00:00:16.580As women, we were told that we could have ambition, careers, power, money, independence,
00:00:22.860all of the things, that we could have it all.
00:00:24.720But only if we managed to pursue all of it while we also remained endlessly agreeable, attractive, maternal, selfless, accommodating, emotionally available, and completely non-threatening to men.
00:00:38.080Even if we checked all the boxes, we still weren't going to get all the things.
00:00:42.060Today I'm chatting about the new book, The Ambition Penalty, with Stephanie O'Connell.
00:00:45.520This conversation hit a real nerve with me because it gets at the thing that so many of us are feeling right now.
00:00:52.540hey stephanie hey joe why does the world hate ambitious women
00:00:59.160it's a complicated question and yet it's not at all because we've all felt it we've all
00:01:06.860experienced it we even know that you just put a different pronoun in front of the word ambitious
00:01:11.820and it changes the entire meaning he's ambitious what a go-getter just the guy we need what a
00:01:17.300great leader. She's ambitious. Difficult. Not a team player. Selfish. What a bitch. What a be.0.93
00:01:23.320Yeah. What a be. What a be. Edit as needed. Why? Why? Because we, whether we want to admit it or
00:01:34.180not, our perceptions of what we think power, authority, and leadership should look like
00:01:41.600still align with very patriarchal, white, heterosexual ideas of what power leadership
00:01:51.120and authority should look like, who we're supposed to listen to, who should have power.
00:01:57.180When people think boss, they automatically think male. And even if they think, well,
00:02:02.580I don't think that women shouldn't be bosses, it still shows up in the reactions to women who do0.98
00:02:09.460try to assert authority or power or independence, we see it everywhere, whether it's in the0.98
00:02:15.320workplace, whether it's women running for political office, whether it's in women choosing0.55
00:02:20.960to assert their independence outside of marriage and motherhood. As soon as women assert autonomy,1.00
00:02:29.160power, anything, any kind of authority we associate as being held by men, suddenly they're selfish,1.00
00:02:38.400their miserable cat ladies. We're going to stigmatize them as spinsters, old maids. We're1.00
00:02:43.060going to put them down and shame them away from their ambition because what we really need is1.00
00:02:48.880women to conform to this very narrow model of femininity per patriarchal standards, where1.00
00:02:55.680women's labor is channeled into serving men's capacity to attain power, financial and economic0.98
00:03:03.700resources and enjoy their personal leisure, which men also have more of.0.99
00:03:10.640So much more of. So much more of. What is this very narrow definition of femininity? And I would
00:03:16.880argue this is kind of a bold statement, but I would argue that the right and conservatives
00:03:21.960have used this very narrow definition of femininity as their version of feminism and
00:03:27.640their rebranding of feminism. And it's doing very well for them with young women.
00:03:33.700femininity masculinity it's all marketing and you know how it's all marketing because it changes
00:03:40.280all of the time what we consider masculine or feminine has nothing to do with your sex or even
00:03:48.440your gender identity it is something we apply to totally random things like meat eating meat is
00:03:54.980now considered masculine right it's all totally made up and totally arbitrary but eating meat is
00:04:00.700masculine but eating protein is feminine feminine well now it used to be right 10 years ago being
00:04:07.700vegan was feminine right exactly it's all such a moving benchmark it used to be that pink was a
00:04:14.340masculine color and a lot of people don't know this they think oh boys blue natural but historically
00:04:20.140not natural at all wearing higgs wearing wigs wearing makeup wearing heels those things were
00:04:25.940associated with prestige, masculinity, our founding fathers. I talk about in the book,
00:04:31.460you got George Washington curling his own hair because he didn't like the wigs at the time.
00:04:35.720Of course, we would not consider that masculine now, although, you know, these guys are breaking
00:04:39.600their faces these days to conform with standards of beauty. So I don't know, maybe things are
00:04:44.180changing again. But the point is, it's all very arbitrary. That said, what these ideas of
00:04:50.440masculinity and femininity do is really work to reassert a binary. And you need a binary to1.00
00:05:00.760construct hierarchy because the way you enforce hierarchy in a world where you can't explicitly
00:05:07.540discriminate against people based on their identity is that you can create an incentive
00:05:14.820structure where some people are rewarded for engaging in certain behaviors and other people
00:05:20.400are penalized for engaging in the exact same behaviors. So if a man expresses ambition in
00:05:27.600the workplace, if he asks for more, if he is assertive, he is more likely to access greater
00:05:33.920pay, greater power, more leadership access. If a woman does the same thing, not only is she not0.98
00:05:40.560able to access the same level of rewards as her male peer, she is also more likely to be subject
00:05:47.640to backlash for even asking in the first place. Again, being labeled difficult, not likable,
00:05:53.280not a team player, which can result in real lack of opportunity, either not getting the raises
00:05:58.220she's requesting, not getting access to mentorship because she's not considered a team player.
