4. The Validation Pattern: Inside The Ambition Penalty

Stefanie O'Connell is an award-winning journalist, researcher and author of The Ambition Penalty. She spent years documenting what happens when women do everything right — follow the advice, ask for more, negotiate, perform — and still face punishment for it. What she found wasn't a broken system. It was a functioning one, designed to reproduce the same structure of power even as the rules appear to change.

What this conversation builds is the connective tissue between that external architecture and the internal one. Andi names it explicitly: the ambition penalty is most damaging to the people trained to need the reward in the first place. The system rewards and then withdraws. Validation dependency is what makes that withdrawal land so hard.

They cover the ambition penalty's mechanics — what it looks like when it happens in real time, why self-blame is a feature of the system and not a byproduct of it, and what it means that women are negotiating at the same rate as their male peers and still less likely to get what they ask for. Stefanie also shares what it was like to lose 90% of her revenue during pregnancy and postpartum — having written the book on exactly why this was going to happen, having prepared for it financially and intellectually — and still being inside it.

This is an episode about a designed system and the internal wiring that makes it even more effective.  

Guest Links
Instagram: @stefanieoconnell
Newsletter: Too Ambitious (Substack)
Book: The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down — wherever you get your books 

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @advance_with_andi
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to Boys in Board Rooms. Today we're going to talk about the specific kind of bind that is built into modern ambition, especially for women. Women are told to want more, to be more visible, a bit more vocal, a bit more bold. We're told to raise our hands to take up space. However, when you do, when you actually do the thing you were told to do, it seems like something shifts. Maybe the reception cools, the feedback gets quieter, but the pushback gets louder. And you start wondering if you misread the room. Maybe you did too much, but maybe you did it wrong. But here's the thing, you did not. You read it correctly, but the system was designed to reward you for trying and to penalize you for succeeding. And here's the part that most reporting on this misses that the reason it works on you is not only that the reward gets withdrawn, it's that you were trained to need the reward in the first place. And the same system that trained you to need it is the one that takes it away. That is the lock and the key. So today's guest, name the lock, and we are going to look at the key together. My guest today is Stephanie O'Connell. She's a journalist whose work sits at the intersection of personal finance, gender, and power. And she's also the originator of the framework she calls the ambition penalty, the structural pattern by which women are told to be more ambitious, more visible, more leadership ready, and then systematically push back down when they actually do those things. Her book, The Ambition Penalty, brings the evidence, while her reporting brings the receipts. And her own life, as it turned out, brought her the thing every researcher eventually has to confront. The moment you live the pattern you have spent years documenting. Stephanie, welcome. So we're just gonna dig right in today. And I want to talk about this thing you call the ambition penalty. So could you define the ambition penalty for me in your own words? What is it? How is it different from this like leaky pipeline narrative that we're used to hearing? Can you tell us a little more?

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Yeah, so the ambition penalty really speaks to the kind of catch-22 that I put at the heart of women's empowerment advice, where we've really been told for generations now that our biggest barriers to accessing equal pay, opportunity, power is ourselves. If we were just ambitious enough, if we were confident enough, if we were willing to ask for more, only to face what I refer to here as the ambition penalty, which is greater chance of being judged or penalized or cast aside or overlooked for doing those very things. So speaking up only to be seen as ungrateful or difficult, being ambitious, only to be disqualified for being too aggressive, too cold, not a team player, only to be confident, to be seen as selfish or full of herself. And what I point out a lot in the book is that these are distinctly gendered phenomena because the exact same things that men are reliably implementing to get ahead, to access opportunity, to access pay and promotions and power are the very same things that sometimes work for women, sure, but can also really be something that excludes them. And I spoke to so many women in this book who not only were told they were, you know, ungrateful for asking for more or seen as not a good fit or not a team player, but some of whom faced real material consequences for doing so, whether it was having job offers completely withdrawn altogether for even attempting to negotiate, which is wild. I want to say still uncharacteristic, not that common, but not as uncommon as we've been led to believe. I'm sure. And even in those of us who recognize it or we know it exists, we sometimes have trouble pointing to it or being able to say how it's operating. And this book is really about pulling back the curtain to say, hey, you're not going crazy. This is happening. Here's the data that show it happening. And here is something to hopefully validate you, and also something then you can bring into your workplaces. And then that institutional and empirical knowledge you can say to say, you know, I know it's not me. It's you. Not in those words, of course. But it really is. It really is.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

