There’s a word for what you’re building. You probably already know it because someone used it on you, maybe kindly, maybe not. Side hustle. Passion project. Extra income. Girl boss. You heard it and something flinched — or maybe it didn’t, because you’d heard it enough times that the flinch had worn smooth.
These words are not accidental. They do specific work. And once you can see what they’re doing, you can’t un-see it.
Side hustle.
It positions your business as orbiting someone else’s real income. A hobby with ambition. Something you do on the side of your actual life.
The word “side” is doing everything. It establishes a centre — and you’re not it. There is a main thing (someone else’s income, probably a man’s, probably the one the household depends on) and then there is your thing, which exists in the margins of that. You work on it in the gaps. You don’t expect it to be serious. It would be unreasonable to expect it to be serious.
The “hustle” half carries its own damage. Hustle culture is exhausting and exploitative and we’ve broadly agreed it’s over, which means the word now arrives with all that wreckage attached. It frames work as something you grind rather than something you build.
But the part that makes me angry is the structural argument buried inside it. Side hustle positions women’s work as small and unimportant specifically to keep them financially dependent and to make sure they keep doing the unpaid domestic labour that makes everyone else’s work possible. If your business is just a side hustle, you don’t need proper pay. You don’t need investment. You don’t need to be taken seriously by an accountant, a bank, a partner who might pitch in on the housework if you weren’t so clearly available.
You have a business. That’s what it’s called.
Extra income.
Your revenue is framed as a bonus — supplementary, not serious. It says this doesn’t need to work because something else already does.
“Extra” is a diminutive dressed as a neutral description. Extra is a bonus. Extra is nice to have. Extra is not the point.
When someone describes what a woman earns from her business as “extra income,” they’re doing one of two things: assuming there’s a primary earner somewhere (and it isn’t her), or indicating that the money she makes doesn’t need to sustain anything serious because something else already does.
Both assumptions are often wrong. Both are always condescending.
The word for money a business generates is revenue. Not extra income. Not pin money. Not something to help with the bills. Revenue.
Women own 39% of all businesses in the US. They generate 6% of total business revenue. That gap has a name. This is part of it. — National Women’s Business Council, 2024
Passion project.
Sounds like a compliment. Functions to explain why you shouldn’t expect to be paid properly. You’re doing it for love, so money is beside the point.
“Passion project” tends to appear most often when someone wants to pay less — or nothing. The logic is tidy and circular: you love what you do, therefore payment is almost crass to mention, therefore you shouldn’t be surprised when it’s low or absent. Your real reward is the work itself.
This is a scam with good PR.
Passion is real. Loving what you do is real. Neither makes your rent optional or your time free. The plumber who loves plumbing still charges for plumbing. The logic only seems to apply when the work is women’s work — when it involves care or creativity or community, when it’s the kind of thing someone decided long ago doesn’t really count as work.
It’s your work. That’s what it is.
Mompreneur.
It collapses your professional identity into your domestic one. There is no “dadpreneur.” The word itself is the argument.
That last sentence is the whole thing. There is no dadpreneur. No one calls a father who runs a business a dadpreneur. His parenthood and his professional identity are allowed to be separate, because his domestic role is not considered the primary fact about him.
Mompreneur insists that for women, these things cannot be separated. That who she is as a mother is so central to how she operates professionally that the two must be merged into a single compound word. It sounds warm. It reads as celebration. It functions as a reminder that she is a mother first, and her work is understood through that lens.
It also makes her less legible as a professional. A mompreneur is not quite the same thing as a founder. The category is softer, smaller, more domestic. Which is the point.
Founder is the word.
Girl boss.
Diminutive dressed up as a compliment. The hustle era it came from ended badly enough that the word now carries the wreckage with it.
“Girl boss” had a moment. The moment is over, and the ending was instructive. The companies built under the girl boss banner turned out, fairly often, to have awful working conditions, to exploit the women they claimed to champion, and to use feminist language as a branding exercise rather than an operating principle. The aesthetic survived the values.
But even before the wreckage, the word was doing something suspicious. A boss is a boss. Adding “girl” doesn’t celebrate it — it qualifies it. It makes the achievement slightly more remarkable (she’s a boss and she’s a girl!) while simultaneously making it slightly less serious (she’s a girl boss, not just a boss). The diminutive is baked in.
You’re a boss. Full stop.
What they have in common.
Every one of these words does the same thing in a slightly different register. They position women’s work as secondary, supplementary, emotional, domestic, or provisional. They make it easier to underpay, underinvest in, and dismiss. They’re applied almost exclusively to women’s work — not because the words were invented in a conspiracy, but because they emerged from a culture that already believed these things, and language carries the beliefs of the people who made it.
The practical harm is real. If your business is a side hustle, you don’t need a proper rate. If your earnings are extra income, you don’t need to negotiate hard for them. If your work is a passion project, volunteers can do it. If you’re a mompreneur, well, that’s lovely, and have you considered a flexible-hours role that fits around the kids.
And then there’s the sharpest version of it. “Side hustle” is the language MLM recruiters use. Not by accident. A woman who has been told her work is supplementary, who has been discouraged from taking it seriously, who has been financially dependent long enough to be desperate for something of her own — she’s exactly who the pitch is designed for. Just a little side hustle. Just some extra income. Just something for you. The word primes the target. It tells her the bar is low and the ambition is modest, which is precisely what you want someone to believe before you ask them to hand over money for a starter kit.
74% of all MLM participants are women. That is not a coincidence. — Direct Selling Association
Language is a choice, including the language you use about yourself.
Call it your business. Call it your work. Call it your revenue. Use the plain words that apply to any business, because that’s what you have.
They named it the way they did so you wouldn’t take it seriously.
You’re allowed to name it differently.
If this made you think — or argue with me — I want to know. DM me on Instagram, find me in the Facebook group, or drop an email to janelle@buildwithmatriarch.com.