Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - What Killed the Girl Power Movement？

00:00:00.000 Hey all, Joe here, and you are listening to Under the Influence. 0.98

00:00:09.980 The greatest scam of the last 20 years is that women were told if we just worked harder, 0.99

00:00:15.500 leaned in more, woke up at 5 a.m., negotiated better, practiced enough gratitude, optimized

00:00:20.640 ourselves hard enough, and girlbossed with enough intensity, equality and equity would

00:00:26.560 finally be ours. That didn't happen, did it? This week, we're talking about why the entire

00:00:33.400 promise of girl power failed so many women. Not because our ambition was wrong or dangerous,

00:00:39.700 and not because women did anything wrong or dangerous, or because we failed,

00:00:44.960 but because the systems around us just never actually changed to support us.

00:00:50.720 Stephanie O'Connell is back to talk more about her book, The Ambition Penalty,

00:00:54.120 and this conversation moves us forward into all of the stuff that women are exhausted by right now. 0.84

00:01:01.860 We're talking about how the girl power, girl boss movement did fail us,

00:01:06.020 and also digging into the impossible standards that women continue to face at work

00:01:10.380 and why we're still constantly penalized for the exact same behaviors that men get rewarded for.

00:01:17.620 We're talking trad wives, glass cliffs, queen bee stereotypes,

00:01:22.020 My favorite show, Fleabag, just love any excuse to talk about Fleabag. 0.81

00:01:26.780 The lies of meritocracy and why so many women still feel like they're drowning.

00:01:32.160 And yet we're constantly being told that we should be grateful for what we have.

00:01:43.560 Stephanie O'Connell, I am so happy to have you back again to talk about something that I think about a lot as the mom of two girls.

00:01:50.540 Why did girl boss empowerment actually fail us?

00:01:57.380 Let me start with what I think the girl boss got right, because I don't think we spend enough time giving just a little credit where credit is due. 0.95

00:02:06.880 Trust me, I have a lot of critique to give. 0.98

00:02:09.040 My whole book starts out with a very long critique of girl boss culture.

00:02:13.460 But what I want to say is that the girl boss ultimately idealized a vision that allows women to think more expansively about what they want.

00:02:25.540 The idea that work and family, personal and professional, public and private did not need to be mutually exclusive, but could be mutually reinforcing as it is for men.

00:02:39.100 It was a more expansive vision of what women can and should have access to.

00:02:45.320 My beef with it, of course, is something we're all probably very familiar with. 0.96

00:02:50.160 It was very exclusionary in practice, often reinforced a lot of the toxic workplace culture it claimed to challenge.

00:02:59.940 often got getting women ahead at other women's expense instead of thinking about improving the

00:03:06.580 outcomes of all women across all identities. And so when we think about why that vision of

00:03:15.680 girlboss empowerment, the one that promised us that if we could just dream big enough and be

00:03:22.940 confident enough and work hard enough, we could have that more expansive vision and we could

00:03:30.020 access more equitable outcomes relative to our more privileged male colleagues.

00:03:34.840 When we think about why that didn't work, I think we have to think really critically about what the

00:03:42.880 fundamental belief system underlying it was. And basically, the fundamental belief system was

00:03:50.500 The problem is you. The reason you are not getting ahead, the reason you are struggling to access the same outcome as your more privileged male peers is because you are not confident, ambitious, asking for more, willing to step up and be aggressive and work hard and grind and really put yourself out there.

00:04:18.980 And what it did was take a problem of systemic discrimination and bias against women, but, you know, of course, again, across many intersections of identity and teach us to think of it as a personal problem.

00:04:34.900 And what happens when you start thinking of empowerment as an individual and internal issue and not looking at the structures around you, the actual systems of power that recreate unequal outcomes no matter what you do, no matter how ambitious you are, is you not only reproduce the same inequality.

00:04:59.400 But because you've already taught women to blame themselves, that inequality can just go on reproducing itself completely unchecked because there is no resistance to it when we when we can recast the problem as, well, you know, if women just aren't choosing to work as hard, then inequality is just a matter of personal choice.

