career girl
3
3.8
- noun
- /kəˈrɪr ɡɜrl/
- Archaic
:
mujer profesional
- As a career girl, she focuses on her professional goals rather than traditional family roles.
- young career girl
Examples
-
Women have, in the past generation, tried to be both wife/mother and career girl simultaneously with a lot of heartache.
Blog text (8) -
She was a career girl with her own advertising agency who had left her first husband when she was thirty.
Fiction book (1999) -
I like career girls.
-
Ralph Eastman gave her a kiss on the cheek, asking how the career girl from New York was, and Buddy Wittenborn slid off the front seat, hugged her, ducked back, turned his head, and pushed his glasses back on his nose.
Fiction book (1999) -
Being a career girl means prioritizing my job over settling down at this stage of my life.
-
In her twenties, she embraced her identity as a career girl, determined to succeed in her field.
Synonyms
9
3.5
A woman who focuses mainly on her job, often putting work before family
Antonyms
How Career-Focused
- Offensive
3
6.3
9
3.5
- Archaic
3
3.8
14
3.2
8
3.0
28
2.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is compositionally built from 'career' (work/ambition) + 'girl' (female person), so a B1 learner who knows both words can readily infer 'a female whose main interest is her career'. There is a minor sociolinguistic nuance (informal use of 'girl' for an adult woman and the contrast with a domestic role) that may not be fully captured, but it does not prevent basic comprehension.
Etymology
Career girl comes from the time in the 1950s and 1960s when more young women chose a paid career instead of staying at home. The phrase links career (a long job path) and girl (a young woman), so it came to mean a woman who 'puts work first'.