Episode 479: Why Women Get Penalized for Their Ambition & What We Can Do About It w/ Stefanie O’Connell

Stefanie O’Connell 0:02

Even though we’d all be better off by working fewer hours, working more efficiently, companies would be better off by not having to pay people for time they’re not actually producing. What we see is a commitment to this culture of overwork and long hours, because it becomes a tool of reinforcing these arbitrary hierarchies.

Speaker 1 0:23

T minus 10 seconds.

Jamila Souffrant 0:25

Welcome to the Journey to Launch podcast with your host, Jamila Souffrant. As a money expert who walks her talks, she helps brave journeyers like you get out of debt, save, invest, and build real wealth. Join her on the journey to launch to financial freedom.

Speaker 2 0:43

If

Jamila Souffrant 0:52

you want the episode show notes for this episode, go to Journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you’re listening to this episode. In the show notes, you’ll get the transcribed version of the conversation, the links that we mentioned, and so much more. Also, whether you are an OG journeyer or brand new to the podcast, I’ve created a free Jumpstart guide to help you on your financial freedom journey. It includes the top episodes to listen to, stages to go through to reach financial freedom resources, and so much more. You can go to Journey to launch.com/jump start to get your guide right now. Okay, let’s hop into the episode. Hey Journeyers, welcome to the Journey to Launch podcast. Today we have on an old friend, someone I’ve known for a bit while I started Journey to Launch, and has been on the podcast before. We’ll talk a little bit about that, but Stephanie O’Connell, she’s back. She is an award-winning journalist whose work dismantles the myths keeping women from equitable pay, leadership, and power one data point at a time. Her book, The Ambition penalty, how corporate culture tells women to step up and then pushes them down, is described as a testament to what’s possible when women are liberated from keeping themselves small to make other people comfortable. She’s been featured in numerous publications, and really, when I came into this game, was already a vet, so I was blessed to have her guidance and to know her on this journey, my entrepreneurship journey. She was on the podcast, let’s see, episode 148 and 149 so that actually was in the pandemic that you came on.

Stefanie O’Connell 2:34

Oh, wow,

Jamila Souffrant 2:35

you had episode and a bonus episode, and so if you want to hear more about Stephanie’s backstory, you can check out episode 148 how to build your network, thrive in entrepreneurship, and leverage your skill sets to make more money. I’ll link that in the show notes. But Stephanie, welcome back to the podcast.

Stefanie O’Connell 2:52

Thank you for having me on. I mean, talking about being here during the pandemic, it doesn’t feel like it was this lifetime.

Jamila Souffrant 3:00

No, I mean it doesn’t. It’s the whole other world, but for those who did not listen to that podcast, for longtime journeyers who may have missed it, I do just want to touch briefly on your journey to where you are now in entrepreneurship, because I think it’s quite interesting. And so can you tell us a little bit more about your background.

Stefanie O’Connell 3:21

Yeah, so I originally studied psychology and theater, and I was very interested in understanding why people do the things they do, and then kind of the stories we tell about why we do the things we do, or why things are the way they are, and I think those two things have really led me. They’ve served as a through line through my career, even though my career has kind of been all over the place. So, initially I started my career working in theater, in musical theater specifically, and I was on the road as an actor for several years, and I became obsessed with money, because I didn’t really have much of it, and I wanted to have more of it, and I figured, you know, if I could just figure out how to save enough or spend right, that I would be able to unlock not just work I loved, but a lifestyle I loved. But what I came to realize pretty quickly is that, you know, you can’t out frugal your way to rich. I wasn’t making enough money that no matter how much I tried to manipulate my money or spend less of it, I just wasn’t going to be able to save up a meaningful amount or be able to invest in a way of creating meaningful wealth, and so I became really obsessed with personal finance, with entrepreneurship, really trying to understand money itself, and I became a writer, and I started reporting stories about other people’s journeys in personal finance. I was hosting a show at Real Simple magazine for a while, where people would call in and tell me their money secrets, and so often I would just find. Mind that the stories were often of people doing all of the right things, but they still weren’t necessarily getting the outcomes they wanted, and I think that’s been a theme through so much of the work I’ve not only experienced but have also reported on in other people, and what I became really inspired by was trying to understand, well, what are the other forces at play here? You know, when you take all of these steps, and when you follow the right scripts, and you do everything, and you master your skills, you increase your income as much as you can, you fully lean in at work, and you’re still not necessarily getting that same outcome that you expected, what else might be coming into play here, and that’s what really inspired me to take more of a research angle into my reporting and writing, and that’s really where I’ve been focused the last five to 10 ish years in the process of writing the book I’m releasing now.

Jamila Souffrant 6:01

Yes, the ambition penalty. So, let’s talk a bit about what that is, and let’s first start there. What is the ambition penalty?

