Episode 326: The Ambition Penalty: Why Women Are Pushed Down for Getting Ahead with Stefanie O’Connell

Women are told to lean in, negotiate, and step up. And many do. But new research reveals that doing all the right things still isn’t enough — and may actually work against them. On this episode of Women’s Money Wisdom, Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with award-winning journalist and author Stefanie O’Connell to unpack the systemic forces that penalize women for their ambition, and what that means for their careers, their wealth, and their lives

Stefanie’s book, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down, draws on research across sociology, psychology, economics, and public health to dismantle the persistent myths used to explain away the gender pay gap. This is not a conversation about what women are doing wrong. It is a conversation about what the system is doing to them.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why the most commonly cited explanations for the gender pay gap — job choice, caregiving, and lack of negotiation — are not supported by the data
• How ambition itself is weaponized against women as they advance beyond entry-level roles
• Why elevating a single woman into leadership can actually make gender inequity worse
• How the ambition penalty shows up in personal relationships, not just the workplace
• What pay transparency and collective action can do that individual best practices alone cannot
• The research-backed threshold at which women’s representation in leadership begins to close pay and promotion gaps

About Stefanie O’Connell:

Stefanie O’Connell is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down. Her work draws on interdisciplinary research to expose the structural forces behind gender inequity in pay, leadership, and power. She also writes the Too Ambitious newsletter.

Website: tooambitious.com

Book: ambitionpenalty.com

Newsletter: Too Ambitious on Substack

Instagram: stefanieoconnell

LinkedIn: Stefanie O’Connell on LinkedIn

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only.  No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https...

Transcript

Welcome And The Ambition Penalty

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence, and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money, and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. As a financial advisor, I have so many times where women over the years that I work with them change their perception of where they want to land. They also get feedback from work, from their corporate careers, that says, what you want is not what you can get. And oftentimes there's a turning point where everything that worked suddenly falls apart. In fact, that's part of my own origin story, whether it's as a podcast host or the founder of my own wealth management company. So today we're going to unpack all of that, not on a one-on-one anecdotal level, but with research and on a societal level. What is going on with women in their careers as what works starts to change? And with us is recent author, Stephanie O'Connell. She is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down. Her work dismantles the myths keeping women from equitable pay, leadership, and power one data point at a time. Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. Wow. What a great intro. Thank you. Well, I'm so glad to have you here. This is an issue that's close to my heart because I see the ambition penalty and I see that, you know, just like that treadmill that never really moves day to day in my actions. And, you know, as a wealth manager, there are ways for us to bulletproof your life and your financial resources so that even if you are a victim of the ambition penalty, you can make things work. But I want that those road bumps to be evened out, to be unblocked for future generations, for my kid, for my daughter. So tell me a little bit about how you started doing the research that you do.

Why Stephanie Followed The Data

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Sure. So I come from a reporting background, specifically in personal finance, and people who are really trying to follow all of the best practices, implement all of those steps that we know we're supposed to do. And what I found in people's experiences of doing all of the right things and then the outcomes they would get when trying to implement them is that there was this really chronic disconnect that still continued to play out differently across identity, where I would be speaking to women who would do all of the same things as their male peers and still not be able to get access to the same opportunity or pay or promotions. And that hampered their capacity to save, to pay off debt, to build their wealth at the same rate. And so what I really wanted to understand was why this was happening. What was actually going on between, you know, doing the right things and not accessing the same outcomes. And that really led me down the research rabbit hole. This is a very data-driven book where I looked across sociology, psychology, economics, public health. Oftentimes, when we talk about academia and the research, there is a lot of siloing. There's not a lot of communication between these fields. And then there's a disconnect between what's in the empirical literature and then what's in the mainstream media. And what I have heard in the mainstream media as someone who's like adjacent to it, basically, is these stories about why women were struggling, the idea that they just weren't ambitious enough, that they weren't confident enough, that they weren't leaning in, that they weren't asking for more. And yet every woman I spoke to was doing all of those things. They were ambitious, they were confident, they were doing the right thing. So I knew that something wasn't adding up here. And I wanted to make sure it wasn't just anecdotal. Was it just me living in my little bubble, the women I'm around? Are they all just ambitious in a way that other women are not? It didn't sit right with me. So that's where I started digging into the research. And the research really reaffirmed that so many of these ideas of what really stands in the way of women being able to access equal pay, opportunity, and power really aren't borne out in the data. Women are ambitious, they are confident, they do ask for more, but they are still not as likely to be rewarded in the same ways for it. And as I I titularly put my book, they're often penalized for doing those very same things that men can reliably do to get ahead and be rewarded in their careers. That is often weaponized against women in ways that not only keep them from accessing the same payer power, but can also result in real consequences. Some of the women I spoke to had job offers rescinded. They experienced turbulence in their personal relationships, they were labeled not a good fit or not a team player, and so discounted from future promotions and opportunities. And what I started to see was this is how inequality is being reinforced in a modern context, even as more explicit barriers to women's participation have fallen away.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So interesting. And just if