00:05:24.880 It's not a systemic issue. It's not being reproduced by our structures that create the same outcomes that are unequal no matter what women choose. There's no confrontation with the ways in which there's no amount of ambition, no amount of asking for more, no amount of being educated and doing all the same things as your male peers.

00:05:48.160 that's going to get you the same outcomes when you're in a system that rewards men more for

00:05:54.440 doing those things and sometimes even punishes women who do the same. Right, right. You're not

00:06:01.000 girl powering hard enough. You're not girl bossing hard enough. And I do look a lot of credit where 1.00

00:06:09.000 credit is due. Like I took so much of that to heart when I graduated college. I'm like, I'm

00:06:14.980 going to climb this ladder. I'm, I'm, I'm, I think it was inspiring to so many young women.

00:06:20.680 And it's not, it's actually not the fault of the girl boss movement. It's not the fault of the

00:06:27.260 girl power movement. It's the fault of the world that didn't change. It's the fault of the men who 0.91

00:06:31.840 didn't change. Like we were not accommodated by the systems, by the culture in order to be those

00:06:39.840 models that were being upheld for us. And that's the real problem here. Also, the other problem

00:06:47.540 is that I think hustle and grind for everyone is a terrible idea. Like that is just, it is a recipe

00:06:53.900 for burnout. We were told for so long, you get up at five in the morning, you write your book

00:06:59.140 before those kids wake up, you do a workout, you huff your protein. And we're just encouraging a

00:07:05.260 culture of burnout and exhaustion that makes people want to check out of the system, right?

00:07:10.960 A hundred percent. Plus, I always like to think about, like, I've been getting up at 5 a.m. for

00:07:16.320 the last year because that's when my two-year-old gets up. And nobody's calling that hardcore. And

00:07:22.120 nobody's saying that's the reason that I should be getting ahead. In fact, they're saying that

00:07:26.880 because I'm the mother of a young child, me being paid less makes sense. So I think it just really

00:07:32.680 exposes the idea that like grind and hard work is not what determines rewards in this culture.

00:07:39.740 And I spend a whole chapter in the book reckoning with those myths, too, as much as I reckon with

00:07:46.380 the gendered myths of, you know, the idea that you can confidence your way out of inequality.

00:07:52.080 I'm also reckoning with these larger stories of meritocracy, the American dream, the idea that

00:07:59.480 the the rewards and power you have access to has something to a direct correlation to how hard

00:08:06.940 you're willing to work I mean if if it was about how hard people were willing to work we would see 0.94

00:08:12.740 like black single mothers being the richest women in our culture right and that's clearly not what's 1.00

00:08:18.540 happening statistically the rewards who holds power who has money who has more free time does

00:08:25.980 not really correlate very, map on very evenly with work. What it maps on to is identity and

00:08:33.780 the identities that are privileged in our culture. Overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, 0.67

00:08:39.760 overwhelmingly cisgender and heterosexual, right? That is not an accident. It's by design. And so

00:08:46.180 what I talk through in this book is the way that winds up happening generation after generation,

00:08:53.680 even as we become more empowered than ever, even as women have been outpacing men in college for

00:09:01.120 four decades. This is not a new phenomenon, right? The truth is you have an entire labor force right

00:09:08.540 now in the United States that is made up of women who graduated college since before women,

00:09:15.080 since after women, rather, started outpacing men in education. And that has not shifted our

00:09:21.000 outcomes in terms of access to equitable pay or leadership or power. And so I'll give an example

00:09:28.040 of how this winds up, this stratification winds up reproducing itself even as we become more

00:09:36.380 credentialed and assert ourselves. So there's a really fabulous paper that studied why women were

00:09:43.220 facing so much discrimination in accessing positions of leadership. Oftentimes, you would

00:09:50.660 see women who were discounted. And what the researchers found was that it wasn't people

00:09:56.520 saying, well, we're not going to promote her because she's a woman and a woman can't be a 1.00

00:10:01.720 leader and we just don't like women. People aren't that explicit. But what they do instead 1.00

00:10:07.440 is they weaponize other identity characteristics or behaviors against women through double standards

00:10:16.100 that are not applied to their male peers. So when you look at age, for example, when you have a

00:10:21.860 young woman, she gets discounted from leadership because she's too young to be considered seriously

00:10:28.240 as a leader. But if you have an older woman, she's suddenly too old to be considered a leader. 0.97

00:10:33.680 Same situation for the men. 0.98

00:10:35.960 He's a young man.

