America is famed for its workaholic, career-centered culture where dedication to a job is worn as a badge of honor. However, young professionals have been pushing back against the grind by embracing a softer approach with trends like the “lazy girl” or “snail girl” jobs: white-collar gigs with a favorable work-life balance. Gabrielle Judge, a content creator known as “Ms. Anti Work,” popularized the former term in 2023. And opting for a low-energy gig allowed her to build her own media company.
“Lazy girl jobs came from The Great Resignation era,” Judge recently said onstage at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit. “I’m a huge high achiever, I’m a huge workaholic…and I didn’t have a lot of balance. So what was really hard for me was to get a ‘lazy girl job,’ which was still a really good job.”
What Judge experienced was part of a larger phenomenon. Disillusioned with their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown, tens of millions of workers voluntarily left their roles in search of greener pastures. And during the pandemic years—when employers went on aggressive hiring sprees—professionals enjoyed a greater sense of power in the labor market. In the “Great Resignation” era, talent knew they could bargain for better wages, benefits, and work-life balance; remote life also meant increased comfort, clocking in from the couch. One year following the wave of professionals ditching their gigs, Judge took her idea of the “lazy girl job” to the internet.
And young workers like her are increasingly trading the corporate ladder for the founder’s chair. Around 62% of Gen Zers either already run their own businesses or plan to in the future—more than any other generation—according to a 2020 survey from WP Engine. And the entrepreneurial pull extends well beyond new grads: 2024 research from software firm Intuit found that nearly two-thirds of 18- to 35-year-olds have either launched a side hustle or intend to, with close to half citing the desire to be their own boss as their main driver.
From corporate hustle to Ms. Anti Work
After several years navigating corporate America, Judge decided to scale back and make a lateral move, joining Wix as an account manager. This time, she could get her job responsibilities done in just “two to four hours a day” while building her media company, Ms. Anti Work, on the side. After nearly two years at the tech business, she called it quits; since 2023, the now-29-year-old has been independently scaling a brand that helps others decenter the 9-to-5 hustle from their lives. The entrepreneur runs a Substack with over 16,000 subscribers, led a TEDx talk on her work philosophy, and sells resources she calls “The Lazy Girl Career System.”
The career influencer admits that lazy girl jobs have a “time and a place,” depending on the situation or company. And Judge even says she is unsure whether she would advise an entry-level professional to take a low-effort role as employers ramp up their expectations of staffers. However, lazy girl jobs might be the right fit for workers who don’t want to join the corporate rat race—and others could take on the gig as a stepping stone to their true passion.
“Some people get lazy girl jobs because they’re not careerists and they just want work-life balance,” Judge continued. “Some get them because they’re like me, where they’re like, ‘Okay, I don’t have the means or the funds to do my own thing yet, but I want to try it out in a low-risk way—kind of part-time—while I do something else.’”