00:06:03.540Sometimes even having a job offer rescinded has happened to some of the women I interviewed for0.99
00:06:07.720my book. And so what we talk about with masculinity and femininity is basically these shifting ideas
00:06:15.280of what it means to be a quote-unquote good woman or a good man and the way in which if you conform
00:06:24.560to those standards of goodness, you essentially will wind up reproducing the same power structure
00:06:33.780of male dominance because to be good under patriarchy, under these standards of masculinity
00:06:40.000and femininity is to be good as a man is to lead, to be good as a woman is to submit.
00:06:45.960And if you choose not to be good, either as a man or a woman under these standards,0.54
00:06:50.920you will still have the same outcomes because you're going to face punishments for violating
00:06:56.380those expectations of masculinity and femininity. And so to say that femininity is feminism when1.00
00:07:05.920And this constructed ideal of femininity is being used to reassert a binary that enforces hierarchy, a system of male dominance.
00:07:35.100That's what this is. Okay. We are trying to dismantle this brick by freaking brick. And it is not easy. It is hard work. When you started writing The Ambition Penalty, where were you in your own career and your own place of ambition?
00:07:55.620i was in my late 20s actually no at this point i was in my early 30s i forget that i'm i'm turning
00:08:05.26040 this year so 10 years ago your 40s are your best girl your 40s are your best yes i'm excited
00:08:12.020but i had been reporting on money and women's relationship to money very specifically for
00:08:18.660about 10 years and at the time i was hosting a show at real simple magazine and people would
00:08:23.620call in and share their money stories. And what I saw over and over again was this disconnect
00:08:28.620between what I had reported on in the personal finance space of like, here are the five steps
00:08:34.960to save more, grow your wealth, invest in a really smart way. But there was this disconnect
00:08:41.240between that prescriptive advice and then women's experiences of putting that advice into practice.
00:08:47.520oftentimes they weren't really able to do the same follow the same steps and get the same results
00:08:55.780as their male peers even when they were doing all of those right things because of these gender
00:09:00.780double standards that punished them when they leaned in at work when they leaned in at home
00:09:05.960they didn't have access to the same kinds of supports in their home to be able to seize their
00:09:10.760opportunities in the workplace. And I started to feel this too, because as I was reporting my own
00:09:17.900book, I got pregnant. And I wound up selling the book when I was eight months pregnant. And I had
00:09:24.560to write it through the period of postpartum, my daughter's first year and a half of life.
00:09:30.500And it's coming out now that she's two and a half. So I'm a lot slower writer than Joe, but
00:09:34.960I got it done. And I just have to say, as much as I had reported on the unique constraints women0.98
00:09:43.440face while trying to realize their ambitions, to experience that while I was reporting on it
00:09:50.540was in some ways very liberating. Because what it allowed me to understand was that so much of
00:09:58.220what we're experiencing, what makes trying to do all the things we want to do so challenging,
00:10:05.480it made me realize that that is not a personal problem. Even though it's something we've been
00:10:11.000sold as a personal problem, when you report on the data around it, you see that your experience
00:10:18.560is not unique. It's not individual. It's shared. It's a collective experience. And it's not
00:10:24.620happening because you did something wrong. It's happening by design. And because I understood
00:10:31.240that what I was going through in terms of really struggling to combine my professional ambitions
00:10:37.180and my personal caregiving responsibilities, because I knew it wasn't that I wasn't like
00:10:42.660time blocking the right way or scheduling the right way or like being feminine enough or
00:10:48.100masculine enough or whatever thing we're trying to sell women these days, because I knew it was the0.85
00:10:53.180natural outcome of a system that is not set up to support women who are trying to take care of
00:11:01.240their children and have a meaningful life outside of their children and their homes.
00:11:07.420I never once blamed myself. I never once felt guilty. I've never felt mom guilt because what
00:11:13.580was very clear to me was that that was really just something that was being sold to get women0.95
00:11:20.800to do even more labor and caretaking than they were already doing, even as women are already
00:11:27.940doing so much more of this household and caregiving labor than their male peers to begin with.0.88
00:11:33.280And so it really allowed me to see what a scam the stories were told around women's ambitions
00:11:40.960are or should be and how the stories and myths in and of themselves work to condition us into
00:11:49.600believing we are the problem, instead of understanding that what we're experiencing
00:11:55.220is not happening by accident, but by design, and is something that we are experiencing as part of
00:12:01.360something much bigger than ourselves. And what it's going to take to actually do something about
00:12:06.280it is also going to have to be much bigger than ourselves. And I want to dig into that,
00:12:15.200I want to talk a little bit about what we can do, right?
00:14:06.440But a system isn't just the federal government.