Pay Gap Myths That Won’t Die

SPEAKER_00 5:50

we can solidify what the before we dive into your research, the traditional, you know, kind of headlines that say, here's why women don't get ahead, here's why there's, for example, a pay gap, are that women are more likely to be caregivers, they're more likely to opt out, they don't negotiate salary. What are some of the other, you know, kind of traditional reasons that, you know, we kind of start with to say, first of all, are these legit?

SPEAKER_02 6:20

I mean, there's endless excuses, um, and many of them manufactured, and some of them starting from a kernel of truth, but being really manipulated in a way. It's true that women are more likely to be tasked with caregiving responsibilities, that they have twice as much of the child care and household responsibility. But the way that is implied is though it's freely chosen, as if women are opting into shouldering all of that extra load in a way that the research doesn't bear out. No more than 2% of women in the United States have explicitly said they want to be stay-at-home mothers. Uh, and that's been true now for decades. And that is not what happens. Um, most women are, yes, in the paid labor force, but much, much more women are scaling back their careers in ways that they do not want, in ways that hurt their well-being, in ways that hurt their economic autonomy, and in ways that really create a lot of stress around both parenting and in their relationships. And that is something that is being framed as actively chosen or a sign of a fundamentally different ambition relative to their male peers, rather than something that is being forced through gendered constraints and the fact that when women become mothers, no matter how committed they are to their careers, they're still less likely to be able to access the same support from their employers, the same opportunity, the same pay, while their male male peers are more likely to be rewarded with greater promotions, greater pay, greater support, more work-life balance and flexibility. And so what is often framed as freely made choices are really women not even having the same choices available to make. And that's one of the things that I really parse out quite a bit in the book. Now, that's just one example. As you mentioned, we get the women don't negotiate, we get the women just choose, quote unquote, lower paying jobs. Um, again, there's so much data in the book that really debunks this from the fact that women in male-dominated careers are the most face far higher likelihood of being uh blocked from even entering the careers, much less likely to be hired, much less likely to uh be able to access advancement within those careers, much more likely to be harassed, much more likely to face abuse and mistreatment in those professions, often put at uh higher safety and physical risks in ways that compound already risky jobs. So it's just so um disingenuous to suggest that these are things that are being motivated by choice or some kind of natural ability, as opposed to being motivated by really different realities. Even when women do enter uh a field that is male dominated, as that field becomes more and more dominated by women, the pay of that field starts to drop for both men and women within it. So um, and and reversing the other way too. Like when computer science was dominated by women, it was often in the early years, you had a lot of black women in the field. Now it's overwhelmingly dominated by men. Now the pay and prestige has gone up, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:30

So uh in the book, I what's an example of a profession that used to be more male dominated that has had the opposite kind of trajectory?

