For decades, women have been told that ambition is the answer. Lean in. Speak up. Ask for the raise. Negotiate harder. The promise was simple: do everything right, and the corner office will follow.
But what happens when doing everything right still isn’t enough?
Journalist Stefanie O’Connell has a name for it: the ambition penalty. In her deeply researched new book, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up — and Then Pushes Them Down, she makes the case that the problem was never women’s ambition; it’s what happens to women because of it. She joined Jean Chatzky this week on the HerMoney podcast to break it all down.
The Lie of Girlboss Feminism: When Ambition Isn’t Enough
O’Connell’s central argument is that there’s a critical difference between the language of empowerment and actual empowerment, and that we’ve been confusing the two for years.
“A lot of the rhetoric of this new era of empowerment is really focused on the idea of a woman’s greatest barrier to getting ahead as being herself — whether it’s that she’s not confident enough or willing to be assertive enough or ambitious enough,” she said. “And that formula is fundamentally flawed.”
And it’s not just men perpetuating these biases. “Men and women alike are conditioned into these biases, not because we are necessarily bad people, but because we live in a world in which we’re all brought up with these very binary ideas of what it means to be a good woman or a good man. And to be a good woman is still to be seen as deferential to power, serving of power, giving of yourself — and that is in direct conflict with the very stereotypes of power and leadership, what it takes to get ahead.”
The Ambition Penalty at Home: It Doesn’t Stop at the Office Door
One of the most striking parts of O’Connell’s book is its argument that the ambition penalty doesn’t clock out when you do. It follows women into their relationships, their households, and their personal lives.
She points to research showing that when women outpace their male partners in income, earnings, wealth, or status, they face backlash at home too, “whether it’s higher incidents of emotional abuse or physical abuse, or even withdrawing from the household labor in engaging more equitably in the home,” she said.
These, she argues, are not random acts. “Much like in the workplace, forms of backlash that are designed as punishments, a tool to get women back into compliance so that their labor, their ambition can be contained back into that role of ‘good woman’ who is always in service of someone else.”
But here’s what O’Connell wants women to hold onto: “If at the end of the day you know that that response isn’t saying something about you, but instead saying something about them and the environment they’re in, then you’re not gonna shrink yourself. You’re not gonna say, ‘Well, I’m not gonna buy a home [by myself].’ You’re not gonna say, ‘Well, I’m not gonna go for the job I want or build a life that I love.'”
You Can’t Outwork Inequality — But You Can Outorganize It
So what do we actually do about it? O’Connell is clear: the answer isn’t more self-optimization.
“We’ve been kind of stuck in this self-optimization cycle,” she said. “When you believe the biggest barrier to your getting what you want is you, you can always kind of go back into internalizing… And this is the trap we need to get out of.”
Her framework flips the script. Instead of looking inward, she wants women to look outward, at the environments they’re in and how to reshape them. That means advocating for pay transparency at work, engaging more equitably at home, and thinking collectively, not just individually, about solutions.
And O’Connell has a nuanced take for women who think entrepreneurship is the answer. “I love seeing women having their own businesses. But I want us to be very clear that opting out of these kinds of traditional workplace structures in and of itself is not a solution.” The same barriers — lack of funding, mentorship, and connection — follow women into entrepreneurship too.
Her prescription for all of this: “Always, always, always thinking collaboratively [with other women] instead of competitively.”
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