00:10:37.560 That's fresh new thinking.

00:10:39.540 Just the guy we need.

00:10:41.260 He's really going to bring new innovative insights to our team. 0.97

00:10:44.860 You have an older gentleman the same age as the older woman who is discounted.

00:10:49.020 Suddenly, he's a seasoned leader.

00:10:51.060 He is an expert.

00:10:52.640 That's really the experience we need to have on our side.

00:10:57.160 And so you wind up reproducing the same inequality.

00:11:00.760 is just hidden through these double standards. And what they found in this paper were 30 different

00:11:08.620 aspects of a person's identity that could be weaponized against women in this way that was

00:11:16.320 not applied to their male peers. So it could be age, like I said, it could be race, it could be

00:11:21.060 parental status, it could be physical attractiveness. And all of the sudden, you're dealing

00:11:27.360 with layer upon layer upon layer of double standards, certainly on these metrics of identity,

00:11:34.900 but then pair that with choices or behaviors, too, where you're considered either too ambitious or

00:11:41.540 not ambitious enough. And you just have an impossible, an impossible ladder of double

00:11:50.000 standards you have to cut through while we're all out here pretending that all of the barriers to 1.00

00:11:56.500 women's opportunity have all gone away. And our only obstacle is actually ourselves. And that's

00:12:01.820 just nonsense. The inequality is all still there. It's just a little bit better hidden, which is

00:12:07.440 problematic because then we think we're the problem. Yeah, exactly. And there were just so

00:12:14.680 many tenets of of girl boss culture, like you said, that made it feel like we were the problem.

00:12:23.360 right you know we were told that to get ahead in the workplace we had to be more confident we had

00:12:29.560 to speak up we had to negotiate harder as if we weren't already doing those things and yet the

00:12:37.220 penalty is then when we do that we're considered a stubborn annoying bee yes so there is a really

00:12:47.580 wonderful paper as you can set can tell i love research i love data you love research i love

00:12:52.780 how much you love data so much. You love it so much. It's like 450 citations for a nonfiction

00:13:00.520 book might be a little overboard, but as a woman on the internet, I am used to being questioned

00:13:05.600 and being told that I am making things up. And so I really wanted to come in here and not give

00:13:11.600 anyone an opportunity to gaslight, not just me, but any of us with this idea that, oh, it must

00:13:19.280 just be that one study or the sample size or you're not controlling for this. No, no, no.

00:13:24.100 The things I'm talking about are not anomalies. They're the norm. They have been reproduced again

00:13:28.760 and again and again. They're empirically sound. So I just want everybody to know, to be validated

00:13:34.600 that they are not going crazy. They're not making things up. This is borne out over and over again.

00:13:40.560 And to your point, there was a really fascinating paper that found not only have women in the United

00:13:46.840 States, been just as likely to negotiate their salaries relative to their male peers now for

00:13:52.980 decades. And for the last several decades, last 20 years approximately, the research showed that

00:14:00.360 women have been more likely to negotiate their salaries relative to their male peers. But as we

00:14:08.740 know, the gender pay gap in the United States today is where it was 20 years ago. It's exactly

00:14:14.560 in the same place it was 20 years ago. So obviously women asking or not asking was never 0.72

00:14:19.980 the issue. The issue is what the researchers found in this paper, is that while women are 1.00

00:14:25.420 just as likely or more likely than their male peers to ask for more, they are less likely to

00:14:31.300 get what they ask for and more likely to be penalized, stigmatized, and held back for even

00:14:37.100 asking in the first place. Not because they are doing something differently or incorrectly or

00:14:43.440 not following best practices, but because women asking for more challenges the expectations