I mean, as women, I'm just gonna be very transparent. It feels like in the workplace, sometimes we're damned if we do, damned if we don't, right? So that's exactly it. Trying to figure out how we navigate around that. Um, and sometimes sometimes other women help, and sometimes other women are actually part of the problem. Um, some research shows that unfortunately women are harder on other women too. So you have this entire dynamic dynamic that you're trying to work through in the office that just feels impossible to navigate at times.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

A hundred percent. I wound up dedicating a whole chapter to that too, to really understanding that, you know, these aren't like man versus woman dynamics. It's not an individual me versus you thing. It's really these broader perceptions of what power is supposed to look like, what leadership is supposed to look like, and how much that is still very steeped in very narrow ideals of when people think boss, when people think leader, they automatically think male, overwhelmingly think white. You know, there's a very specific vision of what power is supposed to look like. And so when someone who doesn't look like that lays claim to power, says, I want I want to in uh partake in that too, we all are conditioned to automatically see that, eh, that's for you. That's selfish. That thing that we say is aligned for this person because that's what we've oh all been kind of steeped in culturally, we see as selfish or problematic in the other person. And it's not because necessarily we're bad people, but rather because we've grown up our whole lives with this is what this, you know, to be a good quote unquote woman is, and that being in direct conflict with what it means to be perceived as, you know, a good leader and a good boss and a good, you know, basically person that we want to endow with power in our culture. And I think we're not as far past some of these more deep-seated conditioning and ideals than we might think we are.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

It still feels almost like the two can't exist. And you had said something that I thought that was really interesting. You wrote, this isn't a broken system, it's a designed one. So what do you think it's designed for?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

It's designed to reproduce the same structure of power, even as you kind of take away other barriers to participation. So one of the things I talk a lot about in this book is just how much certain metrics of gender equality, but this is true for other forms as well, have really been stagnant for decades now. You look at things like the gender pay gap in the United States in 2025, not only has it just widened for the last two years in a row, but now it's where it was when I graduated high school. And for context, I am turning 40 this year. So we're now talking about from the time that we entered the workforce to our peak earnings years. It now we're talking generations of women who are more educated and ambitious than ever at the peak of their careers and their outcomes haven't changed at all. That really tells us something about the limitations of this approach to quote unquote empowerment that really relies on this myth that the the greatest barrier is within us, as opposed to differences in the way the world responds to us when we're women, you know, laying claim to those ambitions.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

100%. And McKinsey, right? They do their annual women in the workplace study every year. And I I was I was doing a workshop somewhat recently, and I think it's like 46% of men are still or 46% more likely to get promoted than women because they have champions, because they have allies, they have advocates where we don't necessarily have that in the workplace. And it's yeah, it's everyone's saying, Oh, we're going forward, we're going forward. I'm right there with you. I turn 40 next year. And it's like, no, there are still so many things that are systemic that were there when I entered the workplace, you know, almost 20 years ago at this point.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

And I think it's really important that we talk about these things more clearly and honestly because what happens in place of that kind of accountability is this myth making. This idea of, okay, well, now it's not that you weren't educated enough. It must just be that you're all just the big narrative these days is women are en masse redefining ambition differently. And there is something to be said about being constrained in your career and finding new ways to map out how you want to move forward. That's a real thing. But you don't have, you know, hundreds of thousands of women spontaneously deciding to opt out of the workplace all of a sudden. What we're doing, what is happening right now, is like a real reframing of women constrained out of options and out of rewards and out of opportunities as kind of like freely made choices or a new kind of power. And I think we need to be really wary of it, even if we're trying to use that language in a positive way, as to like how are we coping through these constraints? You know, there's a story to tell there. But what we don't need to do is give cover to these workplaces that are really just finding new ways to erect the same old barriers and implement the same old biases. Because when we say it's something that just women are choosing, then it's not a problem. Then it's just a women make different choices, women have naturally different ambitions. And that inequality is just the outcome of that and not the fact that you're you're really having uh an issue of systemic exclusion.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