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Yeah, I I think that was it, veteran veterinarians, even a lot of specialties, even within medicine, like obviously medicine is still a high-paying career, but as soon as the specialty itself becomes more associated with women, all of a sudden it's much, much more less um devalued.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

And it's we can see that with family practice or OBGYN.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

And so it's fascinating when I share this research online. You know, uh you'll start with uh a stat like the fact that um women are paid on average. I think right now it's um 81 cents on the dollar relative to their male peers. And that's just the average for all women. If you purchase out for a woman of color, it's much, much worse. Um but then, you know, you immediately you'll get all the comments. Well, these women just choose lower paying jobs, they don't ask for more, whatever it is. And so then I'll go through the data on like the choosing lower paying jobs myth. And and then they'll come back and they'll say, Well, it really isn't about that anyway. It's just that women have kids. And so then you get into like the caretaker constraints and you debunk that. And then it's like, well, it's really not about that anyway. It's really just that men are more naturally suited to multitasking and being leaders. And then you point out that, like, well, if they were such great leaders, they wouldn't, they'd be able to like change their own children's diapers and schedule the family plans. Um, but they're all opting out of this, saying they're not really project managers or good multitaskers. So we really have some double standards to confront there. And and so like it winds up being this back and forth where you get to a point where you realize that like at the end of the day, these people are not actually interested in rectifying this inequality. All they want to do is double down on why it makes sense. And that's because a lot of us have not confronted the fact that we really believe that women don't deserve to earn as much money as their male peers, which is a thing that people don't want to confront about themselves. Some people like will even hear me say that and be like, Well, that's not me. And I'm like, Great, if it's not you, then like let's really interrogate this pattern of always moving the goalpost to justify why that should make sense instead of putting our energy into making sure that this no longer happens, because that's why we're stuck here.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

It is so you can think about all of the silent dialogues that are subconscious, you know, just starting with your first example. Um, woman has a child in the workplace versus man has a child in the workplace. The subconscious is, is she coming back? Will we get as much of her time? Whereas the subconscious for the male who has the family is he's potentially the breadwinner now, even if they were both working, she might opt out, um, which leads to unconscious biases or conscious um that are um, and you can take any of the examples and and and then think through that silent dialogue that is often kind of understood in the room and think about how it compounds when there are so many of

How Bias Compounds Every Day

SPEAKER_00 12:45

these conversations that aren't spoken.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

Um I like your point of compounding, right? Like it's not just this one moment in time. A lot of the times when we think about gender bias, we think of it even in the research context, it'll often be like, well, in this hiring experiment, you know, women were 8% less likely to be hired uh when you control it for all of these other things. But the thing is, like, that's not how this is showing up. This is showing up every single day with the stereotype about job choice, compounding with the stereotype about like um ability or interest in advancement with a stereotype about parenting, with a stereotype about what leadership should look like. And when you start to compound all of these gendered double standards on top of one another, that's how you get to a place where inequality doesn't move even as women become more ambitious than ever.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So then when women become ambitious, let's say they're um in, I don't know if there's a difference based on your research on different career stages for that ambition, but what do you find when the ambition is unbridled, unapologetic? Um what are you unpacking or finding in your research for what the results of that ambition are for women versus men?