00:14:51.520 that women should simply be grateful, should not challenge men's authority, should not 0.75

00:14:57.500 desire any more access to power or pay than they already have. And so what you're up against is not

00:15:05.240 an issue of confidence. You're up against, again, a double standard that is set up to punish you,

00:15:11.120 even when you do all of the quote unquote right things. Now, in addition to all of that, one of

00:15:16.900 my favorite findings from this paper also looked at why people think gender pay inequity still

00:15:26.200 exists. And they found that the people who believe that women are underpaid because they don't ask

00:15:31.900 for more, even though the evidence doesn't support it, were also less likely to support policies

00:15:38.480 that actually reduce gender gaps in pay.

00:15:41.960 They were less likely to support pay equity initiatives, 0.85

00:15:46.540 pay transparency policies that we know close gender gaps.

00:15:50.780 And so what I think that paper really tells us

00:15:54.220 is that not only are we perpetuating these myths

00:15:59.140 that aren't true,

00:16:00.420 but the myths in and of themselves undermine support

00:16:04.720 for the very policies that would actually address this inequity. And so understanding and debunking

00:16:13.900 the myths themselves, I argue, is one of the most powerful things we can do to shift our outcomes.

00:16:22.860 I completely agree. I mean, I just could not agree more. I want to take a quick break. And

00:16:27.180 when we come back, I want to talk about things that I'm just sick of. I just want to I want to

00:16:30.160 complain a little bit. OK, let's do it.

00:16:34.720 okay we're back we're back on the complaining part of this episode i want to stop being told

00:16:45.840 to be grateful for my career success um to be grateful i just kind of want to stop being told

00:16:53.380 to be grateful generally i firmly believe that this like massive movement towards gratitude

00:17:00.720 and that gratitude will improve your well-being is just a way to make us have to have to accept

00:17:07.960 a status quo. Right. Like I get told also as an author all the time, I should be grateful that I

00:17:12.960 just get to write books. Right. And I don't think men get told that. Right. I am always wary of when

00:17:20.100 self-help really only falls to one gender. Like the advice really only gets applied to women and

00:17:28.820 not men, because then you really think, who is that really serving? Who is it serving to tell

00:17:34.240 women and women exclusively that the key to having more happiness, sustainability, well-being is just

00:17:42.460 to be more grateful and not to reduce their workload or not to give them more support or not

00:17:49.880 to give them more access to the same kinds of rewards and recognition as their male peers?

00:17:56.420 It's always telling when we're being sold a solution that doesn't depend on shifting the systems that are increasing our stressors, our burnout, the things that we're struggling with, but instead says, actually, you should just be more grateful for what you have.

00:18:12.220 Now, this is not to say that like we we don't have any value in any of the advice we've been talking about, whether it's being grateful, whether it's being confident, whether it's negotiating. Right.

00:18:23.400 But I think what I really want to be clear about is when is that advice being used to serve us and when is it really just being used to justify the same unequal outcomes that we've been sitting with now for generation after generation?

00:18:42.900 because, gosh, I can't tell you how often I hear people coming up in my comments and being like, 1.00

00:18:50.120 well, you should be grateful you don't live over there in this country where women can't even show

00:18:54.940 their faces in public, or you should just be grateful that it's not the 1800s. And what it 0.84

00:19:00.120 does is reframe the conversation from what we're talking about, which is a rampant, gross,

00:19:07.400 unjustifiable inequality that is costing women, especially those most marginalized women,

00:19:13.880 their time, their money, their autonomy, their access to safety, well-being, the care for their

00:19:20.080 children, their children's safety, their children's economic security. And we are reframing how much

00:19:27.420 harder it is for them to have that relative to their male peers and saying, actually, the benchmark

00:19:35.220 shouldn't be where we're at today and the inequality you're experiencing relative to

00:19:40.480 your more privileged colleagues. It should actually be where you could have been a hundred

00:19:44.780 years ago or another place in the world. And you should just shut up and be happy with that. 0.83

00:19:51.060 Right. Who does that serve? That's always the question I'm coming back to when we talk about 0.97

