But after a year and half of working long hours, Judge burnt out and quit her job.

She then found a “lazy girl job” – what Gen Z is calling reasonably paid jobs that are not demanding.

Young women have taken to bragging about these jobs on TikTok, where videos with the #lazygirljobs hashtag have gone viral, amassing millions of views.

The term often refers to menial, technical office jobs that can be done remotely.

One TikTok user shares a video of herself sitting in front of a computer and writes, “I was born for lazy girl jobs. I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one, take breaks whenever I want & be the office baddie”.

Another says all she does is “copy and paste the same emails, take 3-4 calls a day, take an extra long break, take more breaks AND get a nice salary”.

A third describes leaving whenever she’s done for the day and taking “as many breaks as I need”.

For these Gen Z women, it is a point of pride to be paid well “to perform the bare minimum, ordering food whenever i want, & & scrolling thru my socials”, as one TikTok user puts it.

The comments are filled with others saying they want these jobs and advice on how to get them.

Judge, 26, from Colorado, says she found a job as a technical account manager at a major tech company in the US, which involved a minimal amount of work during the week.

“I wanted to find a job that’s still somewhat using my degree, and it’s paying well but it’s not completely mentally draining and constantly using my brain because I wanted to build out my own business and be a content creator,” she says.

She says she realised she couldn’t pursue her dreams if she spent 50 hours a week at work, and believes she and other Gen Z women are questioning the values of a culture where one’s identity and happiness is based on work.

“With everything going remote over the last three years, people are more susceptible to a different message these days,” she says.

Roots in the antiwork movement

The advent of remote working during the pandemic spawned waves of job changes – known as the “Great Resignation” – as people re-evaluated their priorities and took advantage of a red-hot jobs market.

Judge was among those who made significant life changes and discovered the antiwork movement, which gained traction during the pandemic and has spawned the r/antiwork subreddit.

She says managers and employers use “crazy metrics and instruments” to push employees to work harder and harder, often at “110pc of their effort”.

“Lazy girl jobs are definitely a positive spin on how we can be antiwork,” she says.

The antiwork movement is not against all work, but is hostile towards jobs “as they are structured under capitalism and the state”, “exploitative economic relations” and “hierarchical social relations in the workplace”, according to the subbreddit’s FAQ.

Often, antiwork supporters believe in working only as much as needed and self-organising to protect their interests. Others go further, describing most jobs as unnecessary and designed to enforce wage slavery and deprive workers of the full value of their output.

Backlash against girlboss and hustle culture

Judge says lazy girl jobs can be understood as a reaction to “girlboss” and “hustle culture” that has prevailed on TikTok in recent years.

“Girlboss culture started off as an empowering thing,” she says. “It was to improve conditions for women in the workplace, and to create more pride for career-focused women and representation.

“It started off with good intentions but started to get very extreme. Since we’re in late-stage capitalism, younger women are starting to see that that’s not the right choice either.”

A girlboss is a 21st-century working woman “whose success is defined in opposition to the masculine business world in which she swims upstream”, according to #Girlboss author and businesswoman Sophia Amoruso.

Although meant to be empowering, this brand of feminism has been criticised for failing to address structural inequalities in the workplace and valorising overworking and “hustle culture”.

Judge says Gen Z is also questioning a culture that has often led to women working long hours at their jobs on top of handling a large proportion of childcare and housework.

Her job became more demanding this year and she decided to quit to focus on her business venture, which involves helping others find their own lazy girl jobs. She calls herself the “Anti Work Girl Boss” and has amassed more than 130,000 followers on TikTok.

Judge says a common assumption when people first hear about lazy girl jobs is that the young women who seek them out are lazy.

“There’s a huge misconception that it’s just young girls that don’t want to work and that’s not necessarily it,” she says.

“It could be a lot of life changes happening and they may need to take the gas pedal off of this hustle culture, they could have other career interests as a whole that they want to explore outside of the time that they’re not working and maybe not be completely drained, they could have other goals like family stuff or are taking care of someone.”

Judge says she has been criticised for focusing on women but says this is because she “can only speak to the feminine experience”. She says men are also interested in lazy girl jobs and nearly a third of her followers are male or trans. “I don’t see an issue with women giving other women financial and career advice,” she says.

‘I worked two hours a week but got paid for 35’

Lazy girl jobs may sound like a dream, but the shine can wear off over time.

Polly Arrowsmith remembers having a lazy girl job in the earlier stages of her career.

At 33, she got a job as an accountant at a big advertising agency and ended up only having two hours of work to do a week.

“I just got lucky,” she says. “It wasn’t like I deliberately went to find a job which didn’t have any hours and paid well. It just so happened that was the job. Jobs like that have always been around, but getting them is probably a different matter.”