Stefanie O’Connell 6:09

Yes, so the ambition penalty really speaks to the way that women’s ambitions are often weaponized against them, particularly in corporate spaces, in public spaces, spaces that are really perceived and rewarded as high value, and it really speaks to the paradox at the heart of women’s empowerment that really came to shape the 2010s and the 2000s when so many of us were starting our careers and really were sold this message that all we needed to do to get ahead was just ask for more, just speak up, just assert ourselves, just be unapologetic about our ambition. And what I found is I was speaking to women who did all of those things, they did ask for more, they did lean in, they did speak up, and not only did they not access the same rewards for doing so, but they were often sometimes punished and penalized for even asking. So, I spoke to women who were labeled too difficult, not a team player, ungrateful, not the right fit when they went into their salary negotiations, when they followed the same best practices as their male peers, and oftentimes it wasn’t just about being labeled unlikable, it was about then being cast aside from future opportunities, not being mentored, not being supported, not being chosen to advance into leadership on a subsequent performance review, it was about having job offers even rescinded for asking for more, it was about facing really negative consequences in their careers, but because it wasn’t something that people talked about, they thought it was just them, and what happened is women would often internalize this negative backlash for doing all the quote unquote right things as something wrong with themselves instead of something wrong with the systems around them that reward some people for engaging in the same behaviors that are penalized in others, and so what I wanted to do in writing the ambition penalty was expose these kinds of double standards and really expose the way in which it’s these much more hidden forms of bias and discrimination in our workplaces that work to reinforce the same inequities we’ve been talking about for ages, but even as we don’t talk about them in such explicit ways, so the way this stuff shows up is very much kind of hidden in these terms of they’re not going to say I’m not going to hire you because you’re a woman, instead they’re going to say well, I don’t really want to work with her because she’s just a little abrasive. Meanwhile, this same exact behavior is seen as an asset, is seen as, oh, that’s a go-getter, he’s independent, we want to work with him, he’s just the guy we need, and I think understanding the way that this modern misogyny operates in our corporate cultures and our workplaces, beyond the corporate world, and even beyond the workplace itself, is really important for understanding how these kinds of inequities across pay and wealth and other financial metrics sustain themselves even when more explicit barriers to participation fall away.

Jamila Souffrant 9:28

Yeah, okay. So that was a great definition and baseline for what the ambition penalty is, and why it’s important to talk about it, so that women who are experiencing the backlash for being ambitious, like it’s not just in their head, it’s something bigger than them, it’s systemic. So, with that, the ambition penalty that you talk about, you already gave examples, but that can look like, you know, asking for a raise, right, maybe being direct, not being like indirect, not being. Someone that I wouldn’t say, not a team player, but maybe they’re not as friendly or smiley. I don’t know. You can you describe what that looks like in real life, and that can show up differently for different people too.

Stefanie O’Connell 10:11

Yeah, so I think it’s important to understand what is driving these penalties is not about like some kind of battle of the sexes. It’s not about me versus you, it’s not this individual thing, it’s these broader cultural ideals about who should hold positions of power and leadership, respect and authority that we value and reward, and who should operate in a support, a support capacity, and what power and leadership in and of itself should look like, and these ideas of men and women that are very, very narrow and very, very mutually exclusive. It’s this idea that to be a good professional is to be aggressive and competitive and ambitious, and these are qualities that align with these cultural perceptions of what it means to be a real man, to be competitive, aggressive, and ambitious, and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with those qualities in and of themselves, but the problem is when the prescription is it’s only men who should behave in these ways, and our, and our cultural prescription for what it means to be a good woman is to be compassionate, collaborative, caring, and not competitive and aggressive and ambitious. Then it really sets you up for this double bind, where the qualities of what it takes to get ahead as a leader and as a professional are in direct conflict with the identity of what it means to be a good or likable woman in our culture, and so again, this isn’t about like any individual interaction, it’s about these broader cultural ideals of, you know, who is allowed to express their full humanity, and in what context. And I will point out that I think this hurts everyone across gender identity, you know, it hurts men when they’re told that, you know, they shouldn’t be compassionate and collaborative and caretaking, and that’s a problem when we have so many caretaking responsibilities that we are trying to share with our partners and show up as good parents and people, and even in the workplace as good bosses and mentors, we often see that a lot of that mentorship is inhibited by this prescription that to be caring and compassionate as a man is to somehow have your masculinity challenge, and so that’s limiting for men as much as it’s limiting for women, but in ways that outside power and privilege and rewards in a paid work setting and in a position of power in a leadership setting that is still very difficult for women to manage, even as you know these other barriers, these explicit bans, for example, on women’s participation fall away, and so in terms of like how it shows up, you know, we talked about negotiations, we talked about, you know, in the hiring process, oftentimes you know your mom, I’m a mom. There’s really great research on the fact that not only is are these biases such that women are perceived as not as committed to their careers if they are women and mothers, but even if they push back against that perception by trying to lean in even further improve themselves and work against those stereotypes that mothers are less committed. Well, then that triggers the ambition penalty. Then it’s suddenly like, oh, well, a mother is supposed to be warm and always prioritizing her child, and it’s just maddening, because you just have this situation where you’re like, well, if I do this, then I’m not considered committed, and if I do this, then I’m considered not warm and likable, and so, like, there is no way for me to win here, and I think this is just something that comes up in every single stage of the career ladder, so from hiring, certainly to promotions, certainly to positions of leadership, one really fascinating study recently found that when a woman was on an evaluation committee for determining who was going to be allowed to ascend into a promotion or leadership position, then gender bias against women applicants for that position got worse, not because the woman on the team was discriminating against the women applicants, but because the presence of a woman on the hiring team triggered the gender bias of the men on the team, so just by having one woman in a position. Of authority and decision making on on a hiring team that amplified the bias against all women, and I think it’s this kind, these kinds of examples that show us just how much you know you can maintain a lot of exclusion without ever really admitting to it if you don’t look at what is happening at scale, if you don’t see the data, and so what I try to do in this book is bring us back to the data and what is playing out statistically and not just individually.

