Do women lack ambition?” the Harvard Business Review asked 20 years ago, like a misogynist comedian wondering if women can be funny. But do we? Do I?
It’s complicated. I internalised the gen X contempt for visible striving early and we joked about the one openly ambitious girl at school (she’s now a CEO whose £3.2m pay package I read about this year; the joke’s on me). My professional life started aimlessly, in a job I hated; I had two children in quick succession at least partly to get time off work. I was nearly 35 before I accepted and acted on my deeply repressed ambition – to write – then tackled it with a white-hot determination that came at real detriment to my personal life. Now 49, my work excites and challenges me, but I’m also conflicted. I’m constantly anxious, stressed and comparing myself unfavourably to my peers. My hips ache from all the desk hours; I wish I was fitter and had more time to read, garden and see friends. My slightly older husband has a better work-life balance and I sometimes look up from my laptop to see him heading off to do something fun and fulfilling and think: ‘Is this really what I want, and if so, why?’
A new book, Fair or Foul: The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition, addresses those questions in a thought- provoking set of reflections framed around, arguably, the most ambitious woman in the literary canon.
“Most of us at some point or another have a crossroads moment,” says its author Stefan Stern when we speak. “We’re faced with ‘how much do I really want this?’” Stern has a lifelong obsession with the play and its exploration of ambition gone wrong. He chose to frame his thoughts around Lady Macbeth, he says, because she represents that dilemma most clearly.
He quotes from her first soliloquy, addressed to a vacillating Macbeth: “Thou wouldst be great, / art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.” “Those lines still make me shudder,” Stern says. “That’s the most difficult or the biggest challenge of all ambition: do you have to be a bit crazy, a bit unhinged?” It’s something he’s wondered himself throughout his life and the book examines that question for both men and women through a Lady Macbeth lens.
I wonder if as a male author, he felt any hesitation about this approach. Stern says yes, but the book is partly his attempt to rehabilitate the character. “The cliché of the scheming Lady Macbeth figure persists; any successful or healthily ambitious woman risks being labelled in that way by insecure men who feel threatened.” In fact, Lady Macbeth demonstrates “a more sophisticated understanding of human nature and society than she is often given credit for,” Stern argues, and the questions the character embodies – is ambition a kind of derangement, and is it, actually, bad for us? – are as relevant now as ever.
Those questions resonate differently for women. Female ambition has often been considered unnatural and inappropriate (Stern highlights a “whole dictionary” of words used only for ambitious women, never men: bossy, feisty, pushy, shrill). In Lady Macbeth’s famous “unsex me here” speech, Stern says, she expresses the need to discard femininity to do what needs to be done (he points to Elizabeth Holmes and her Steve Jobs-aping outfits as evidence that impulse persists). “It anticipates all these future discussions about how an ambitious woman should present herself to the world and conduct herself, and what the world will say.”
Jennifer Romolini knows something about that. On her graft-fuelled rise through the ranks of noughties publishing and digital media to C-suite jobs and global recognition, Romolini encountered a great deal of gender-specific unease at her unapologetic ambition. Her new memoir, Ambition Monster, includes numerous examples of men with her kind of burning ambition being treated quite differently. “The ease with which men walked into jobs, walked through jobs, the amount of judgment and attention given to a woman’s behaviour was entirely different,” she tells me. “My behaviour was constantly monitored and criticised and my ‘bedside manner’ was a problem. The way I was behaving was not inappropriate per se, but it was inappropriate for what we understand a woman to be able to do.”
Some of that criticism came from other women, one of whom describes her, with evident distaste, as “such a careerist”. That tallies with the research findings of the author of that provocatively titled (and far more thoughtful than the splashy title) Harvard Business Review article, psychiatrist Anna Fels: “The women I interviewed,” Fels writes, “hated the very word. For them, ‘ambition’ necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandisement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends.”
It’s a characterisation of ambition that also makes Viv Groskop, the author of Lift as You Climb: Women and the Art of Ambition, angry. Groskop is happy to be described as ambitious (her many achievements – books, radio, standup, TV, a podcast featuring the likes of Hillary Clinton and Margaret Atwood – are testament to that), but became frustrated by how ambition had “become owned by really terrible, self-interested people”. The book was, she says, in part an attempt to reframe women’s ambition as mutually supportive and compassionate and reclaim it from “bombastic” and dated clichés. “I think we recognise these tropes – the shoulder-padded bitch, the Queen Bee – but they are ridiculous and have no relevance to real life.”
Their history is interesting though. After first-wave feminism, two world wars bringing women into the workplace and the pill, the “shoulder-padded bitch” of the 1980s was a watershed moment for female ambition. For Annie Auerbach, founder of trends agency Starling and author of Flex: Reinventing Work for a Smarter, Happier Life, it was “an embattled era of ambition”, characterised by rocketing levels of female full-time employment, Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All, the film Working Girl and “women defiantly taking up space”. It evolved through the girl-power 90s, emerging as the much-derided noughties #girlboss.
For all its superficial, Swarovski-coated vapidity, the girlboss era had a clear narrative that women could be ambitious without “unsexing” themselves and it did, I think, move the needle. A friend, S, who has a big job in publishing says girlbossing made a real impact on her 20s; a much younger PhD student tells me: “It was never really a serious thing, more of a meme to us,” but also says she and her friends “don’t really care if we’re seen as ‘excessive’ or ‘unseemly’”, which is surely at least partly a product of that course correction.
But the “you go girl” rhetoric felt simultaneously cynical and empty – it became another way for women to feel they were failing. Romolini is ferociously funny and righteously angry about her experiences at the sharp end of this “socially sanctioned #bossbitch bootcamp” and the way it was co-opted and exploited in organisations that often remained male-led: “I am complicit in selling a narrow, convenient, overinflated narrative about women and work that I am beginning to know is – at least in my experience – a lie,” she writes.