00:19:55.440 these stories or these sentiments of like, especially the gendered sentiments that are

00:19:59.840 overwhelmingly directed at women, because then it really tells you something about like, okay,

00:20:05.800 are they telling you to be grateful because it serves you? Or are they telling you to be

00:20:10.720 grateful because it serves them if you just shut up and continue to show up and keep doing

00:20:16.460 all of this labor and maintaining all of this additional infrastructure that the system that

00:20:24.880 enables men to access more pay power and leisure depends upon exactly i mean that was that was a

00:20:33.000 really good good answer to me just shitting all over gratitude uh which whereas i was just going 0.72

00:20:38.180 to be like hashtag gratitude totally sucks i want you to complain about something what is something 0.97

00:20:44.100 that you just you just want to get rid of or that you just that you just hate let's just talk about 0.96

00:20:48.520 things we hate right now? Oh, my God. There's so many to choose from. Where do I begin? I really

00:20:55.880 hate the reframing of women constrained out of their professional opportunity, their public life

00:21:04.560 and their personal leisure as a choice. I think like there has been in the face of like a very

00:21:12.540 unprecedented attack on women's autonomy and their well-being and their economic security,

00:21:19.680 there has been like a simultaneous push to say, well, actually, this is what women want. And 0.85

00:21:26.320 they're just choosing to be empowered in a new way. And I just keep thinking about like the

00:21:32.460 hundreds of thousands of black women who are whose jobs were cut from the federal government

00:21:36.920 in a very targeted way last year to then have to read headlines about how women's labor force 0.99

00:21:44.120 participation has fallen and how that's not really a problem. It's just women choosing 1.00

00:21:48.340 differently. I just think it's such a slap in the face when people are really struggling to 1.00

00:21:53.580 feed their families, maintain a roof over their heads, maintain their access to health care.

00:22:00.180 Who are we serving with this nonsense, right? I just really want to give empathy to how much the way in which our collective struggle is being recast as some kind of collective liberation when in fact what it's doing is reinforcing the very status quo that has made our struggle so difficult to begin with.

00:22:30.180 Yeah, yeah. I also want to get rid of the word glass ceiling or the phrase glass ceiling because it makes, again, it makes it seem like all of this is possibly our fault.

00:22:45.300 You talk a lot about a different phrasing that researchers use called glass cliff, which, you know, then I just picture, every time I think of a cliff, I think of lemmings, but that's wrong here.

00:22:58.780 But what is what is the glass? My kids my kids have been watching a lot of Grizzly and the Lemmings lately. Have your kids ever seen that? It's the worst show. It's the worst show to that one on television. It's essentially Tom and Jerry, but with a grizzly bear and lemmings. It's absolute complete crap. And they love it. What is what is the glass cliff?

00:23:17.860 Yeah, so the glass cliff is a tactic wherein women or other underrepresented groups are elevated into a position of power, but generally in a time only in a time of crisis so that they are more easily set up to fail and can be scapegoated as the reason that the company was in crisis and not the fact that the company was already in crisis. 0.96

00:23:47.420 And then secondly, when those underrepresented groups are elevated into those positions of power, they are not given access to the same supports, the same resources, the same buy-in by the company board, for example, to really implement radical change.

00:24:06.900 And they are not given as much grace for the mistakes that they maybe make along the way. And so really, it's a system of setting marginalized groups up to fail so that we can then point to them and say, well, they really weren't great leaders anyway. And this really proves all along that we should only really have white dudes in these positions because that's the way leadership is supposed to work effectively.

00:24:31.860 yeah yeah i also i want to get rid of something else that i think you want to get rid of the idea

00:24:39.940 of the queen bee right and that like you know the queen bee versus the alpha in our language right

00:24:48.120 talk about double standards you know anytime i talk about this stuff in the backlash against 1.00

00:24:54.480 ambitious women i hear well the worst of it comes from other women women are the real problem here 1.00

00:25:00.040 And I wound up dedicating a whole chapter of the book to these dynamics. And the first and foremost, like the thing we really misunderstand about these systems of bias is that they're not these individual things. It's not like me versus you. It's not guys versus girls.