Jamila Souffrant 15:38

Yeah, and I think that’s important. I mean, there are definitely ways in which you can storytell and draw out and hypothesize why things are happening, and then you know some people will just say, well, that’s just your feelings, that’s not the truth, or that’s not the what’s actually happening, in essence, gaslighting the person where they are experiencing this thing, and so I do think this type of work is important, because then you can’t refute the data that shows, like, well, here is what’s happening, like, here are the statistics. So with that, can you speak to any things that you came across the data that shows even just like drilling down further than just women, but like sub segments of race and age, right? Like I know for like black women, women of color, especially like in the workplace setting, or just even in media, right? If you were like to take this and just look at society, if you know, you come off more direct and there’s a trope, you’re the angry black woman, and all these things that further would prohibit you, maybe from excelling or being likable to a certain degree,

Stefanie O’Connell 16:42

so what’s so important to understand about this, like, just like I said, that it’s not about this individual thing, like me versus you, man versus woman, it’s about these broader ideals of like what it means to be a good man or good woman, and that those ideals also intersect with these broader cultural ideals around every other form of identity, from ethnicity to race to sexuality to ability to neurodivergence. Like one of the things that I spend a little time teasing out in this book is the way in which these penalties can show up differently depending on how something, let’s say, race intersects with gender, and so for Asian American women, for example, there is often a lot of pushback when they are perceived as being competitive and aggressive more so than other women face because it violates completely erroneous gender and racialized stereotypes that Asian American women should always be quiet, serving deferential, like much more so than you know women as a collective, and to your point about black women, sometimes there’s a more leniency in allowing black women to express their ambition because there is the historical legacy of slavery in this country, where, where black women have had to carry so much more, and their black women have some of the highest labor force participation rates. I think they have the highest labor force participation rate of all women, and so there is an expectation that black women are going to be engaged in the workforce, but to your point, if they express their entitlement to equal rewards in that workplace, oftentimes then they’re going to be hit with that racialized stereotype of this angry black woman, simply for just expressing themselves in the same way that any woman or any of her male peers might, same thing with Latina women, often there’s this stereotype of this fiery Latina, so if she is mad and she can feel like she has to self censor, and even if she should be speaking up and calling out an injustice, because what these stereotypes effectively do is cause a self-censoring effect, and that self-censorship leaves the inequality unchallenged, but speaking up would also mean putting herself in jeopardy, and so it’s really so maddening that you’re not just fighting against these broader gendered stereotypes, you’re fighting against all of these stereotypes and the ways in which they intersect, and one of the really interesting things that I looked at was how this can play out differently across contexts, so if you’re in an environment, for example, there was a paper that that looked at negotiating outcomes for men and women in the Arab Gulf countries that are highly patriarchal, and so what happened was you saw a lot of the same outcomes across gender identity that you would, that we’ve been talking about, right, men had better negotiation outcomes. Comes women were more likely to be penalized for asking, but when those same men were negotiating with employers in a global context, so not for a local company, but a global company in which power and resources are still overwhelmingly dominated and given to white men, those men suddenly started having the same negotiation outcomes as their women counterparts, because they were seeking power in resources in domains that have been stereotypically dominated, as seen as like for only these elite kinds of men, and so I think it just shows how arbitrary all of this is. Right, the entire idea that some people should be allowed to express this behavior and be rewarded for it, and some people should be penalized for it, really relies on the premise that some people are more deserving than others, and that is completely ridiculous, right? It is completely ridiculous, and I think as soon as you interrogate any kind of inequality enough, that is where you come to, but, but so often we’re just so conditioned, we’ve heard it so many times, like you talk about racial wealth gaps and pay gaps, or gender wealth gaps and pay gaps, and people are just so used to hearing it that it kind of like shuts off our critical thinking. We’ve been hearing it for so long, it’s like, yeah, and so we come up with all of these ridiculous explanations, right? Women just aren’t interested, they’re just choosing lower paying jobs, they’re just opting out of their careers after they become mothers, you know, whatever it is, and meanwhile you can come up with more and more data points showing that actually that’s not true, and yet, like, they were so