00:14:09.200that's certainly part of it, but it's operating at so many different levels. So you have an
00:14:14.480interpersonal level that is in your home environment. What is the system of parenting,
00:14:21.420of marriage? We often think of these, again, in very individual terms, instead of thinking about
00:14:29.040how much our experiences of these interpersonal dynamics are really shaped by the institution
00:14:36.260of heterosexual relationships and what it means to be a good wife or mother or girlfriend and
00:14:44.500a good partner or parent or sister or friend, right? And those are very institutional norms
00:14:53.500that we can think about, again, systemically, not just individually. What am I doing? Sure,
00:15:01.420as an individual to either uphold the status quo that says to be a good mother is to completely
00:15:08.020abandon yourself and self-erasure and any ambition outside of the home versus what am I doing to
00:15:15.500redefine what good motherhood looks like, to model what caretaking is in a way that is expansive
00:15:23.280and shared and leaves room for ambition outside of it. So I think that's a way to think at the
00:15:30.240interpersonal level. And then you have the institutional level. So that's when you're
00:15:34.180talking about a workplace, the policies, the practices. And this is also true in other
00:15:39.440community institutions, like if you're in a church or a community organization. There, again,
00:15:45.080you're thinking about what is the system of what we say power should look like, whose needs are
00:15:53.060going to be prioritized? What are the practices that uphold that system? And where is there an
00:16:00.380opportunity to challenge it? So in the workplace, one of the biggest examples of challenging
00:16:06.960workplace inequality that I cite in the book recently is just the adoption of pay transparency
00:16:12.880policies. Very simple, straightforward sharing of information of what people make reduces gender
00:16:20.460pay gaps considerably. Now, I caveat this, of course, with when it works, where it doesn't,
00:16:26.040what you need to do differently. But I think the extent to which we see things like pay gaps that
00:16:33.140have been so chronic and have been reproducing themselves for so long start to close immediately
00:16:38.800when you stop telling people that they just need to power pose more and you start saying,
00:16:44.240well, what's happening in the system that continues to reproduce these unequal outcomes?
00:16:49.540You see a shift happen immediately when you start looking at a policy approach. And again, it doesn't have to trickle down from the federal government. That's something we can be advocating for, that kind of transparency and accountability in whatever organizations we're operating in on a day-to-day basis.
00:17:07.360Again, it's really helpful if you're not having to do this alone, but you're working collectively with others. So collective organizing is another huge theme in the book. Looking at the examples of unions, looking at the examples of social movements over the years, every single time you see really meaningful change, it's always been through these collective reckonings with shifting the environment around us.
00:17:32.600And it's really only when the idea of empowerment shifted to this internal and individual project where every intervention starts with ourselves that we really saw women's outcomes start to stall out and a pay gap that's been in place for 20 years.
00:17:47.880Now, getting back to the interpersonal, the institutional, the final level we have is the political and cultural sphere.
00:17:54.620And again, this isn't just the big guys at the top.
00:17:57.820You know, this is your local government.
00:17:59.440This is your local school board meeting.
00:18:01.240I really think for as horrifying as it is to live in our day-to-day reality in the news cycle, it is a testament to the idea that just because something is systemic doesn't mean it can't change.
00:18:16.700In fact, the system is changing all of the time.
00:18:19.900Unfortunately, it is currently changing in ways that protect the power and privilege of the already most powerful and privilege.
00:18:26.880but they have a playbook that is working incredibly effectively for how you
00:18:32.620really change policies to work for some people more than others.
00:18:37.260What we want is a policy that works for everyone,
00:18:42.340they didn't start with this like mobilizing just at the federal government.
00:18:46.020They got there through their local school boards and their local governments
00:18:50.800and cities and States one by one by one.
00:18:53.780And I think when we talk about political and cultural change pushing back against the system, again, let us look to the examples where there's hope. One of the things that I've been pointing out recently is I live in New York City. My daughter's going to go to free pre-K in the fall. There's going to be a two's child care program in this city next year.
00:19:16.120And what I think it's really indicative of is that we do not lack solutions. We have solutions that work. They make caregiving more sustainable. They reduce inequity. They support our ambitions both in and outside of the home. These policies will make a really meaningful difference for people, and they're not a mystery.
00:19:35.560What we lack is the collective will to implement them. So where I'm getting hope right now is in these examples, whether it's in my city, whether it's looking in Minneapolis and the way people are coming together to organize and build resistance and build community.
00:19:52.020And what you see is the through line in all of those things where empowerment is not this like internalization. It is a community building. It is a collective project. And it is a reckoning with the actual systems of power.
00:23:15.840But the idea that you can really categorically say men are ambitious and women are not is simply not borne out in the data. What we do see in the data, however, is that everyone's ambitions are responsive to the environment that they're in.
00:23:30.660In other words, you become more ambitious when that ambition is supported, when it's championed, when it seems attainable, when you have the resources to go after it, and you become less ambitious the more your ambition is undermined, questioned, judged, unsupported, the more you're exhausted out of it.
00:23:52.420So where and when you do see a gap in ambition emerge across a group as big and diverse as men versus women, that is telling you there is something really wrong in that environment.
00:24:10.660That is not telling you something about what's naturally happening within the men and women.0.64
00:24:17.120It's telling you about an environment where as women try to go after their ambitions,