00:25:16.380 is that we're all growing up in these cultures where we learn that women are supposed to be

00:25:22.960 one way and men are supposed to be another way. And what men are supposed to do aligns with

00:25:29.280 our ideas of power and leadership. And those aren't natural ideas. They're cultural ideas.

00:25:35.160 They're inherited. And we all inherit them, even if we are part of the group that has been told

00:25:41.180 that you're not a leader. You're not what a leader looks like. So when women assert their

00:25:47.460 power, their ambition to leadership, yeah, other women are primed to also express some of those, 1.00

00:25:56.260 hey, she's a bee. She's difficult to work with. She's not a team player. She's a bee. Just as men 1.00

00:26:02.800 are. She's a bee. She's a bee. Right? So it's, again, about this broader cultural conditioning, 0.99

00:26:10.240 not this individual project. However, that being said, in spite of our cultural conditioning,

00:26:18.580 we see unequivocally that women's outcomes improve the more they are surrounded with other women,

00:26:26.420 particularly as women access leadership positions. And the real key difference is

00:26:32.480 token woman, one woman in a position of power, two women in a position of power versus women 0.99

00:26:39.100 represented in positions of management, power, leadership at scale. Once you get about 30% of 0.96

00:26:48.300 women in management, in positions of leadership, then they have the real critical mass to start 1.00

00:26:55.460 shifting the culture. Talk about glass cliff. If you only elevate a single woman leader, 1.00

00:27:02.820 oftentimes that woman is being elevated because she's being used as a cover for maintaining the 1.00

00:27:10.280 same old misogynistic and exclusionary practices of the workplace so they so the guys in power can 1.00

00:27:16.140 continue to stay in power they can continue to discount whatever that one woman in power says 0.73

00:27:20.780 because there's enough of them to overrule her and then they can say you know women aren't supportive 1.00

00:27:26.920 of other women anyway, but we're not actually misogynistic because, look, we have a woman in

00:27:32.720 our leadership, right? So those token women are used as cover for maintaining an exclusionary 1.00

00:27:38.540 status quo. But where the status quo can be really challenged and is challenged is when you see women 1.00

00:27:44.840 represented at scale in a meaningful capacity. And one really fabulous paper, it talks about

00:27:52.720 Women in management at a threshold of 60 percent in the UK closed gender pay and promotion gaps throughout the organization studied.

00:28:03.360 So as soon as you had women in power, not just like more than one, but really in a meaningful representative capacity, they were able to get enough buy-in and support for their ideas and not be cast aside and have their voices silenced and to be made to be cast as ineffective no matter how hard they wanted to change the culture.

00:28:28.980 They could change the culture because there were enough other women there to buy in and support them, too. And those women wound up implementing policies throughout the organization that closed gender gaps at every single level. 0.84

00:28:43.380 And I think that is a really powerful testament to what really happens when we're talking about like what it means for women as a social class to have power versus a woman being in a position of power. 0.77

00:29:01.840 And that's a big difference. That's where you get a lot of these queen bee stereotypes. You get a woman in power who is cast as being a queen bee because she's effectively not empowered to challenge the male-dominated exclusionary status quo when she's in that position, not because women are just as exclusionary naturally, quote unquote, as men.

00:29:28.660 Although we are all fighting against this cultural conditioning.

00:29:32.880 Yeah, no, I mean, and that's the hardest part, fighting the cultural conditioning.

00:29:36.180 OK, let's take one last break.

00:29:38.460 And when we get back, we're going to do a rapid fire round.

00:29:42.080 Are you ready for that?

00:29:43.720 I'm going to do my best.

00:29:44.860 I can be very verbose, but I'll try to keep it down.