used to these myths and misconceptions that somehow some people deserve it and some people don’t, that we’re more committed to reinforcing the MS than we are to confronting the fact that these systems are actually wildly inequitable, and there is actually no reason for them to be so. What this book is really about is really challenging us, and I think what will be maybe uncomfortable for people in many ways to confront the fact that, like, inequality doesn’t make sense, it’s actually wildly not just unjust, but it’s harming even the people who benefit from it, because at the end of the day, one of the things I write about is that when you are so committed to preserving your privileges, like being better off, sorry, your relative privileges, being better off than other people. What you often wind up selling out is your absolute well-being. So, you wind up accepting worse outcomes for yourself, and by consequence, for everyone, when you’re more committed to making sure you’re better off than other people that you perceive yourself as better than, and so one example of this I give about in the book is the hustle culture, the culture of overwork and long hours, and one of the really interesting pieces of research I cite is this paper that shows effectively like if a man and woman do the same amount of work and it takes a woman less time to do it effectively, she’s more efficient and has the same performance. She’s still more likely to be not accessing the same rewards, because then she’s seen as less committed to doing the work, even though she was doing the same performance and doing it more efficiently. And then, if she does work the same amount of hours she is then perceived as being less competent as needing more hours to get the same job done, and so it’s like, oh my gosh, like there’s no way to win, yeah, and what effectively we have here is like when there’s no way amount of hours that women can work in a way that they are able to access equal rewards. Hours worked then becomes a way of reinforcing inequality, because men will always are in the debt, statistically always seen as more committed when they work more hours, and because they’re able to work more hours in the paid labor force, as a result of women’s unpaid labor in the home, what you wind up having is a system where workplaces double down on presenteeism in office presence longer and longer hours, often unnecessarily so, often rewarding inefficiency, which costs organizations money, but it does become a tool of making sure men are able to maintain relative power and privilege relative to women, and so even though we’d all be better off by working fewer hours, working more efficiently, companies would be better off by not having to pay people for time they’re not actually producing one. What we see is a commitment to this culture of overwork and long hours, because it becomes a tool of reinforcing these arbitrary hierarchies.

Jamila Souffrant 25:11

Hey, journeyers, if you are loving this podcast, then you will love my book, Your Journey to Financial Freedom: A Step-by-Step Guide to achieving wealth and happiness. I wrote this book for you. This book is for you if you want a clear and enjoyable path to having more money options and a rich life. This book is for you if you hate your commute and the fact that you need to seek approval or permission from a boss. I hated that when I worked. This book is for you if you weren’t born into wealth, you didn’t marry rich or win the lottery, but you still want freedom. This book is for you if you’re at a crossroads. A major decision or event is imminent, maybe a career change, marriage, starting a family. Pressures are reaching a tipping point, and the discomfort and the desire for more can no longer be ignored. And this book is for you. If you find yourself zoned out at meetings, looking out the window, or daydreaming about the life you truly want, so go pick up Your Journey to Financial freedom.com so I can show you how to map out how to get from where you are today to where you ultimately want to be, and enjoy the journey while you’re on the path, head over to your Journey to Financial freedom.com to see where you can pick the book up. It’s available on Amazon, bookshop.org Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore, everywhere. Go to Your Journey to Financial freedom.com to get the book now. Another thing that I was thinking about is this idea that if let’s say one person, the one of, right, the example, like the one woman in the room, or the one black person, or the one, you know, person of color, makes it, and then becomes the example of, see, like, they made it, so there really isn’t any of these like penalties or biases, but what happens is, then they become the only one, and then whatever they do now, if they, let’s just say, have some some inefficiencies or faults, or whatever, they become the example that is shown, or maybe the blame placed on the broader population that did not get a chance to be represented in that space, versus if they’re like, you know, 10 white men in the room and on the board and committee. If one of them messes up, or two of them show a little bit of, you know, lack of discernment or something, right? It’s like, okay, that’s just that’s just John. But if the one black person that made it through shows that same thing, it’s like, okay, you’re showing that, well, we don’t have this, this bias, and we don’t, we’re not racist in this way, because look, this person did it, but then here’s this one person that has to shoulder the entire hopes and dreams of whatever for that population,