SPEAKER_02 14:06

So we see that men and women have very similar ambitions. Um, men similarly also want to be involved in their personal lives, much like women similarly want to be involved in their professional lives. So personal and professional ambitions don't really shift very much naturally across identity. Where they do shift is depending on the context in which those ambitions are being either fostered or damaged. And that's true across identity. So if you're someone who is constantly having your desire to get ahead undermined, penalized, met with skepticism, um, if you're being punished for it, your ambition erodes over time, no matter who you are. And the other way around, if you're in an if you're someone whose ambition is constantly being celebrated, rewarded, championed, supported, mentored, uh rewarded with more opportunities, more pay, your ambition grows over time, no matter who you are. Um, just like as a as a statistical reality, not necessarily like from individual to individual, yes, like we all are a little bit different. But when you're look talking about uh social groups, right, which are vast, vast amounts of people, like men and women aren't really fundamentally different in these ways. Ambitions are very similar, they respond very similar to the environments around them. What we do see, however, is that women get to a place where they're more likely to be in those environments where their ambitions have been actively undermined and damaged. And what I point out in this book is that that is by design. This is not happening by accident. You don't wake up one day and suddenly lose your ambition. Like you might feel that way, but it's not spontaneous. It is happening on purpose because if you can disenfranchise people from the thing they want, and if you can make them believe it is an internal thing that's happening within them, then they're not gonna challenge the system that's doing it to them. They're just gonna think it's themselves and some kind of personal evolution. And so we wind up just wind up having these conversations about like, I guess I'm not ambitious anymore and I'm just exhausted. And we think that that exhaustion and burnout is just like a coincidence, but it's not coincidence when it's happening at scale across an entire demographic, right? And that's why I use this really um really powerful data throughout the book. One of my favorite data points that I came across in the research was that it's actually men who have more free time, who have more work-life balance, who have more time for their hobbies and their leisure. And they didn't have to give up their personal power or their ambitions to access it or their economic autonomy for that matter. So I think what I'm really trying to do here is reframe this conversation in a way that allows us to really identify the problem where it is. And the problem is not individual, it's not happening within us. It's something we are collectively experiencing in the environment around us. And it's not something that's personal, even when it feels that way. But when we think it's personal, we think it's our fault. And that winds up being a very, very good way for to get um to let allow the system to continue reproducing itself because when we think it's our fault, then you know, we are we think we alone have to solve for it alone or bear the consequences alone, or show ourselves to the door.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

I mean exactly. So you're describing what I may be taking liberties, but you might call systemic gaslighting where women are

When Ambition Erodes Over Time

SPEAKER_00 17:55

um given negative consequences and feedback for their ambition. Um, if you were to take this into the workplace specifically, because I know the consequences aren't only in the workplace, they could be personal as well. But in the workplace, um did is there research that like early career ambition is more well received than um mid and later career ambition or higher level of achievement?

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah. So where you really start to see a shift in terms of where the backlash and penalties really compound is as soon as you get out of the entry level. There has been a shift in terms of women, and specifically young women and girls' ambitions and acceptance of their education, of their achievement. And one of the things I write about in the book is that it's that educational ambition that gets championed because education isn't power, but it is a thing you can turn into power. But at that point, it's still just all about potential. Like the idea of you can be whatever you want to be. This is still an ideal, it's an ideal I grew up with. I grew up in the 90s. Um, I was very in that girl power generation. And one of the things that's been really striking to me is kind of tracking my own trajectory and those of that of my my fellow cohort of Gen X and millennial women who are now, you know, into or past their peak earnings years, only to face the same inequalities as our mothers, despite having all of that extra access to having our aspirations fostered and having our educational, educational outcomes improve relative to our male peers. And so what I think it's really indicative of is that there's an acceptance of ambition that is all about potential. But as soon as you try to translate it into power and power that challenges an ideal of power that is overwhelmingly male dominated, that's where the backlash and the penalties really go up. So, real for a really good example of this is like in male-dominated fields, a lot of these dynamics and sexism is so, so much worse because the field itself is perceived as for men. So uh treating women poorly, even for doing things that their male peers are rewarded for, is basically a sign that's saying this is not for you, leave. And even outside of male fields, power in and of itself, authority in and of itself, is still very male-dominated. So there isn't more of an acceptance of women's labor, but only in so much as it's really supporting men's access to power. So at the entry level, you'll see a much, much more gender parity. You'll see, as I said, in education, there is an acceptance of the well, these are education's easy to see, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Like you drop your kids off and you know how many teachers are female and you know how much of the administration is male or female.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