00:29:47.020 okay we are back with stephanie o'connell author of the ambition penalty i want to do a quick

00:30:00.140 ambitious lady rapid fire round favorite spice girl song

00:30:05.780 i mean it has to be want to be how could it not be i'll tell you what i want what i really really

00:30:12.880 what i really really want i'll tell you what i want yeah um what i really what i really really

00:30:18.860 want uh it's want to be it's i mean there's no other other answer to that question right um

00:30:25.640 favorite ambitious female character in a movie

00:30:31.780 i mean i love fleabag and and like fleabag isn't necessarily you know what you think of 1.00

00:30:42.860 in terms of ambitious and in like the very narrow sense of the word like she's not trying to climb 1.00

00:30:49.980 a corporate ladder but she owns her own business it winds up being very successful and she winds

00:30:55.880 up getting to a place by the end of the series where she doesn't feel like she needs to be

00:30:59.940 constantly validated by other people to be secure in her own self and like man isn't that the way

00:31:06.680 to be able to move through your life with kind of creating the world and life you want, even if it

00:31:12.860 is sometimes very, very heartbreaking and makes me cry every time I watched it. Fleabag? Oh my

00:31:17.700 God, I just started rewatching the series. So I also, I have the, this was a Mother's Day gift

00:31:23.280 that Nick got me years ago, a book of all the scripts of Fleabag. Yes, I gave it to my best

00:31:30.300 friend. Yeah, yeah, they're wonderful to read. And so I started rewatching the show as well. And

00:31:36.180 And I actually love that you say that, because I think that that gets into how we can redefine

00:31:42.900 ambition.

00:31:43.980 It is not climbing the corporate ladder.

00:31:45.920 Like, what do you want to be ambitious about in your life?

00:31:48.680 My friend Neha Roosh, who wrote The Power Pause, is really trying to redefine what it

00:31:53.740 means to be ambitious about motherhood, right?

00:31:57.020 And so maybe you step out of this corporate life.

00:31:59.900 Being in a job, in an office, is not the only way to be, quote unquote, ambitious.

00:32:04.700 You can be ambitious about building your own business, about building your own platform, about being a mom, about being a great wife.

00:32:13.640 Like there's just about being a great friend.

00:32:15.460 Like ambition does not have to be solely dedicated to the workplace.

00:32:20.000 And I'm really sick of that idea, right?

00:32:22.800 Totally.

00:32:23.600 In the intro of the book, I wound up dedicating a little ode to this because I think we use, and I use it too as I've been talking about this,

00:32:32.720 metrics like pay and power and leadership as a kind of shorthand for ambition. They are not

00:32:38.380 exclusive indicators of ambition's presence. And I don't think ambition is any one thing. I think

00:32:44.560 ambition is public. I think it's private. I think it's personal. I think it's professional.

00:32:48.480 I think going back to what I said, what I think the girl boss got right, a more expansive vision

00:32:54.240 of what we should be able to have access to. It's not a balance in a bank account. It's not waking 0.83

00:33:00.060 up at 5 a.m. It's not checking things off of a list. It's to just live in alignment with more

00:33:05.020 of the things that we want to do. The reason I wind up citing a lot of these metrics we

00:33:10.220 traditionally talk about is because of the way in which the pursuit of public ambition,

00:33:16.280 particularly ambition that is both perceived and rewarded as high value, is made uniquely fraught 1.00

00:33:23.300 for women. And I think that is what this book is really reckoning with, because if that is still

00:33:28.040 the case, it makes it much harder to reimagine any kind of ambition because you really are just

00:33:35.720 stuck in a struggle of trying to keep a roof over your head. And you can't really have room to

00:33:42.380 imagine and rethink and experience this more expansive and ambition of possibilities if you

00:33:50.360 are not able to access the basic needs that you need, your basic security, your basic autonomy, 0.98

00:33:56.680 me and your basic things that that women still have far less access to exactly exactly I think

00:34:02.600 it's very hard to be ambitious about the other parts of your life when we have we don't have a 0.93

00:34:10.840 social safety net okay like we we have I'm I live in fear of precarity all the time which is dumb

00:34:18.000 I shouldn't right like I like by all metrics am at the top of my career I like my level of earning

00:34:25.720 power right now. But I also and I'm I'm very privileged to be able to say that. But because

00:34:31.100 there's no social safety net, everyone, me included, is one health crisis away from not

00:34:39.360 being able to to access any of these things that make us secure, like literally one health crisis.