Stefanie O’Connell 27:56

yeah, and that’s that’s being done by design, yeah, so this is it’s a way of basically providing cover for the amount of discrimination that’s happening in the workplace, so you elevate one person of color, one woman in this token fashion, and then what happens is companies will be like, see, we don’t have a problem with diversity here, even as, as you mentioned, right, the entire leadership structure is still probably like 90% white men, and the entire pipeline to that leadership really reflects it, and the other thing you’ll often see is people claiming diversity, like meaningful inclusion, by only pointing to the entry level, and it’s really wild, because, like, this is the way inequality operates, is like what you have now is a phenomenon of women, and especially women of color, who are much more educated than their male peers, coming into the workforce relatively like uneven footing, but that’s only because they’ve been earning higher education for 40 years longer than their male peers, so already they had to have more qualifications to even get into that entry level, and then at every single subsequent level, what they’re facing is like, let’s say, a small amount of these kind of like microaggressions that you see day in and day out, their contributions are valued slightly less, their successes or their asks are penalized slightly more, they’re less, slightly less likely to get access to mentorship, they’re slightly less access to get promotions, and even, of course, keeping all of their performance constant, and what the data finds is that even when you have just a 3% bias in this way, and keeping everything else constant, the person who’s not experiencing the bias would need eight performance review cycles to get from the entry level to the executive. Level, while the person experiencing this 3% bias would need 17 performance review cycles to get to the same level, and so I think what I’m really trying to show here in this using these these data points is the way we often think of discrimination as a kind of single moment in time or a moment of direct discrimination, instead of understanding it as something that’s happening day in and day out with compounding consequences over the course of a career, and I think what’s really important to understand is that when you do get this person who gets elevated, let’s say, for the for the purposes of claiming that there’s greater diversity, even in leadership. What’s wild is there’s a paper that finds it’s an analysis of 1500 firms that found that once one woman lands a top level job at a company, the chances of another woman being hired to a high ranking position drops by about 50% and so what I think this really shows us is the way in which companies are not really creating cultures of meaningful inclusion, and what happens when you only have a single token woman, person of color, you know, LGBTQ person, whomever in leadership is, you can easily sideline their perspectives, and that way not only do you not endow them with equal respect in their leadership position, but you cast them as ineffective to every other marginalized person at that company, and then that person becomes a scapegoat for not changing the culture, even though they were never really empowered to do so to begin with. So we can say, “Oh, we had a woman as a CEO, and she didn’t look out for us, she didn’t change the culture, she didn’t make it so that, you know, we had like a paid leave policy, but meanwhile, like, she might be the only person on the board saying, “Hey, we need to do this, but without meaningful inclusion of her perspectives, and not just hers, but other people, and not, and diverse perspectives, you are not going to fundamentally change the culture, and so one of the solutions that I wind up writing about is this idea of a tipping point when you get to meaningful representation in leadership. The data suggests it’s around 30% of marginalized identities being represented around 30% of leadership. That’s where you really start to see metrics across companies change, gaps closing in pay gaps, closing in promotions, because that’s when you not only have a token person in leadership who’s from a marginalized identity, but you have like real support other people at the table who can say, you know, this is not a fringe issue, this is not a special interest. This is a meaningful and important metric for making our workplace work better for the people who are contributing some of the most valuable labor to it. I think it was some studies in the UK where once they got to, you know, over half of the women being managers, all all of the gender pay gaps disappeared, and you see very meaningfully how this kind of inclusion is important across identity with similar metrics, being like, you know, having diverse perspectives at the table isn’t just an a business imperative and an economic incentive, it’s an incentive for better workplace cultures for literally every person in that workplace,

Jamila Souffrant 33:40

right, and you just said something about solutions, and I know this is more from, like, a macro, like looking at the numbers, like level, right? But yeah, if I’m listening to this and I’m someone who knows that this exists, and maybe this is great, because I now have some statistics to show management and to confirm what I feel has been happening where I am, what’s next for the person who is experiencing this, and this may just be not off, like from the book, but just your own perspective of just researching and being within the field. Is there a solution? And, and I’m just gonna like bring in entrepreneurship. One, I’m just gonna keep saying I don’t think entrepreneurship is for everyone, because I do think at some levels, depending on like how you work and where you work, you can still experience some of this bias, depending on the type of business you have. If you’re, you know, going for contracts or in meetings for certain things, what is a woman or someone who’s feeling this? What are they to do if they’re in this situation and they are ambitious? What is their solution for them, or