But right now, like in higher ed, like women have been outpacing men in college education for 40 years. So um that that is something that that has been a huge success story. And there has been an acceptance of that until recently. Now there's there's much more backlash against that. Uh, but um my point being is like despite that overqualification and that acceptance of that potential, as soon as you go to try to put that potential into power, you try to translate it into authority that is more than just like the labor that's support at the entry level that supports the the rest of the power structure of the organization, immediately you're gonna start getting backlash. And these uh these penalties amplify the higher you seek to climb because power in and of itself, people think boss, they think male. Whether you're a man or a woman, it's not about whether like you as a person are sexist. It's really just about the fact that we're all conditioned growing up in this world in which we perceive our authority figures, our People in positions of power to be men. And even if we are women, you know, we see a woman expressing the same potential, the same, the same power, as like, well, what's wrong with her? You know, even even those of us who maybe even explicitly identify as as progressive or really or wanting to um more egalitarian outcomes. Yeah. So I think what uh what we really need to be aware of is that tendency where it comes from, not judging necessarily ourselves for it, but being curious about it and leaning into it, because what we see in the research is that the people who think of themselves as the most unbiased and the most unmeritocratic consistently express the most bias and are the least meritocratic. So accepting, if you start from an acceptance of the fact that you're going to be biased because you are living in a biased world and every single day that is reinforced of you know, the these ideas of what power should look like, what who should have access to it. Um, and when people who don't align with that image we've grown up with try to access it for themselves, we're conditioned to be skeptical. But I think like if we can be aware of that and try to actively consciously, as a continual practice, identify it, identify it. We're in a much better position to disrupt that cycle than people who automatically assume that, well, we don't judge here based on gender anyway. We only judge here based on performance because

Backlash After Entry Level

SPEAKER_02 23:40

those are the people who are least judging based on performance.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Interesting. So let's talk about um, I'm just curious, like, so that is one solution is to stop saying that you don't have that bias, acknowledge it, and identify that you you know you're not biased as you're going into a framework of making decisions. What are some other like if you're someone listening and you're in a corporate career and you're um, you know, thinking, oh my gosh, this is my life, this is my career, or I'm entering that phase where I'm expecting, you know, advancement and how do I protect myself? Are there like um micro movements that can help to change knowing that the system is not going to fix itself in the near future?

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Yeah, so I write a lot about the ways things like asking for more and asserting yourself and negotiating is weaponized against women. But that doesn't mean I don't think women should do it. I still think we need to do it, but I think we need to be realistic that doing all the right things in and of themselves will not gain us access to equal outcomes. So, what I say is what we need to do is continue these best practices as we currently know them, but add on these more collective systemic elements to our goals. So, if the goal is advancement, if the goal is equitable pay and promotion, you know, sure we're gonna do all of those things at the individual level, but what can we do in partnership with other people to change the environment around us? Is there a pay transparency policy in our organization? If there isn't, can I just start practicing it with my own peers so that I don't I know not just what they're making or you know what the uh expectations are or if I'm being underpaid, but like I know more about the environment I'm in, you know, because every environment is different. There are gonna be people who you're gonna be able to identify. Those people are gonna be supportive when you lean in and ask for more. And there, and if you can get access to that institutional knowledge of who are the people in the organization who are gonna have a bad response when you do that, you are gonna be much better able to navigate that environment and you're gonna be able to do it better with that collective knowledge. Also, you know, if you can go to the organization, say they do have an equity policy, look through the employer handbook. I'm sure they have stuff written in there. But you can go in with a group of people to point out the disconnect between the policies and the practices in a much more effective way and with far less backlash than if you're approaching those conversations alone.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Interesting. That's super helpful. And then in addition to the you know, kind of systems and impacts and outcomes on the career side of things, what are some of the personal penalties that women pay for ambition, whether it's um the impact on their relationships or um with their children? Um, what do we need to be familiar with and aware of when it comes to the research?

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Uh, first, I think awareness that this dynamic of being having your whip ambition weaponized against you is something you need to be aware of in the world, not just in your workplace, um also in your home, because what happens when we don't talk about these things is people get blindsided by the backlash, and again, they internalize it. They think it's a personal problem instead of a shared problem that is really being motivated by these very limiting ideals of who's allowed to uh express their desires in their full capacity. And so I speak to I interviewed women in this book who um whose partners would actively undermine them every time they got a chance to get ahead at work or were taking a big exam for school or were like defending their PhD thesis or were going in for a big job interview. And at first, they again they thought it was just them, they didn't think anything of it. But and because of that, they wound up giving their partners the benefit of the doubt again