00:34:47.980 Or and also, I don't know if my job will exist next next year. Right. Like there is so much

00:34:55.240 precarity and it's so much worse for so many different populations that it is hard to talk

00:35:02.540 about ambition without talking about how building these safety nets for people well and that's why

00:35:10.620 i'm always that's to me the biggest red flag in the like the trad wife discourse and the soft

00:35:18.140 life discourse is like you know at the end of the day if you really care about valuing caregiving

00:35:24.860 labor, if you really care about making life more sustainably, making ambition more expansive,

00:35:31.660 then the solution isn't to submit to a man. The solution is to reinforce a social safety net.

00:35:38.380 But they're not out here advocating for universal health care and universal basic income and these

00:35:44.000 other things that would make, you know, at home ambition, caregiving ambition more sustainable

00:35:49.400 and accessible to all of us, because at the end of the day, that would undermine what they're 0.99

00:35:54.380 actually trying to sell us, which is a very gendered division of labor and a gendered 1.00

00:35:58.180 division of power.

00:35:59.840 And so I think that to me is like the most telling thing about like, oh, are we really

00:36:06.240 caring about our ability to think expansively about ambition and creatively and allowing

00:36:14.220 people to sustain this thing that we think matters? 0.68

00:36:17.500 Or are we just trying to make sure that this is labor only women are expected to do? 1.00

00:36:24.380 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I hope that people are energized by this talk and less exhausted. Okay, wait, more rapid fire, though. Your favorite thing for self-care? 1.00

00:36:37.040 i like to run though recently i've been trading it in for sleep because my book's coming out

00:36:43.920 look when people ask me what i do for self-care it's sleep okay i love sleep so much i am a

00:36:49.500 massive freak for sleep i'm constantly thinking about ways that i can have more sleep and more

00:36:54.340 comfortable sleep like sleep is what sleep is one of my number one priorities one of the other

00:37:00.260 things that i hate that i want to get rid of is when people find out you know how many books i

00:37:05.300 write how many podcasts I make they're like you must never sleep but I'm like I said nine hours

00:37:08.400 a night like I prioritize sleep more than anything else because I couldn't function if I didn't sleep

00:37:13.500 but I think that goes back to hustle and grind right like if you're working hard then you must

00:37:18.380 not sleep you must be getting up and grinding so freaking hard oh my gosh I've I've come to like

00:37:26.060 this new theory that masculinity like aspirational masculinity is just about manufacturing hardship

00:37:32.140 and aspirational femininity is all about manufacturing ease so like basically for

00:37:39.320 like I said before I'm up at 5 a.m with my kid but you know we're not saying oh it's hardcore

00:37:44.660 you know it's only hardcore if a dude does it and then you know the actual hard labor of being with

00:37:51.000 my kid all day and cleaning my house that is like being sold as the pinnacle of ease and liberation

00:37:57.200 It's just always such a tell.

00:37:58.360 That's the pinnacle of ease and liberation.

00:37:59.380 Yeah.

00:38:00.240 I think being up at 5 a.m. with your kid is hardcore.

00:38:03.420 I think you're hardcore.

00:38:04.940 You are hardcore.

00:38:05.380 I'm going to start making reels being like,

00:38:08.900 I was up with my daughter this morning.

00:38:11.020 5 a.m.

00:38:12.220 Very, like, macho man, Randy Sedge.

00:38:18.180 Totally.

00:38:19.100 Exactly.

00:38:19.740 I love that. 0.52

00:38:21.080 Stephanie, you are a joy to have on.

00:38:22.640 I love the book.

00:38:23.240 I love the ambition penalty.

00:38:24.520 Thank you so much for being here, 1.00

00:38:25.760 dismantling girl boss culture and talk about fleabag with me because it's pretty much all 1.00

00:38:30.180 I want to talk about all the time. 1.00

00:38:55.760 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - June 02, 2026

What Killed the Girl Power Movement？

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