Stefanie O’Connell 34:41

yeah, so I wound up dedicating a solution section to every single chapter in this book, but what I will say, I think, is the unifying theme of the solutions is that understanding what is driving this inequality, not as an. Individual issue, but a systemic issue is something that’s really, really important, because what it tells us is that when something is a systemic issue, it’s shared, it’s a problem that it’s not personal, it’s a problem that a lot of people have, and when something is a problem for a whole collective of people. The best way to push back against that problem is with a collective group of people. We often think about trying to get through these inequitable systems on our own, and I’m not saying there’s not things that we can do to build our resilience, to build our skills, to work harder, but obviously you know we know the limitations of this. That’s what this whole book is about. It’s not saying don’t negotiate, but know the limitations of it, and know that there are these broader forces at work here, and so when we come up against those limitations, what I want people to do is to reach out and build community, because community not only builds your resilience, it builds your access to information, it builds your access to resources, it builds your access to networks, and these are the things we see in the data time and time again proved to be some of the most valuable things in advancing in spite of these limitations. I was at the book launch for Anna Gifty, she wrote a book called The Double Tax about women of color’s experiences in the workplace and in the economy specifically, and one thing she said that struck me, and because it’s aligned so much with my findings, was how at every meaningful step of her career, and where she faced a roadblock, and she was really struggling to get ahead, was there was always another woman of color who not only gave her the advice for getting ahead, but she knew specifically the ways the kinds of biases that would come up for her as a woman of color in those environments were going to manifest, and who were the people, so they could identify who were the people who were going to be champions and who were the people who were going to be a problem, no matter what you did, and I think that’s what community and networks allow you to do. It helps you get that access to vital information sharing and vital resources, and to understand, you know, who are the people where my ambition and where are the environments where my ambition is going to be cultivated, is going to be celebrated, is going to be rewarded, and where are those environments where it’s not, and there’s a lot you can gain, even from just doing your own research on, like, LinkedIn, and, like, looking at the about us page, you know, who’s in leadership, that’ll tell you a lot about whose ambitions are celebrated, and what environments are going to support you, and which aren’t, but I also think that, regardless, the big theme here is that so much of what we’ve been taught to do, and that is exhausting us, is this idea that we have to do it alone, and I really want us to look back at our history and to remember that every huge win, every meaningful moment of progress that really changed outcomes has always been the result of a collective action and not an individual action, and again I’m not saying let’s abandon the individual action, but like let’s pair our individual action with collective action, and I think you and I are based here in New York City, and one of the things that I’m really taking a lot of inspiration from recently is the fact that, like, my daughter’s going to go to public 3k education this fall. There’s going to be in my neighborhood free daycare for people – like, these are life-changing solutions for a lot of people that are going to meaningfully address some of the biggest barriers to their opportunity, and it wasn’t that we didn’t know we needed them, but what we were missing was the collective action and political will to implement them, and so a lot of this book is not just saying, okay, how does child care improve these gaps? Certainly, you know, pay transparency, women in leadership, diverse perspectives, meaningful inclusion, DEI policies that are actually enforced, you know, not only showing how that stuff works, but also showing us that the barriers to implementing those things are really not so insurmountable, they’re really just a matter of enough collective willpower and organizing, and so I think I’ve at one point a line in the book, it’s like you can’t out hustle your way out of inequality, but you can out organize it, and so I really hope that it’s something that that people take with them, even in the mere act of like being able to tolerate the. The exhaustion that comes out of these unequal systems, and the burnout, and sometimes the disillusionment of dealing and operating with these unequals within these unequal systems a little bit more sustainably, because you know when people blame themselves and when people are exhausted, they internalize, and we’ve been conditioned to, we’ve been taught to believe we are the problem, and instead, if you are connected into your community, into your information sharing network, you’re also going to be reminded that it’s not you, and you’re going to be built back up again with the people who see you and champion you, and remind you that you have a lot to offer, and you have a lot of value that deserves to be seen and rewarded, and I think, like, that’s all something we need more of. We are so out here on our own these days.

Jamila Souffrant 40:51

Yeah. No, I love that. I love, you know, whether it is that one person who you believe that can help you, or you know, you can work together, and then you know, looking for the support group, whether outside the company or within, and mobilizing and sharing resources, because if you know it’s a bigger system problem, and yes, it’s hard, it’s for one person to beat the system, that’s, you know, it’s hard, but like you said, creating your own system, your own network worth of people and support, and like you said, mobilizing, so putting some of the collective angst and what’s been happening to work for solutions is powerful, something you brought up, because I’ve been thinking about ambition and how my ambition has changed and how it’s been different over time, and you talked about sometimes if you’re internalizing, or if you’re burnt out, the ambition can look a little different, or you feel like it’s different. And so, with that, right, I would love to talk about the idea of ambition, and I see this with, like, whether it’s myself or just friends and women who are maybe a similar age, like in their 40s, where they were traditionally ambitious, maybe in the workplace, and had all these things they wanted to do, and then maybe at a certain stage in their life, they are maybe with a partner or have kids, and I do think, like, that, you know, that does change your capacity and how you can do things within your world, and I used to think, like, I don’t feel as ambitious in the traditional sense anymore, like things I used to aspire to and want to work hard to do, I just.. I don’t have it. And then I think I was talking to someone else, and they were like, “Well, it’s not that you’re not ambitious, you’re just.. you’re ambitious in a different way, you know? Like within maybe this stage of motherhood that you’re in, like you are actually doing a lot, maybe not for your business and trying to start and run a million dollar company, but there’s something still happening here, so I don’t know. Maybe we can talk a little bit about what that looks like, because I do feel like a lot of women feel that, where it’s like maybe my ambition doesn’t look like the other person’s ambition, but doesn’t mean that I don’t have wants and am not striving for, in a good way, something else or something to be happy about.