Collective Moves That Protect You

SPEAKER_02 28:05

and again and again. And because of that, they systematically saw, you know, what happens to your ambitions over time as they're undermined and damaged. They get smaller and they shrink and they shrink and they shrink, and then suddenly they lose themselves because they thought it was just them. Instead of what happens when they realize like what they're experiencing is not an anomaly, it's something that many women experience. They realize, oh, this is a pattern uh that is not sustainable. It's not about necessarily what I'm doing. And I need to be in an environment where I know that what I want is not going to be met with backlash, but is going to be met with support. And I, this isn't an issue of like the way I'm asking or the way I'm expressing it. This is an issue with someone who believes that I'm not entitled to the same things that they are. And so one of the other, some of the other ways that this showed up in the research was women who were financial breadwinners in their relationships were more likely to be cheated on by their partner, by male partners. Uh, they were more likely to face emotional abuse from male partners and more likely to face physical abuse from male partners. Again, I want to clarify like there is nothing in this data that suggests that this has anything to do with what these women are doing. In fact, the research is very clear that as women's incomes go up, outcomes improve, their well-being goes up, relationship satisfaction goes up. It is only when women's incomes surpass 50% of the household income. So when their relative income is greater, that's when the penalties uh start coming up in the relationship. And so that really indicates that it's actually not an issue of ambitious women, it's not an issue of career-driven women, it's an issue with the way men are responding to women's successes.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

So, did you I don't know if there's studies, I'm just curious. Is there differential information for same-sex relationships for this than the um uh multigender relationships?

SPEAKER_02 30:16

Yeah, so the pattern is less prevalent in same-sex relationships. Um, notably, uh oh, there even even like there was a study that studied um the division of household labor, which is another huge piece of this, and the backlash can also manifest in household labor, uh men withdrawing from household labor. So then leaving women with an even greater share of the domestic load, even as they already take on a greater share of the income earning load, and it became becomes this kind of slow exhaustion uh and a slow withdrawal from their male partners. In same-sex relationships, um income and household labor were much more in alignment with the way you think they would be, where people who earned more who worked more hours in paid labor, they did less of the unpaid labor. Um, in heterosexual relationships, women always do more, pretty much. Uh women always do more housework. Oh, women always do more housework no matter how much they earn. Um and in same-sex relationships, there was also more expectation that the labor would be more equitably shared, even among people who are outside of the relationship. So a lot of this, these norms, again, they're they're not just like these personal things, they're not just happening inside of us, they're shaped by the world around us and what it means in our culture to be a good, you know, woman or mom or wife. And um, so so people's expectations in same-sex relationships, even from the outside, are also more equitable. And so that translates into a more equitable division of labor within the relationship. But interestingly, while people outside the relationship said that, you know, the the breadwinner should be tasked with less of the household labor, that changed a little bit based on people's gender um uh expression. So if they, you know, if it's a same-sex couple of men, for example, and one is more feminine, traditionally speak, patriarchally speaking, than the other, then that gender expression still manifested in more expectation that that more quote unquote feminine partner would perform more of the household labor. So I think it just really goes to show just how entrenched the pattern ideals are.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah. Interesting. Well, it's so important to shine a light on everywhere

