Toward the end of high school, a community group awarded me a small college scholarship and mailed out a list of the winners and what we wanted to be when we grew up. Confident that elected office was the best route to changing the world, I listed “United States Senator.” A male classmate, for whom I harbored a crush, caught sight of the mailer and, eyebrow raised, said to me, “Senator? Isn’t that a little ambitious?”
Duly chastened, I put that objective aside. I still thought maybe I would run for office one day, but now I knew better than to admit I thought I’d be good at it.
Female success in today’s more-feminist world is a complicated thing. In school, girls tend to do better than boys; last year, women made up 56 percent of students on college campuses and earned 57 percent of master’s degrees. A survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that women are just as ambitious as men at the start of their careers. Women reach—for high grades, for graduate degrees, for promotions.
But we also know that pulling back the veil and showing the striving behind the facade of effortless, unconscious success is too often seen as an ugly thing. Plenty of women are celebrated for being successful, but it’s a wholly different thing to be seen as seeking power, influence, or money. That process, which means asserting oneself and competing with men, is unfeminine, suspect.
Women internalize this predilection and behave less ambitiously as a result. According to one study of MBA students, single women asked for lower pay if they knew male students were watching. We know that as much as men say they love ambitious women, the reality, borne out by research, is that men routinely expect their romantic partners’ careers to take a backseat to theirs. Male bosses with stay-at-home wives are less likely to promote women, and women who pursue more money or authority at work are less likely than their male colleagues to get it.
No doubt these factors contribute to some women becoming less outwardly ambitious after being in the work force for a while, to being less likely than men to say they want senior leadership positions.
Fundamental to femininity is the expectation that women serve others first—that we manage others’ feelings, that we nurture others’ ambitions, that we make dinner and are the last to sit at the table to eat. A 2016 study found that most Americans still believe women should be responsible for the majority of the cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, and child-rearing even if they have a full-time job.
Fortunately, in the era of #MeToo, some expectations of female silence in the face of sexual predation are unraveling. But the expectation of feminine service remains stubbornly in place. Pulling back the veil and showing the striving behind the facade of effortless, unconscious success is too often seen as an ugly thing.
Ambition, in women, remains suspect because it breaks this expectation of servility. Even stereotypes of women having sex with the boss for a promotion—yielding to Harvey Weinstein’s massage requests to get a part—still rely on a default assumption of broad male power and women trading the only inherent asset they have (sexual access) for a fraction of it.
We have figured out how to brand ourselves as already-successful #GirlBosses. But we haven’t yet found acceptable ways to voice what is for many of us a blistering and as-yet-unrequited hunger for money, for power, or for influence.
As so many of us declare #MeToo and break our silence on sexual harassment and assault, ambition is the next frontier. Already we are discussing the pursuit of power, with actresses starting production companies to create decent roles for women, and a record number of female voters—radicalized by Trump’s election—running for office. This is progress. But these actions, too, come with undertones of demureness. Women insist they are creating avenues through which other women might succeed or their daughters can enjoy a better future.
Maybe soon, women will be able to say, unabashedly, “I want to be the greatest. I deserve bigger and better and more.”