Stefanie O’Connell 42:58

Yeah, so I say that ambition is not any one thing, it’s not a job title, it’s not a balance in a bank account, it’s not limited to the public sphere, it’s not limited to your career. I mean, ambition is again that striving, that desire to do the things you want to do, and to be valued for it. But what I do want to point out is the way in which ambition that is perceived and rewarded as high value, and oftentimes this isn’t a professional sphere, but honestly, any public place, really, where there’s even if it’s not money, you know, if there’s prestige associated with it, that ambition in women is very, very consistently undermined, and why I want to point that out is because we often talk about our exhaustion, or our burnout, or our feeling like maybe I’m just not ambitious after all, as though it’s like this personal phenomenon, but it’s actually happening by design, the system is designed to make some people’s ambitions uniquely unsupported, and I think it’s important that when we talk about gaps that emerge across ambition, we recognize that this is not happening by accident, but it is a direct response to these kinds of environments that say, you know, if you’re going to go after this thing that we as a society are celebrating and rewarding, then we’re going to make it as difficult as possible for you, especially to get access to it, and I think it’s important to recognize the systemic piece of that, because oftentimes what happens is I’ll hear people say, you know, I’m not that ambitious anymore, because I don’t want to climb this corporate ladder, but then they’ll be like, but I want to write a best-selling book, and I’m like. Okay, you’re ambitious. Let’s be very clear, but what you’re talking about is an environment that is really making the pursuit of an ambition, a particular kind of ambition, completely unsustainable and not worthwhile for you. And what we see in the data is that everyone across identity, no matter what your identity is, is less ambitious about what they want to achieve when they are less likely to be supported in doing so, and when they’re less likely to reap the rewards of doing so, and when I think what happens when I say, like, when we see these gaps emerge across identity and ambition levels. I think it’s important that we tie it back to the fact that that is not a gendered phenomenon, it’s not an identity phenomenon, it’s telling us something about the environment and who is being supported within it and who isn’t, and who’s being rewarded for it, and who’s being hurt, and so one of the things that I point out, I actually wind up writing a whole chapter in the book, and this was not part of the plan when I started about these more recent trends of how this kind of burnout, specifically a gendered burnout that is really focused on women, is manifesting itself right now in 2026 in trends like Tradwives, in trends like The Soft Life, feminine energy, lazy girl jobs, there is a very, very interesting kind of arc going on from post girl boss, post lean in era kind of bringing us here, and that’s why I end in this chapter, where what happens is this message winds up becoming, you know, everything is too hard and it is so unsustainable and it is so punishing, and that’s all true, but instead of saying, why is the world operating in this way, where it’s uniquely punishing for these people and not so much these people, we’re saying, oh, so women should just give up their public power and professional ambition altogether,

Jamila Souffrant 47:15

right? Just lay down, which is, yeah, we do deserve rest, but

Stefanie O’Connell 47:19

yeah, and so we just do right, and but here’s the, here’s one of the things I write about, which is fascinating, and again, I didn’t know when I started this process, is that men have much more free time and leisure time than women, they have much better work-life balance, and yet they are paid significantly more, and they have much more power in leadership, and so when I think about conversations around burnout and work-life balance, like, and why we’re so exhausted, I really want to interrogate what’s going on there, because I think what we have been now sold is the opposite of this lean-in fantasy that we can get what we want just by asking for it. Now we’re being sold this man to see that we can get what we want by giving everything we want up, and both of those, I think, share a lot in common because they’re both doubling down on these very individualistic solutions to collective problems. There’s like the self-optimization myth that if you can just unlock this right combination of either performing your professional life in a certain way or performing your quote unquote femininity in a certain way, well, that is going to secure you autonomy and freedom and the space to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, but they’re both selling the same fantasy, and they’re both selling a fantasy that isn’t being sold to men, right? So that’s one of the things I spend a lot of time kind of dissecting, like what is this message actually serving us, and who is it harming. So, to your point, I think ambition can be many things, it doesn’t have to be only professional, it doesn’t have to be only public, it can, it can change over time, it does change over time, but what I want us to be mindful of is where we’re talking about these changes that are actually in response to systems that are failing us, not necessarily always that it’s only something that’s happening within