The Personal Cost At Home

SPEAKER_00 32:35

that we have misunderstandings and also um hidden pitfalls. Is there anything you found in your research that was encouraging, that was on a positive trend that you said, oh my gosh, I didn't expect to see that, but that's not the worst thing I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Oh my goodness. Um, positive. There was a paper out of the UK that found that when 60% of the management in a workplace was women, represented by women, there were no gender pay gaps or promotion gaps throughout the rest of the organization. So oftentimes when we talk about women in leadership, there's um an idea that, like, okay, you put one woman in a position of power and she's supposed to magically be able to affect change throughout the whole organization. And the research shows that actually when you just elevate like a single woman in leadership, it can often make these dynamics worse. Oftentimes, because uh that woman is being elevated really just as a cover for a lot of misogynistic reasons. Having been that person before, I would agree. Yeah. And so, like, even if the woman is in that leadership position trying to change things, she can be siloed, she can be overruled, right? But as soon as you And she has political capital, she can lose. Yeah, exactly. And it's hard for her to push back, and then she can be cast as ineffective not only by her peers, but by her subordinates. Well, we had we tried this woman, so no other woman's gonna help us. So it's actually a very effective strategy for excluding women from power is to elevate a single woman. Um, but uh if you start to get women represented in leadership at scale, even around 30% outcomes really start to shift, really start to shift not just at the top, but throughout the organization. And then when you get to like real meaningful representation, you just see a lot of these inequities go away because then you have enough buy-in to literally change, reshape the culture.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Wow. Interesting. Um I wish we could talk more on this. It's so powerful. I see so many applications. I know I'm gonna be sharing this episode. Um, it's follow-up to conversations with clients. Um, and so glad our listeners had a chance to hear from you. Um, what's next after the book? What are where are you focusing other than just you know, kind of shouting out, here's where we need to work?

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Oh my gosh, I don't even have an answer to this question. I have to I have to tell you I was pregnant when I sold this book proposal, and I wrote the book in postpartum. And so now my daughter's two and a half, and this book is coming out, and it's really just been a season of life. Oh, like what day is it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh what year? Yeah. So um I I can't even think past it, I have to admit.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Um well, you have a great Substack where you're posting new content.

SPEAKER_02 35:25

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Content, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:27

I appreciate that. Yes, the subsect, the Substack is called Too Ambitious. I mean, there there's just so much in here. I could talk about these things forever. And one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book, and I think I did, was really get into more of the recent research. So much of the way we talk about these things is really shaped by ideas that came out like 20, 30 years ago. And some of those things are relevant, but some of them aren't. And what I really want to do is is really stay focused on like how is this showing up in contemporary culture? Because there's so many misperceptions that just because these ideals and this exclusion isn't explicit, that doesn't mean it's not there. In fact, it's very much operating as much as it ever was, it's just better hidden. And so I'm going to stay committed to

When Women Lead At Scale

SPEAKER_02 36:15

showing the ways in which that's showing up. You know, it again, it doesn't look like we're not going to hire or promote you because you're a woman, but it effectively functions the same way. And it's much, much easier to talk about navigating this more effectively if we're all aware of how it's showing up. But right now, there's still way too much of this misperceptions and myths and misinformation around why our outcomes are so unequal. And so I think this book is the first step.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Well, I love that. I just can't say enough for having an interdisciplinary viewpoint because it's so easy to take singular issues. And I see this often in the area I love to focus on, which is like for genetics and older millennials being in the messy money middle. You're you've got kids and diapers, you've got parents that might need caregiving, and men and women are put into you know separate kind of holes, whether it's their health outcomes, so many different things. And so you really need to look at the world that we face um with money considerations, but also all of the other, you know, psychology, health, etc., um, kind of social sciences um interwoven because it's just not that simple to tackle a single problem with a binary, you know, kind of solution set. And our lives don't work that way either.

SPEAKER_02 37:31

Absolutely. I so appreciate you saying that. That is consistently proven true throughout my career.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

Well, congratulations on the book. Everybody, make sure that you um go out and find the ambitious ambition penalty um at bookstores and libraries near you. And Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, listen.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value

Book Plug And Listener Support

SPEAKER_01 38:05

in this episode, the best way that you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to ProPlan.com and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned. This presentation by Pro Planning is intended for general information purposes only. No portion of this presentation serves as a receipt of or a substitute for personal investment advice from Pro Planning or any other investment professional of your choosing. Copies of Pro Planning's current rent and disclosure brochure and form CRS discussing our advisory services and fees are available upon request or on our website platform at proplan.com. The information that we share is meant to educate and inspire, not serve as personalized financial advice. Everyone's situation is unique, so be sure to consult with your own financial professional for guidance that fits your life. And just so you know, the opinions shared in this podcast are Melissa's own and those of her guests. They don't necessarily represent any organizations with which Melissa is affiliated. For more important disclosures, please go to our webpage at proplan.com.