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Gen Z is stressed. And rightfully so.
For years, we’ve told this generation to be entrepreneurial. To side hustle. To create their own opportunities in a gig economy that promised flexibility and freedom. We praised their innovation, their digital nativity, and their refusal to accept the traditional 9-to-5 grind that left previous generations burned out.
Then, just as they began building the businesses we encouraged them to start, we pulled the rug out from under them.
The recent sweeping tariffs imposed by the current administration aren’t just abstract policy decisions. They’re devastating blows to the young entrepreneurs we spent a decade encouraging to “disrupt” traditional career paths. Two-thirds of small business owners say tariffs will hurt their company. They face a myriad of challenges because of them, including slowing sales, higher prices for raw materials, limited leverage to negotiate with suppliers, and uncertainty about pricing.
The Feminist Stakes Are Even Higher
But this isn’t just an economic story: it’s a feminist one. Gen Z women, particularly BIPOC women, were already navigating systemic barriers to entrepreneurship. They dealt with the added burden of unpaid care work that disproportionately falls on women. They pushed through workplace discrimination that made traditional employment paths feel impossible.
So they did what we told them to do: they hustled. They started Etsy shops and consulting businesses. They became freelance graphic designers and launched sustainable fashion brands. Gen Z entrepreneurs are proving their dedication with 73% reporting that their business is their main source of income.
Now, small businesses may have to pay more for their overseas products and parts due to tariffs, while two-thirds of micro-and-smaller small businesses haven’t even begun to plan for this new reality. For young women who bootstrapped their businesses with minimal capital, these sudden cost increases aren’t just challenging—they’re potentially business-ending.
The Promise vs. The Reality
We sold Gen Z on entrepreneurship as liberation. No glass ceiling when you’re the CEO. No workplace harassment when you work for yourself. No gender pay gap when you set your rates. It was feminist empowerment wrapped in millennial pink Instagram aesthetics.
But liberation requires infrastructure. It needs predictable supply chains, affordable materials, and economic stability. Tariffs can disrupt the steady and predictable supply chains that small businesses depend on, making imported goods more expensive or harder to obtain.
For a Gen Z woman running a small jewelry business, sudden tariff increases mean her materials costs could skyrocket overnight. For the recent graduate who started a sustainable clothing line, import taxes could price her out of the market she spent years building. These aren’t just business challenges; they’re the collapse of the alternative career path we promised would be different, better, more equitable.
When “Girl Boss” Meets Economic Reality
The cruel irony is that Gen Z women embraced entrepreneurship partly because traditional employment felt rigged against them. They watched older women fight for equal pay, battle workplace discrimination, and struggle to balance career advancement with family responsibilities. Entrepreneurship looked like a way to opt out of those systems entirely.
But opting out only works if there’s actually an alternative system that functions. For small businesses that rely on overseas suppliers or imported goods, tariffs mean higher costs and slimmer margins, making creativity and strategic thinking essential just to survive day-to-day operations.
Young women who started businesses with razor-thin margins are now being squeezed from all sides. They’re competing with established companies that have the resources to absorb increased costs, while facing the same economic pressures that made them seek alternatives to traditional employment in the first place.
The Pattern of Broken Promises
This tariff crisis reflects a broader pattern of how society treats young women’s economic aspirations. We encourage their ambition, then undermine the conditions that would allow them to succeed. We celebrate their entrepreneurship, then create policy environments that favor established businesses over scrappy startups.
We told them to be independent, then made independence economically impossible. We praised their innovation, then destabilized the markets they innovated. We promised them they could build something different, then ensured the traditional systems they were escaping remained the only viable options.
Why Feminist Book Club Readers Should Care
The tariff crisis isn’t just undermining businesses; it’s undermining that entire narrative. It’s proving that individual solutions can’t overcome systemic problems. That telling women to “lean in” or “girl boss” their way to equality doesn’t work when the economic foundations keep shifting beneath their feet.
The solution isn’t to abandon entrepreneurship or tell Gen Z women to settle for traditional employment that may not serve them better. Instead, we need to acknowledge that individual hustle can’t overcome systemic economic instability. We need policies that support small businesses, not rhetoric that celebrates them while undermining their foundations.
We need to stop treating economic inequality as a problem women can solve through individual effort and start treating it as a structural issue that requires systemic solutions. We need to recognize that when we encourage marginalized people to “create their opportunities,” we have a responsibility to ensure those opportunities can exist.
Gen Z women believed the promise of entrepreneurship because they had to. Traditional systems weren’t serving them, so they built new ones. The least we can do is not destroy what they’ve built, especially when we’re the ones who told them to build it in the first place. Their stress isn’t just about tariffs or supply chains or profit margins. It’s about the collapse of a narrative that offered hope for something different.