Her only task was to process British Airways’ global marketing spend and bill the airline 2pc every month.

“My biggest job of the month was to pop to their floor to reconcile all the figures,” she says.

Arrowsmith, now 56, was in the office for nearly 35 hours in case BA or their sister agency called, but spent most of her time reading and having lush lunches with clients.

Her salary was about £45,000 a year plus perks.

“It sounds so ideal, doesn’t it?” she says. “But I was getting really bored out of my mind. It wasn’t stretching me.

“We didn’t really have that much of an internet in those days. If the internet had been there I would definitely have stayed because I would have been able to upskill myself or be on Google.”

Even then, she says she remembers her friends being jealous and asking her how they could get similar jobs.

Arrowsmith, a marketing director and entrepreneur in north London, says she knows people with similar roles who are paid well because companies have outdated technical systems they need specialists for.

Even though she did little at her lazy girl job, she used it to get a more exciting job at Saatchi & Saatchi, another advertising agency, who hired her because she knew how to use the same accounting system.

She says she can understand why people are boasting about their lazy girl jobs online. “It’s lovely to have that balance if you can get it,” she says.

‘My lazy girl job was better than my stressful jobs’

Ceryn Rowntree, 40, has fond memories of her cushty job as an Information Officer for two days a week while she was at university.

The job paid her £12.50 an hour – double what her other part-time job at McDonald’s was paying.

Her days involved reading newspapers and listening to local news on TV and radio to produce a briefing sheet twice a day which covered any news that might interest clients.

This took up an hour every morning, followed by three hours of “absolutely nothing to do” until lunchtime, and then another hour of work in the afternoon.

“It felt like stacks of money to just sit and watch TV and read the papers basically, so it was quite wonderful,” she says.

She says she could not have done it forever because it was boring, but it was a good fit at the time.

Rowntree, a therapist, author and medium, says she had subsequent jobs in corporate communications that were much more unpleasant.

A decade later, she worked 60 hours a week at a job that sounded like it paid more, but the hourly rate worked out to about £7.50 an hour.

“I’m all for people having jobs that are low stress,” she says. “I also think it’s important that we’re paid what we’re worth.

“I could give you another five examples of jobs I’ve done where I’ve been very stressed and worked a lot of hours and not been paid well at all. Frankly, it’s about time that the scales were reversed.”

Rowntree, from Cramlington in Northumberland, believes there is a balance to be found between doing work that is meaningful but not stressful.

“For decades, if not centuries now, we’ve been so focused on the ‘do do do’, to the detriment of our health, to the detriment of our well being, and to the detriment of every other part of our lives,” she says.

Economic factors propping up lazy girl jobs

Jon Boys, senior labour market economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a trade body, says lazy girl jobs may be having a cultural moment because there are plenty of jobs available.

“Unemployment is very low and it’s still difficult to get hold of candidates,” he says. Wages in the UK are rising at a record pace, which Boys suggests “the bargaining power is on the side of workers at the moment”.

Regular pay grew by 7.3pc in the three months to May compared with a year ago, according to the Office for National Statistics.

“There’s certainly more scope to carve out a role or the terms and conditions that suit your preferences,” Boys says. “That’s maybe not the case when unemployment is a lot higher, and people feel less secure in their jobs.”

However, economists are expecting the UK economy to enter recession later this year, with a corresponding rise in unemployment.

The extent to which the economy slows down will determine whether workers can afford to be as relaxed about work.

Why lazy girl jobs may be a passing fad

Boys doubts that lazy girl jobs will be a lasting trend because that is not how most people think about work.

He points out that the types of jobs being celebrated online are typically “not nice jobs to do”.  

“There’s a lot of status still attached to doing good work,”  he says. “Doing work that’s interesting and engaging is probably a lot easier than doing work that’s not.”

Boys says he does not think Gen Z is lazy, but rather could be reacting to the difficulties of work in the earlier years of one’s career.

“If you ask people of any age, when was your first job that was a good job?” he says. “I was probably about 28. The ones before involved a lot of drudgery. It’s natural for younger people to not enjoy their work.”

Younger people tend to work in lower skill jobs until they gain more experience and move up in their careers, he says. Job switching is prevalent among Gen Z as it is for young people of any generation, who are testing out options to figure out where their skill sets are best placed.

Young people are also likely to earn the least amount of money, as earnings tend to peak when people are in their 40s and 50s.

He says Gen X was previously viewed as “slightly skeptical, cynical people, and maybe even slightly wasters”. Films like 1999’s Fight Club showed characters angry with jobs that are meaningless.

“This might just be a recurring motif of young people, that they prioritise different things,” he says. 

Does a ‘lazy girl job’ appeal to you? Join the conversation in the comments section below