So then what kind of riving off of that, what do you think that most well-meaning leaders get wrong when they try to fix women's careers?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Well, the first thing people do is they individualize the problem and they internalize it, right? Every intervention starts with what's wrong with you, not just as a woman, but as an individual. And what I really point out to again and again and again in the book is that, you know, when you have a system where you take the same input and the output differs depending on the identity of the person, you don't have an input problem. You have a system problem. You have something going wrong within the system. And so what we need to do is kind of like flip our framework here to saying instead of thinking of every intervention starting from within you and at the individual level, what we need to do is actually reckon with those systems of power interpersonally in our homes, in uh our relationships, how we show up as peers, parents, daughters, um, certainly in our uh cultural and institutional environments, in our workplaces, in our communities. And then finally we have that bigger political level, the bigger cultural level, the scripts and the stories we tell about what power and leadership should look like and who is best suited to it. So I think when we're thinking about, you know, where people go wrong is they just come back to this individual level instead of understanding that like clearly what we're dealing with here is a problem of uh people, individuals who have the exact same behaviors and do the exact same things and are still experiencing vastly different outcomes. And so if you keep talking about the individual level, you're gonna overlook the entire problem. And not only that, you're gonna continue to keep that myth alive that the real problem is this like ambition la gap instead of the ambition penalty.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

So walk me through what that ambition penalty looks like in real time, right? So what does the reward phase look like and what does that moment of withdrawal look like for the women that you speak to?

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Yeah. So one of the most impactful ways that I've seen this show up for women is really in their self-advocacy in the workplace. So they would do all the right things. They would, especially around pay negotiations. I I spoke to a woman who had taken like a pay negotiation course in college. She was following all the recruiters online, she had read all of the books and she practiced her negotiation, she had the data, she had her talking points, you know. There is something to be said of having the skill of being able to advocate for yourself. And that's real, that is important to know. But what she wasn't ready for was the fact that like she could have the skill and she could do the right things and she could follow all the best practices. And it didn't mean she was going to be able to access the same reward for doing so. So the reward being the extra money she was asking for in the negotiation. But not just that, like she what she wasn't prepared for was being demonized for following those best practices. Like, what do you think you're doing here? We're a startup. Meanwhile, like nobody is saying this to the guys who are asking for the same thing. And this manifests in all kinds of different ways. It's like uh it can be um, you know, just this kind of who do you think you are? And it can be, well, that's just like not the culture of our work environment. There's an there's a hundred ways to gaslight you into thinking that the problem was you when what's actually happening is the ambition penalty, a very gendered dynamic where women are statistically experiencing this more often. And in this case, her job offer was rescinded. And because of the messaging that the problem was her, that how dare she ask for more, she internalized it as something that was wrong with her. Because the message is the worst they can say is no. And when the message is the worst they can say is no, and not only do they say no, but they punish you for asking, then all you're left to think is it has to be you, that you did something wrong. And only later over time, and then of course that has cascading effects. Then, you know, we talk about imposter syndrome like it came out of nowhere, instead of as a direct result of these kinds of experiences in which you have been designed, again, purposely been made to feel that you were the problem and that you don't belong. Not because that's true, but because the workplace is designed to make you feel that way if you're a woman or a person from another marginalized identity. That is how it sustains inequality, even as women do the right things and follow all the best practices. It's how you get away with it. And if you can get women to respond to that by blaming themselves for the backlash instead of holding the systems accountable that subject them to that disproportionate backlash, then the system can go on systeming, it can go on excluding, and it never really has to change. But what's really interesting in this woman's case, eventually she wound up sharing her story with a couple of their friends and realized that they they had been through the same thing. And then as soon as she had started to realize that it didn't, it wasn't just her, the shame, the imposter syndrome, the self-blame started to release. And then she could really start to contextualize her experience within the broader experience of what is happening to women in the workplace. And when you can start to understand yourself as part of this larger social class, you can start to understand the problem through the systemic lens as opposed to this very individualistic lens where you are the primary uh, you are the reason for the for your own uh inequality, and which is absurd when you say it that way, right? But that's kind of what we've all been conditioned into believing.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

But it's it's how we, yes, it's how we, it's how we internalize, right? I I think here is a great point or a great period of the conversation to bring my frame in because the ambition penalty, as I am hearing you talk about it, it's the system, it's external. But a big part of the reason that the system lands on the people inside of it is something that I call validation dependency, right? And we had talked about this a little bit in our introductory chat, but I see, you know, the system is essentially designed to reth to reward and then withdraw. And it really does damage you if you were trained to need the reward in the first place. But that's the issue here is that as women, we are trained even more so than men, to want the reward. Man goes in and he asks for uh a pay raise, and it's like, what's the worst that happens? They say no and they walk away. What's the worst that happens with us? We walk away with imposter syndrome or trauma or feeling like we can't ask for a reward again because of how we've been reacted to in that environment. So as women, we're trained to be good, to be wanted, to be needed. So if we're denied, it can affect many of us even more. So you have the system internally and externally going on. Does that map with what you've seen?

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, it's really interesting that in more recent years, there's been more research that studies these dynamics more as a factor of like what happens when people receive these kinds of responses across identity. And we see in the data that like actually everyone changes their behaviors the same way going forward. So when you see a difference emerge, what you see across as huge a group as gender, what you're actually seeing then is not something that's like a woman thing. You're seeing what happens in a world in which women are far more subject to this kind of judgment and this kind of backlash and this kind of penalties. So one of my favorite papers in the book is like really looking at uh differences in characteristics we associate with men versus characteristics we associate with women, like the the willingness to take risks, for example. And what they find is that like actually it has nothing to do with your gender identity. But if you are someone who has been penalized for the risks you take in the past, no matter your identity, you are going to be less likely to take risks in the future.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

And that is not something that's happening because of who you are. It's happening because of the way the world has responded to you. And what we're seeing then in these differences is that the world is responding differently to people at scale, at scale. And one of the other factors in this is also power. So uh gender is often a like race, often a proxy for power. Often we don't talk speak about it in those terms, but when you have a culture in which people believe that men should hold power and women shouldn't, then yeah, it's really a proxy for power. So when you have uh studies of things, again, like confidence or risk aversion or whatever it is, within the context of looking at it through a power framework instead of an identity framework, you get the outcomes you would expect if you're in a high power group, you're more likely to speak up. You're more likely to be more confident, you're more likely to take risks. Not because of your identity, but because you're endowed within the high power group. And the same with the lower power group, you know, even if men are assigned in that low power group, they are also going to be less likely to want to take risks or speak up or anything because they are they recognize that they are endowed with lower power within that context. And I I talk a lot about in the book, you know, when you shift context, you see differences emerge and outcomes. You know, if this was all just natural, if this was inevitable, then we wouldn't see things change over time. We wouldn't see, like, you know, in one part of the world uh women being expected to negotiate and in another part women being punished for it. But that is what we see. So I think, you know, I'm hoping to get people a lot of context, again, coming back to like contextualizing your experience within the broader experience of what is happening to all women, but also like contextualizing what is happening to women within the broader experience of like what has happened across time, what is really what is happening across place, what is happening across context, because when we see how much our outcomes can change by shifting our context, we understand that what we're facing is not inevitable. It's uh about a change in the environment around us. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

And I want to I want to shift this conversation in a moment to kind of how we interrupt the pattern. But something that you wrote to me actually stayed with me. And part of this podcast is about stories, about our individual stories. And I want to hear a little bit about yours because you're in the center of this research. You're the words, you're the person putting words into this patterns, and you still somehow found yourself a bit inside the loop, wondering if you were doing too much or not enough, or the wrong things in the wrong order. And I think it had to do with when you were you were pregnant, when you got your book deal and everything. So um, this isn't a contradiction of your work. I think it is purely proof of it. So tell me a little bit more about like what living inside that pattern taught you that perhaps documenting it couldn't.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

I mean, yeah. So I was writing and researching this book through the prog through the process of pregnancy and postpartum, which, you know, is is a humbling experience for anyone who's been through it. Uh, but to have that lived experience as I was doing the research, and I I've been writing and reporting about. Care work and household inequality and the way this enables inequality in the workplace for a long time. But I think the extent to which I experienced this personally still caught me off guard in the sense that, you know, I had felt I had done all the right things. I felt I had really prepared myself with the data in mind. Most people don't know how badly women are underpaid and how badly they're mistreated. And especially when they transition into parenthood, there's an idea, there's some acknowledgement that mothers face discrimination. But again, it's often attributed to choices. But I knew, I knew that it wasn't about choices. And so I really prepared, I saved so much money, like an ungodly amount of money that as a someone who writes about personal finance, like if you told me you had that much money in a savings account and not an investment account, I'd be like, you are crazy. But I knew because I had been reporting on this forever. And yet, having done like all of the quote unquote right things, having prepared myself, having gotten to a point in my career where I had just been making more money than I ever had, and nothing, you know, everything was was as good as it could be, and it had been that way for years, like a decade. I could not, you could not have prepared me for the fact that I would lose 90% of my income, my revenue. I lost 90% of my revenue. And I say revenue, not income because I'm self-employed. And so, of course, my income is uh directly contingent upon my revenue. And so, like, I could sit here and make a lot of justifications for why that is, you know, I work in media, media ecosystem, very, very volatile. Um, you know, I the social media algorithms are always changing. That has a lot of impacts too. But the thing is, like, those things have always been true. And yet I'm at a point in my career where I've never had a bigger following, I've never done better work, I've never had more um acknowledgement of my work being platform places. Um, and yet I I still couldn't spare myself from the motherhood penalty. And I am still like grappling with that and caught off guard by it to an extent that is hard because like I am very ambitious. I am more ambitious than ever. And so the idea of having my outcomes be reframed as something that's actively that I'm actively choosing, that I uh that is just an indication that I have this life shift and therefore, you know, I don't care about my access to economic autonomy and stability and what I use to pay my daughter's childcare bills and the roof over her head. Like I find it kind of insulting and egregious, quite frankly, to frame the conversation in those terms. And um, you know, I'm figuring it, I'm figuring it out as much as anyone else in terms of like what does this now mean for me on an individual basis? But I do think no matter where I land, it's quite clear to me that like I can't individually hack my way out of it either. You know, and I think we should be, even when it works for us, because like it's worked for me in the past, but I think we should we need to remember that even when it's working for us, we should even be reframing our success as understanding, measuring success through what all women have access to. So it's not just about how what one woman gets ahead, how one woman gets economic stability, how one woman accesses more opportunity. But what do we need to do to make sure women collectively as a social class across the board, as big and diverse as we are, we all have access to autonomy, to opportunity, to security. And right now, I think we really need to reckon with the fact that even if you have a couple, you know, high profile people who are having success successes, and I think that's a great thing, we need to measure our progress and what's working by the rule and not the exception.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

I love that. I do some executive coaching and I have an issue with pure play, I would call it executive coaching for this very reason. It's someone who tries to take a framework that worked very specifically in their career and then apply it across the board. And I'm like, this is not going to work because it's so internal, it's so unique to what each individual person is going through, right? These cookie cutter, do this, say this, send this email. No, like at the end of the day, it sells so well, but no one is going to get ahead by following something.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

I know, I know. Well, also because like what we were just talking about, how much context matters, right? Like that email might work in that in one context, and you have send it to a different person, get a completely different outcome. Right. And that's why, you know, one of the hardest parts about writing this book was talking about, you know, how you move forward and how you address these things, because it's not sexy to be like, hey, I don't have a five-step plan for you. I don't have like step one, power pose, step two, take out the exclamation points, step three points, yeah, step three, delete just, and like all of a sudden everything's gonna work out for you because that's a lie. That's not true. And when you say that, it feels disempowering. It feels like if it's not me, it's the system, there's nothing I can do. And I want people to understand that actually believing in these myths, that it's as simple as like the right combination of words, is what is disempowering us because that's standing in the way of our collective action and solidarity and coming together as a collective to demand these systems change.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

It's really about internal empowerment. It starts inside and what you believe in yourself and what you actually give yourself the permission to go after and find ways to work around the system because you have to. You don't let the system control you. It's going to to an extent, but you have to go in and start to make your own kind of inroads. And I was going to ask you, how do you interrupt the pattern? I know that there's no five-step checklist, but what do you recommend to do here? How do people start to interrupt this pattern? I think awareness is probably a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Yeah, the awareness is a much bigger piece of it than I even understood. Uh, you know, to coming back to the negotiation, just because it's such a common thing people deal with in their lives, really great paper looked at the myth that women don't ask for more. And not only did they find that women were negotiating as much as their male peers, just less likely to get what they asked for, they also found that people who believed the reason women were underpaid was because they didn't negotiate, were also less likely to support pay equity policies and pay transparency policies and uh legislation and kinds of company practices that are actually proven to reduce these gaps and to reduce these inequalities. So I think what that really tells us is that these things aren't just myths or misconceptions, but buying into them in and of itself stands in the way of getting support for the interventions needed to address them. So I think uh yeah, a huge part of this is certainly that. And then when you're talking about like where is that internal empowerment coming from, like I want people to think more expansively. I want them to think in terms of like everything we do for thinking about like the right things, the the things we have to do to best prepare ourselves when we walk into a room to advocate for ourselves. Like, I'm not saying we let go of that, but I'm saying we add, we add a collective element to each one of those things. So if I want to make more money, I need to know all of those things that I need to do individually, but I also need to be operating at the collective level to make sure that I'm part of a community and a system of working to improve all women's access to equitable pay and opportunity. And the way I can do that is it can be very simple. It can be at the interpersonal level, like information sharing, resource sharing. Like you said, this stuff can't be standardized because every organization is different. You not you not only need to know how to ask for more, but you need to know who's gonna be receptive to it and who's not gonna be. And if this person is receptive to it, how are they receptive to it? That's institutional knowledge. That is something you gain through collective, not individual. And then if you are trying to push back on uh uh the past the interpersonal level, you're going to the institutional level. Like let's say the company does have a pay transparency policy, but they're hiding all this inequality in the bonuses. Well, if you go and call that out by yourself, it's not gonna look good. You're gonna have a target on your back. But if you're going in like as a collective, as a you know, a group of people, like the employers who want to retain their workforce, suddenly it's not you versus the company. It's saying like the workforce here is feeling undervalued, feeling like they're not being rewarded. And that's a company issue and not a you issue. And suddenly you have a framework for you know, addressing these policies that that aren't being implemented fairly through a way that you're not having to go at it alone. And when you when you're not going at it alone, you're much more likely to be successful and you're much less likely to be having the one facing all the backlash when it all falls apart. Um, so you know, again, like reshaping the systems in and of themselves and not alone, but together, those are much more sustainable forms of action. And I point out in the book um a number of examples when you think even historically throughout time, you know, on the political and cultural level, where you do see the biggest change in outcomes, it's always been through the policies. It's always been through the legislation. We saw women's labor force participation reach an all-time high in 2023. It is not an accident that this happened as there was this massive shift to remote work, right? And then, you know, again, people think the system, nothing I can do to change it, but the system changing also changes all the time. What did they do as soon as that happened? They said you had to be in the office all day, every single day. Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

So who does that hurt the most, right? It hurts the most. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

And that's by design. It's by design. And if we can learn to cultivate cultivate that recognition and then also cultivate our commu our c community and our collective organizing around these things, I think we're going to be much, much more equipped to have these conversations and to push back in a way that meaningfully shifts things. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

So I want to talk a little bit more about your book. I want you to tell me a little bit more about it. Um ultimately, what do you want the ambition penalty to do that no other book in this space is doing?

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yeah, so I want the ambition penalty to fundamentally change the way we talk about women's workplace opportunities and outcomes and the things that women want. I think one of the things that drives me bananas is the way in which so much of the conversation around personal and professional for women is still framed as mutually exclusive instead of mutually reinforcing. You know, even the most simplest ideas of having a career or having a family, even if it's not a family, like a fulfilling personal life and a fulfilling professional life, those things are automatically assumed to go hand in hand for men. It's not even a question. As soon as we start talking about women, it becomes the language of trade-offs. And there's something real there. There's something real about like women being constrained through systems that just men are not facing, you know, men are not carrying twice as much as the household load. But again, the idea that this is that this is being actively chosen by women, that this is what we really want, I that is a language and a framework that I find maddening because not only does the data not support it, but because it's being presented in these terms of inevitability or or freely made choices, it effectively takes away all the urgency out of out of changing it and addressing it and creating a world in which, you know, having it all is seen as too much for women and uh the the basic floor for men. So that's what I want to change. I want to change the way we think about these things completely.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

And I hope this conversation is, you know, a slight movement toward that for the women and the men that we reach today because we need allies as well. So everyone, everyone, the collective needs to come together to really fix these systemic issues.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

And I make that case in the book too. Like this is a movement that it at the end of the day, it does serve everyone. More egalitarian cultures have higher standards of living, longer lifespans, longer healthy lifespans, greater um less wealth and equality. So there is really an incentive here for everyone. And I think if we can really reframe this as, again, collective well-being, collective good, that's gonna really, I think, be another fundamental shift in the way we've traditionally talked about this idea of empowerment as like a woman getting ahead versus women getting ahead, which means everyone getting ahead. Everyone wins. Yeah, everyone wins.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Okay, Stephanie. So if people want to find you, where can they find you? Instagram, Facebook, where can they get your book?

SPEAKER_00 35:27

Yeah, so Stephanie O'Connell is my Instagram handle. My newsletter is called TooAmbitious at Stubstack. And the book is The Ambition Penalty How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down wherever you get your books. Well, thank you for your time, Stephanie. It was great having you on the Boys and Boardrooms podcast. Thank you, Andy.