Stanford is the birthplace of Cisco, Nike, Netflix and Instagram, where graduates hold a collective net worth of nearly 3 trillion dollars, and have collectively founded nearly 1,500 as of 2022. To accomplish it all, the patriarchal “grindset”, a mindset focused on tirelessly achieving one’s goals that hold power and wealth as the utmost importance. 

The grindset manifests with particular force at Stanford. Students mimic and measure themselves up to the standards made both implicit and explicit in the images of wealth, entrepreneurship and the opportunities of an elite education and an affluent community around us. But this mentality is not new: its conception began as soon as men were socialized to believe in the image of success sold to them, an image that I see as inherently patriarchal.  

The kind of success that the grindset often projects is not success in selflessly changing the world, attaining self-actualization, or even enjoying one’s life. Instead, it is the successful domination that men have pursued in various forms since the beginning of civilization — domination over women, over other men, over animals, or over the poor. 

Not only is this vision of success harmful to those subjugated, but it requires that men neglect their emotional and authentic self to attain it. bell hooks describes the emotional neglect in her book The Will to Change, when she says that “patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

I have witnessed self-mutilation at Stanford and it has extended to women as well. While still male-dominated, I’ve noticed that my female peers now prioritize and chase this it to the same degree, joining men in a self-mutilation in which they neglect their health and well-being in favor of working towards a future of financial gain and power. Someone I recently met gave me a blank stare when I asked why he worked on the weekends before telling me that he worked everyday for his startup. Students study in the dining halls while shovelling food down their throats. The calendars of peers sitting next to me in class are blocked out for days with meetings, classes, networking events and the like. Talk of applying for prestigious internships is inescapable. Billionaires are venerated in speech and pictures of entrepreneurs hang on dorm walls. Students, male and female alike, saturate the campus with the stench of their startups, social-climbing networking, silicon-valley billionaire worship, while denying themselves rest or enjoyment. 

Shockingly, the toxicity of this mindset is rarely acknowledged. A recent article from The Daily quotes a student characterizing entrepreneurship as “the best way to push a vision you have for how life should be into the world.” This is an honorable pursuit, and ought to be valued. But I’m drawing a distinction here between non-profit and charitable entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship for status and monetary gain. I question how many people following the grindset are authentically and wholly devoted to the former and not the later. Can one seriously say that the sole goal of Stanford for-profit startups like Nike and Netflix was to advance the future of humanity, that they were founded and sustained for reasons outside of money and prestige?

I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my experience the students who dedicate all of their time to marketable startups and networking in a chase for achievement are the ones who I often hear defend and idolize Elon Musk and other billionaires, who describe to me their dream of standing at the front of a board meeting and commanding the room, and who explicitly admit that their career choice is nothing more than a matter of money. What forms the basis of their feverish entrepreneurship is the pursuit of power, where the grindset is not a bridge to selfless action but a bridge to domination. Any mindset based on this model of success as domination is in itself toxic and in itself patriarchal.

Why, then, do some feminist theories adopt such models for themselves? It’s become a sort of fantasy for some women following a kind of “girlboss feminism” to occupy roles of domination previously held only by men, most problematically as the billionaire leaders of affluent companies or ventures. Publications like Forbes now praise obscenely wealthy women, sending the message that power acquisition is a feminist step towards equality. 

This is the core of the patriarchal grindset: money first, morality second. When women participate in such a hunt, they join men in clamoring for a share of power instead of advancing genuine equality. As hooks put it, “women have gained the right to be patriarchal men in drag.” 

What, then, would a society of genuine equality between the sexes look like? It’s simple: a society free from the models of domination that patriarchy imposes. We must unlearn the grindset’s perception of success that Stanford and the world at large have impressed on us and replace it with a vision of a world that is not defined by superiority to begin with.

By no means is this easy: to create a society free from patriarchy has never been accomplished and will take generations. However, the only alternative is to continue to exist in the hierarchical systems that enclose us all, subsisting on the grindset they entail and settling for social reforms that allow women to parade as patriarchal men while we remain trapped. 

Work towards genuine equality instead of settling for patriarchy disguised as such. Reject the grindset.