By the 2010s, the post-financial crisis exhortations to grind and #leanin (Sheryl Sandberg’s book of the same title was published in 2013) created, Auerbach says, a sort of “productivity porn, with relentless self-promotion… the only way to offset precarity”. Covid was an inflection point of sorts, when mothers’ unprecedented burnout and declining mental health provoked an existential reckoning, perhaps expressed most clearly around former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s resignation in 2023.
We have come a long way, but I’m not sure exactly where we are. This feels like an age of ambivalence around ambition, especially for women; a time of #lazygirljobs, #softlifegirlies and the reframing of rest as a radical act. “The girlboss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature),” reads one meme that hit hard. I feel that ambivalence and I see it around me. A self-described “recovering academic” is reassessing her attitude to ambition beyond that ultra-competitive environment; a senior civil servant has lost her single-minded drive since having kids, which makes her “a bit sad”. A bakery owner I admire hugely says she started out “full of ambition and energy. I had to be a girlboss and ambitious with a new bakery and baby solo.” Now she’s drawn to the “soft girl life” and her allotment: “I no longer have any interest in scaling the bakery, calling myself the founder… I dream of homesteads and field bakeries.” My absurdly talented friend, whose ambition was stolen by long Covid says: “I’m kind of glad, because ambition is meaningless.”
It seems to me that much of the ambivalence I hear from women about ambition, and the appeal of anti-striving memes, comes from a sense of being failed by late-stage capitalist patriarchy. Because at no point in the evolving story of female ambition have we managed to demolish the structural barriers to women realising theirs. I hardly need to set them out, but 54 years since the Equal Pay Act we haven’t reached parity, which aside from any cultural or biological bias toward women as caregivers, means it’s still often economically sensible for them to become default primary carers in heterosexual relationships; we’re also in an acute childcare crisis in the UK. “The ‘soft life’ is a pushback against the idea that successful women are resilient women,” says Auerbach. “Resilience told us your value as a woman was to say yes, suck it up, be ‘fierce’, hustle harder. Society praises resilience, because then it doesn’t have to change.”
When aspiration hits the buffers of structural barriers, what often follows is burnout. Romolini experienced that as she struggled to achieve her ambitions for both motherhood and professional success, and so did founder and writer Sharmadean Reid. In many ways, Reid was a girlboss archetype: she founded the groundbreaking WAH Nails salon and became the first Black woman in the UK to raise £1m in venture capital for her second entrepreneurial project, but the personal cost that exacted – anxiety, intense stress – prompted her to reassess hustle culture. She’s coolly forensic about the way it exalts entrepreneurship and leadership: “We’ve had power bitch, we’ve had girl power, we’ve had girlboss, but they’re all the same thing: it’s a neoliberal self-actualisation through work or money… women have felt that they can be part of it if they go out and grind like everyone else.” Stepping back from that to make personal changes and interrogate the stubborn societal barriers that stop women from acting on their ambition, without setting their whole lives on fire, has informed her book of essays, New Methods for Women.
Friends Tiffany Scott and Alex Morgan encountered those barriers, too, as they navigated early motherhood simultaneously in 2020. Scott works in recruitment, Morgan in higher education; both consider themselves highly ambitious and their frequentconversations around how hard it was for the “unpaid work” of motherhood – the drudgery, the mental load – “not to completely derail your career” as Morgan puts it, became their Mambition podcast. What they mainly realised as they interviewed other mothers (“really successful career-minded people”), they tell me, was that everyone struggles. The motherhood penalty has caused 250,000 women to leave the workforce, according to recent Fawcett Society research. “I think people are turned off by ‘having it all’,” says Morgan. “Because they realise how unfair it is.”
But things are changing, working models in particular. Covid lockdowns might have precipitated an existential crisis for many working mothers, but their legacy has been a seismic shift in how and where we (well, some of us) work. A 2023 McKinsey Women report found women were actually more ambitious post-Covid; that’s a product of the chink of light flexible working practices let in. For Reid, the emergence of flexible and hybrid models is “almost the equivalent of the pill… you really see there are alternative ways of working” (though, she emphasises, for many women these models of working are still not accessible).
Other things are changing, too: the UK gender pay gap is at its narrowest-ever point (91p in the pound) and shared parental leave is slowly becoming more common. Morgan mentions two friends who have taken it, including one who was the first in his engineering firm; my publishing friend’s partner – a lawyer – did too. That McKinsey report found men want flexible working as well as women; they’ve been pushed into roles that don’t suit or fulfil them, just as women have.
Another positive trend that emerges from all my discussions is that we’re defining ambition more, I suppose, ambitiously. Stern sees a shifting focus to “personal growth not career growth”; we have life ambitions, not five-year plans. “I haven’t given up on ambition,” says Romolini. “I’ve just redirected it so that I get what I actually want.” “What about self-actualisation through creativity or personal development?” asks Reid. For Auerbach a life-centred, flexible way of working is “one of the most ambitious things you can strive for”. Groskop describes a new “altruistic ambition” and I see that in Reid, who is trying to effect at least a “pinprick” of structural change by exploring new economic models and micro-revolutions.
Because ambition need not be a life-gobbling monster or an “illness”; it shouldn’t have to destroy women, as it did Lady Macbeth. A friend says her gen-Z daughter and her female friends want, and believe they can have, family, leisure and fulfilling work without the sacrifices their mothers’ generation made. I hope they’re right. And I hope that the broader, bolder ambitions we’re starting to express for our “one wild and precious life” will keep chipping away at everything that still holds us back.