Jamila Souffrant 49:20

us. Yeah, the other thing too, and I don’t know if this is just sometimes the, you know, how the algorithm just like places you can put two into certain like places and people’s pages, and so it’s that soft girl life. A lot of it is maybe not always being said, but the implication is to have the soft girl life. You’re offshoring that kind of stability and income to your partner, your partner should provide for you and give you that life, and like, yes, you can stay home and you not even have to work, you know, tried wife or not, but like, you can relax, or that’s the life you deserve, and like you said, there are some implications there, where sure, like that’s nice, and especially if you have a partner that. Will respect you as just as much as if you’re not bringing actual income into the household, but there’s a lot happening there, like you said, like systemic that is like seeping in, especially as someone who you know a little bit older, so I feel like can’t trick me, I understand that, but I have like a lot of like younger people in my family, or in that, or just I see a lot of teenagers now that my kids are getting a little bit older, and like the messages that are being passed to them as like girls, and it’s very interesting, and things that I think we should be aware of, because I think it’s seeping into our mind here.

Stefanie O’Connell 50:35

I agree, I agree, it’s really problematic, really dangerous, not because I don’t want all of us to have easier lives, but it would be different if we were creating this kind of content, and then the call to action was for universal basic income, but that’s not the call to action. The call to action is to give up all of your dreams outside of the home and all of your financial autonomy, and hope it all works out. So, what often these trends are advocating for is not more support for everybody, and more stability, and financial security for everybody. Instead, they are advocating for a gendered division of labor, and a gender division of power, and that is something that should be incredibly disconcerting for all of us across identity, you know, because that’s a lot of pressure for men to bear too. There is certainly a privilege with it, but it comes at a cost, and I think we have seen what the cost is for all of us, you know. More unequal societies do not have better standards of living, more egalitarian societies have better standards of living, more equitable incomes, less income inequality. That’s where violence against women is less likely to be tolerated, as in egalitarian societies. It’s when there is gender divisions of labor and power where you do see greater violence, more anti-democratic tendencies, worse standards of living, lower healthy lifespans for everybody, and I think you know, again, we’re talking in 2026 like we’re seeing evidence of how scary a world it is when people who really double down on the idea that only a very select group of not even just men, but very small group of men are worthy of power and resources and rewards, and the rest of us should just, you know, like

Jamila Souffrant 52:30

take what’s left. Yeah,

Stefanie O’Connell 52:32

give them our labor for free, basically, right? That is not a, that’s not a good world. So, like I said, I wasn’t planning on including that chapter in my book, but it wound up being like really interesting to start out with, kind of like the girl boss deep dive, and to end on the Trad Wife deep dive, and to see really how much they share the same flaws.

Jamila Souffrant 52:55

My gosh, Stephanie, this was like this was amazing. This conversation, I feel like it definitely, like, opened up just some, some ideas, and hopefully, as you’re listening to audience journeyers for yourself, how this applies to your own life, and what I really like too is that we touched upon the community and the support you need to work and hopefully dismantle at some point the system and make it more equitable. Stephanie, please tell everyone where they can find your book, the name of it again, when it comes out, and where they can follow your work. The

Stefanie O’Connell 53:30

book is The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down. It’s out may 19. It’s available for pre-order out wherever you get your books, and I’m on social media at Stephanie O’Connell, talking about all of these things all of the time with a lot more data.

Jamila Souffrant 53:50

Yes, and I mean this will probably come out so like you can pre-order whether it’s out then or order, but we will link all of that in the episode show notes. And thank you so much again, Stephanie, for coming back on the Journey to Launch podcast. Thank you. I know I always love being here. Don’t forget, you can get the episode show notes for this episode by going to Journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you’re listening to this, and you can still grab your Jumpstart guide for free to help you on your journey to financial freedom by going to Journey to launch.com/jumpstart.com/jump start, if you want to support me and the podcast, and love the free content and information that you get here. Here are four ways that you can support me in the show. One, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen, whether that’s Apple Podcasts, that purple app on your phone, your Android device, YouTube, Spotify, wherever it is that you happen to listen, just subscribe, so you are not missing an episode. And if you’re happening to listen to this in Apple Podcasts, rate, review, and subscribe there. I appreciate and read every single review. Number two, follow me on my social media accounts, I’m at Journey to Launch. On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I love, love, love interacting with journeyers there. Three support and check out the sponsors of this show. If you hear something that interests you, sponsors are the main ways we keep the podcast lights on here, so show them some love for supporting your girl. Four, and last but not least, share this episode, this podcast with a friend or family member or coworker, so that we can spread the message of Journey to Launch. All right, that’s it until next week. Keep on journeying, journeyers,

Unknown Speaker 55:29

you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai