I've got a "What Happens When The Ambition Reckoning Never Comes For Men" google doc that I've been working on for months because YES. The whole time I was researching The Ambition Penalty I was seeing all of these anti-ambition memoirs come out, and thinking who does is it serve to sell women (and women exclusively) on the promise that true freedom, rest, and liberation comes from constraint – through giving up, scaling back and wanting less, while men maintain the vast majority of public power and personal leisure for themselves? But even I did not see the girlboss 2.0 coming...
Not only do men maintain the majority of public power, they don't have to do a damn thing to get it in the first place (white men, obvi). No lifestyle changes, no changes at home (besides getting a wife to do all the home things), no juggling.
fuck yeah plssss pub this. I’ve been wrestling with this having started a company when I was 30 and now almost 40 and it’s been in my opinion wildly successful. Yet this year I’ve been struggling with this bc my husband took a “big” job with travel and stricter starts and ends. And so I became lead parent. We agreed to this bc I wanted to be supportive. I’ve been living my wildest career dreams for a decade; he hasn’t but also bc I was feeling shouldn’t- I want more time for kids creativity rest want less work that I love… but I didn’t. It made me less motivated feel less alive and felt small. So I’m leaning back into work for better or worse term and now it’s just a compression of time always. It all feels messy, full and I’m thinking about ambition and women and care LOTS now
Your final point that a lot of these systemic barriers are in fact most upheld within the domestic structure itself is so spot on. After making the mistake of taking about five years off and letting my husband have the opportunity to be the primary breadwinner once we had our children, we snowballed into a dynamic that we hadn’t fully discussed. His earning power increased and his domestic workload all but disappeared. His stress, his work schedule his self-employment dynamic became the center point of our lives. As I continually expressed how unhappy I was being home full-time, my earning power had decreased, and there was no way that I could reasonably catch up to where he had stumbled into over the past 5+ years. Therefore, his high earning power was, and continues to be the priority in our family. Ultimately, he’s become accustomed to a lifestyle that is not pinched for cash and the option for the tables to turn and me being the one that supports the family, because I inevitably am the one that enjoys work more, means we would have to alter our lifestyle. Something that I fear would breed resentment.
Asking him to do more domestic labor on top of a heavy workload, just for the sake of me not carrying 100% of both the logistical and mental load, has no doubt resulted in tense conversations of “fairness”. All of this coming from a man who is NOT a misogynist, who supports me in all of the ways that he knows how. So if I’m married to a “good” man like this, who still bump up against these barriers, imagine how many women whose partners are far more traditionalist get sucked into a dynamic that they don’t know how to get out of.
We (he) don’t know how to break the cycle of his time essentially being “more valuable” than mine. His stress load being higher than mine, and therefore takes higher priority for things to balance around his orbit. It’s a frustrating place to be.
The crux of it all is that I like to work and he doesn’t really. He just makes too good of money for our family now for us to know how to alter our trajectory. I have largely done project based work which has included chunks of real estate investment. This has caused resentment on his part as well because he feels the weight of paying for my projects up until I get paid. It’s a tricky dynamic.
jess i really appreciate you taking the time to share this -- i expect this dynamic is _very_ common. i was emailing stefanie o'connell this morning (her book 'the ambition penalty' comes out next month; she's in this comments section as well if you want to check out her work) and i was like, even were all our dreams for collective change to become reality tomorrow, unless we culturally adjust our perception of the value of women's time/drive, it's still going to be the mommies headed to pick up the sick kids from universal childcare.
Thanks Katie, appreciate your content! Missing Money With Katie, but quickly digesting Diabolical Lies. Especially LOVED the Caro episode, and I did, indeed, pause and go read "Yesteryear" over a long weekend recently before finishing the episode. Thanks for the work you do to make women feel seen, understood and considered in our modern world.
I feel this so much. With a less stable consulting business, and "more flexibility" in my schedule by design since our second child was born in 2013, my earning trajectory plateaued as my husband's steadily increased and now we have 2 teens, I contribute about a third financially of what my husband does and constantly feel pressure/desire to earn more, but with nearly no uninterrupted time or domestic support. Add to that I've started volunteering at the school and most of my labor/stress-inducing responsibility is unpaid and yet (and so?) feels less valuable in our family dynamic. It's rough. At the same time though, I'm hitting perimenopause, probably still recovering from burnout I hit in 2023, and have no desire to really be in a 9-5 or trying to succeed in a corporate setting. So lamenting about my situation now, where my husband is fortunate enough to have such a good paying job/career, feels like a very privileged, whiny position to take when I'm not about to start hitting the pavement to work a "real" job.
Meanwhile, while stressing about some volunteer deadlines coming up, my 15 yo son asks me "why do you do so much unpaid labor?" in response to me hedging on being able to take him back to practice after he takes the bus home from school (vs. him just hanging out at school until practice). The irony being that I'm not paid for shuttling him around either. Then the mom guilt of "I should be enjoying this privilege to spend time with my teen (even if it's just sitting next to him in the car while he scrolls his phone) before he leaves the nest forever." Ugh.
Georgiana, I really feel what you're saying here - especially your point on the feeling guilty/whiney/privileged about your situation. I'm in the exact same situation: we made a choice when my oldest was born (almost 19 years ago) that I'd stay home, but at that time, his career was just beginning. It was ROUGH, because I was in a career before kids that really required my being there full-time in person (PR, events, fashion world, etc), so it wasn't practical for me to go back, although I desperately wanted to work, have a business, something part-time/flex. Meanwhile, his income grew, making it less imperative that I earn an income, but my resentment (and shame) grew from not contributing, although, similar to what you said, my husband has always been supportive of whatever I wanted to pursue. In fact, I am writing my memoir now about how I fully lost my identity due not only to becoming a mother, but also because of my feelings around how I contributed financially to the family while also trying to understand and fulfill my own personal ambitions/passions. I came to realize that it's okay that my "work" is my creativity (writing) and my handling 100% of the domestic work/keeping our lives running. No guilt required. It's a work in progress!! Thank you, everyone, for sharing and being so vulnerable about this topic. I'd love to hear more from anyone who resonates. It will help inform my memoir. :)
ugh all of this! Glad you're son is aware of the unpaid labor...I'm dedicated to my Children being more aware early enough to make different decisions in their partnerships someday!
Resonating immensely to this. I’m in that first year of seeing child needs go up + need more flexibility + partners salary exponentially exceeding mine stably yoy equation and having been wondering wait how is this suppose to change and what does this equation look like when my 2and 4 are teens
I had this same dynamic with my now ex partner and eventually retrained so I could support myself financially. then left him and now we are 50:50. But the wage gap never closed and he earns more than double. I so resented doing all the domestic physical and emotional labour and at least now I have every second week childfree to focus on my work and free time hobbies and leisure
Just sending you solidarity, Jess. This is also my reality (more or less) and reading this comment was a gut punch (I mean that in a complimentary way). ♥️
I feel for you, Jess. Could you possibly get into a real estate project that would result in passive income? Eventually the passive income plus your active work could exceed your husband's income, and he could back off work a bit. Obviously not an immediate fix, but an option to work toward.
Tara, I currently have a multi unit rental property, it does produce income and I work very part time after building/developing it...however, with the debt it carries, the REAL payoff wouldn't be for another 10 years where, yes, we could live primarily off my income. This has been a puzzle I've been trying to solve for many years as I know he's burned out. My most recent diagnosis and attempted solution would be for me to sell my business, use the profits (about $300k) to bolster a "Coast FI" of sorts. We have considerable assets (home, retirement) but only recently did I start to explore what this early taking the foot off the gas would look like. I'm 40, my Husband is 39. I think if we can sell my business in the next year, I could pivot to a less overhead way of making money, maybe bring in about 1/3 of what he does, he can slow down a bit and by 45-50 we can start supplementing some income from our Brokerage Account and slow work down as we become empty nesters. I'm weekly re-running scenarios. Our life (once we downsize our house, aren't needing to invest so much or save for kids' future education) will be quite simple actually. With just my Husband and I, we can get by with much less. We just did the whole "suburbia utopia" while our kids have been in school. I think we're about 5 years out from really tipping the scales, as long as we can figure it out, I have a bit more patience in me. I'm working hard to challenge his engagement in our finances, domestic work and some mental load. It's a tricky puzzle. Thanks for your insight too.
I really enjoyed this piece. Thanks for spending time on this.
Your closing point (never having seen a male self-help business book sparked a conversation about flexible schedules and universal childcare) hit hard, and made me reflect a little bit. A few years ago, I read Susan Faludi's Stiffed (1999). It's an interesting companion text to your work here. She argues that the post-WWII promise made to American men (that loyalty, craft, and social utility would be rewarded) was systematically broken by the same corporate forces that now tell women to "start with yourself."
The men she profiles (shipyard workers, aerospace engineers, even Promise Keepers) were betrayed not by feminism but by an economy that discarded them once they stopped being useful. The bitter irony is that the masculine identity crisis Faludi documents (men clinging to consumer culture as a surrogate for lost purpose) is structurally parallel to the burnout memoirs you're describing. Both are symptoms of the same broken compact between individuals and institutions. Yet these two conversations rarely talk to each other.
As for male-ambition narratives that actually address your point: the pickings are remarkably thin. Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People (2018) is probably the closest thing I've seen. He explicitly calls the U.S. lack of family leave "barbaric" and "economically irrational," and folds it into a broader argument for restructuring the economy around human flourishing rather than productivity metrics. His book is framed as policy, not memoir, which, I think, proves your point: men get to make structural arguments without anyone demanding that they first account for their personal relationship to ambition.
Meanwhile, Scott Galloway went on his podcast in February and called dads "mostly a waste of time or space" in a newborn's life and said he's skeptical of mandatory paternity leave. The backlash was significant, but notably, no one questioned whether men should be ambitious at all. The implicit assumption, as you wrote, is that it's not their problem to solve.
Thanks for writing this! The "gap between widespread recognition of what needs to change and the change itself" is a brutal place to live. I think naming it is worth more than the usual recitation of policy proposals.
"An individual desire for achievement is often discussed like it exists in diametric opposition to systemic change"
Love this quote, and it confirms my own feelings/suspicions about recent trends in the motivational women-at-work literature I've been seeing for the past handful of years. As someone who is moderately ambitious, although nowhere near the mythicized Boss Babe, the pendulum swings between extreme ambition and complete burn out are head spinning, and feel a bit drippy with agenda. Surely there is a midpoint here where a woman can have a moderately successful career without either going full silicone valley entrepreneur or burn out completely and stay at home making sourdough bread (I say with love as someone with a sourdough starter) and ultimately not be pathologized. Feels a bit damned if you do, damned if you don't. Lots to think on here and I don't have fully formed thoughts.
I don't have any sort of proposed solution for this, but I did appreciate your balanced look at the situation. And of course, books and articles that push further to one side or the other will generate more clicks and interest, and so will sell better than a nuanced take.
"While the average 30-year-old woman may recognize much of her anxiety about being a working mother is a byproduct of structural failure and social conditioning, this awareness does little to improve her reality, where she must confront that anxiety anew every morning when her alarm goes off and commit to a plan for the day despite it."
Sister, yes. Every day when I look at my calendar (because I have to have everything on the calendar - life would not happen without it), I think how much more efficient my life would be if I didn't have to work outside the home. Running a house and multiple calendars is a full-time job. However, I have to go to work every day while not making enough money to sustain any help inside the home. My husband is retiring from 25 years in the military and can be a stay-at-home husband, but I actively reject that to my core. He's not good at it, and I don't like my job. Then my inner feminist says he'll get good at it, and I have to be a good example to my daughters. UGH!!!! I need tangible takeaways from these memoirs! Not just suggestions from high-net-worth women that can afford to have a staff of people!
as someone who (a) has no children and (b) still pays for household help because it allows me more time to work, i can confirm it makes a fuck ton of difference
Personal flourishing for more people, more fully! Thanks you for putting words to this sentiment. There’s always been some friction for me with the anti-ambition rhetoric. I fully understand pulling back from the workplace due to burnout, but an ambitious person is an ambitious person. If they’re really ambitious, that ambition will manifest elsewhere. One of the capitalist’s broad-level arguments against socialism is that if people don’t have to work hard for their money, then they won’t work hard. I say pish! People work hard at so many things. Ambition manifests in so many ways. Why else do people run marathons, or cultivate crafts, or climb mountains, or organize their communities? Personal fulfillment, yes, but also /working hard feels good/. We like it. The goal of systemic change shouldn’t necessarily be less work, but instead opening doors to doing work we enjoy.
I have a lower stress job with a pretty good schedule (school nurse), my husband is wonderful, there is no deficit on his end as far as home and kids stuff. He's home Mon-Fri, and works the entire weekend, and I work Mon-Fri and am home weekends. Even in this situation, I feel burnt out. I need at least 1 day to myself, I go for walks but I don't exercise otherwise and I need to. I am constantly, actively looking for alternative work situations where I can work as little as possible for same or more $ (beauty of nursing is its flexibility).
I often fight with myself in my brain between "working 5 days a week is f ing terrible I hate this", then I think "I should be grateful, I have a beautiful office and nice coworkers and a good situation, I have a good life". Is it something like the hedonic treadmill of "I can make my life better, I have to figure out a way"?
I'm going to push back on this a little bit, not because it's wrong but because it shares some blind spots and unconscious assumptions with what it criticizes, which is namely: ambition at/for WHAT?
Yes, women are punished/discouraged for displaying the same singlemindedness and drive that is endlessly rewarded and encouraged in men. But part of that - and what both tend to share - is an assumption/belief that 'ambition' is a morally neutral and/or positive trait, detached from any consideration of what that ambition is for. This seems deeply evasive to me; artistic and organizing/activist ambition has some of the same problems and patterns as purely monetary/status ambition, and often are present in the same person, but their end goals are still different in terms of what the individual expects to happen as a result of their ambition - artistic achievement or broader social change is not quite the same thing as individual capital and power accruement.
The 'anti-ambtion' memoirs you critique are obviously opportunistic in some ways, because they're predicated on women 'leaning out' while the male power structure remains in place, but the real issue is that they enable (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) weaponizing a left-wing argument - capital and corporate power is evil and fundamentally hollow - for potentially right wing ends, namely the 'back to the kitchen' argument. Men are not generally being targeted by this argument for many reasons, but the primary one is that the kind of man who believes in capitalist/corporate power would immediately (and correctly) clock it as leftist and spurn it. Part of the 'women are fundamentally moral beings' fallacy is that it's believed that they would be more sympathetic to a pro-social argument on its own merits - they can perhaps be swayed away from atavistic purposes, whereas the only way powerful men can be 'swayed' is to defeat and destroy them, which is obviously a lot more inflammatory.
The 'why are women the only ones expected to care about flexible time/childcare/paid family leave' point reminds me of something Ann Snitow wrote about her ambivalence about being in a 'women's peace organization', because it fed into the stereotype of women as intrinsically maternal and nonviolent, forever appealing to men's better angels - but at the same time, who else was going to do this?
“The kind of man who believes in … power would … spurn [the lean out argument]” + “at the same time, who else was going to do [women’s peace org]?”
I think there’s some blind spots and unconscious assumptions in your own argument, Tyler. It sounds like you’re availing the monolith of men who like power as “able to see through the bullshit argument” while women are trapped in the perpetuation of their own stereotypes. This shows some intrinsic assumptions about gender differences and characteristics that I would like to push back on.
You misunderstand me: I'm not saying men are uniquely able to see through arguments while women are doomed to perpetuate them blindly - I'm saying that society/culture has reasons for what it puts to people. For instance, I do believe that both 'ambitious' men and women alike would benefit from 'leaning out' and to stop seeking power as a goal in and of itself, with men likely to benefit more than women, BECAUSE it's so central to their existence. Unfortunately, society does not WANT highly ambitious men to stop that, and it only wants highly ambitous women to stop as part of a crypto conservative 'self-help' tactic that they can invert again once the cycle starts over. So the actual, defensible leftist argument gets twisted and buried, which was my (perhaps ineptly made) point - I don't know how many real people actually believe what gets sold to them, I'm just saying that the kind of people in charge of what does have their own opinions about it.
I could've worded that 'who else is going to do this' part a little better - I don't mean that women are the only ones with an investment in peace, or that they are doomed to use reactionary arguments in its favor. I just mean that, if you're a woman and want to make a woman's argument for peace, you're often going to have to have a women's group devoted to it. Hopefully, you DON'T end up inadvertantly making those arguments. And I thought this was relevant because, while it IS deeply unfair childcare and family leave are assumed to be 'women's issues' that could and should only be fulfilled to further entrench the woman's role as caregiver, those things still need to happen, not least for the betterment of many real women. So at a certain point, you need to figure out how fulfilling that can be done with a minimum of unintentional reinforcement, but still get done
"I have yet to encounter a self-help business book written by a man that results in a conversation about the legitimacy of advice." That's the whole argument in one sentence. The structural critique is correct and also being used as a mechanism to police women's wanting. We can hold both.
This one really resonated (again!)! It made me pull back out a long-ago bookmarked article from Anne-Marie Slaughter that someone shared with me not long after I had my first kid: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/. Interesting to go back and read it nearly 15 years post-publication. It felt like one of the first, more honest takes I read about the (un)reality of integrating it “all” and the utter myth of being able to find “balance” if I just “leaned in” enough...(side note: I’ve just realized there is a follow-up book to this article that purport to flesh out the argument in a broader landscape than the limited scope of the article/respond to some criticisms and this post has motivated me to buy it).
I find so many women struggling with the issued you flagged and that are being teased out in the comments. This conversation is particularly resonant for me, personally, as I find myself in a period of transition - trying to figure out what to do as I step away from a conventionally successful legal career, in part to focus on my family. Though we cannot seem to find a straightforward or simple path forward in light of the individual, collective, systemic, and cultural headwinds, I do take a bit of solace in feeling - at least within my circle of community - like there is dialogue about it and I’m not alone.
I've got a "What Happens When The Ambition Reckoning Never Comes For Men" google doc that I've been working on for months because YES. The whole time I was researching The Ambition Penalty I was seeing all of these anti-ambition memoirs come out, and thinking who does is it serve to sell women (and women exclusively) on the promise that true freedom, rest, and liberation comes from constraint – through giving up, scaling back and wanting less, while men maintain the vast majority of public power and personal leisure for themselves? But even I did not see the girlboss 2.0 coming...
i wish i could pin this comment
Not only do men maintain the majority of public power, they don't have to do a damn thing to get it in the first place (white men, obvi). No lifestyle changes, no changes at home (besides getting a wife to do all the home things), no juggling.
the fact that it's more power AND more free-time/leisure always gets me!
Definitely. Women are never afforded the same luxury.
fuck yeah plssss pub this. I’ve been wrestling with this having started a company when I was 30 and now almost 40 and it’s been in my opinion wildly successful. Yet this year I’ve been struggling with this bc my husband took a “big” job with travel and stricter starts and ends. And so I became lead parent. We agreed to this bc I wanted to be supportive. I’ve been living my wildest career dreams for a decade; he hasn’t but also bc I was feeling shouldn’t- I want more time for kids creativity rest want less work that I love… but I didn’t. It made me less motivated feel less alive and felt small. So I’m leaning back into work for better or worse term and now it’s just a compression of time always. It all feels messy, full and I’m thinking about ambition and women and care LOTS now
Your final point that a lot of these systemic barriers are in fact most upheld within the domestic structure itself is so spot on. After making the mistake of taking about five years off and letting my husband have the opportunity to be the primary breadwinner once we had our children, we snowballed into a dynamic that we hadn’t fully discussed. His earning power increased and his domestic workload all but disappeared. His stress, his work schedule his self-employment dynamic became the center point of our lives. As I continually expressed how unhappy I was being home full-time, my earning power had decreased, and there was no way that I could reasonably catch up to where he had stumbled into over the past 5+ years. Therefore, his high earning power was, and continues to be the priority in our family. Ultimately, he’s become accustomed to a lifestyle that is not pinched for cash and the option for the tables to turn and me being the one that supports the family, because I inevitably am the one that enjoys work more, means we would have to alter our lifestyle. Something that I fear would breed resentment.
Asking him to do more domestic labor on top of a heavy workload, just for the sake of me not carrying 100% of both the logistical and mental load, has no doubt resulted in tense conversations of “fairness”. All of this coming from a man who is NOT a misogynist, who supports me in all of the ways that he knows how. So if I’m married to a “good” man like this, who still bump up against these barriers, imagine how many women whose partners are far more traditionalist get sucked into a dynamic that they don’t know how to get out of.
We (he) don’t know how to break the cycle of his time essentially being “more valuable” than mine. His stress load being higher than mine, and therefore takes higher priority for things to balance around his orbit. It’s a frustrating place to be.
The crux of it all is that I like to work and he doesn’t really. He just makes too good of money for our family now for us to know how to alter our trajectory. I have largely done project based work which has included chunks of real estate investment. This has caused resentment on his part as well because he feels the weight of paying for my projects up until I get paid. It’s a tricky dynamic.
jess i really appreciate you taking the time to share this -- i expect this dynamic is _very_ common. i was emailing stefanie o'connell this morning (her book 'the ambition penalty' comes out next month; she's in this comments section as well if you want to check out her work) and i was like, even were all our dreams for collective change to become reality tomorrow, unless we culturally adjust our perception of the value of women's time/drive, it's still going to be the mommies headed to pick up the sick kids from universal childcare.
Thanks Katie, appreciate your content! Missing Money With Katie, but quickly digesting Diabolical Lies. Especially LOVED the Caro episode, and I did, indeed, pause and go read "Yesteryear" over a long weekend recently before finishing the episode. Thanks for the work you do to make women feel seen, understood and considered in our modern world.
I feel this so much. With a less stable consulting business, and "more flexibility" in my schedule by design since our second child was born in 2013, my earning trajectory plateaued as my husband's steadily increased and now we have 2 teens, I contribute about a third financially of what my husband does and constantly feel pressure/desire to earn more, but with nearly no uninterrupted time or domestic support. Add to that I've started volunteering at the school and most of my labor/stress-inducing responsibility is unpaid and yet (and so?) feels less valuable in our family dynamic. It's rough. At the same time though, I'm hitting perimenopause, probably still recovering from burnout I hit in 2023, and have no desire to really be in a 9-5 or trying to succeed in a corporate setting. So lamenting about my situation now, where my husband is fortunate enough to have such a good paying job/career, feels like a very privileged, whiny position to take when I'm not about to start hitting the pavement to work a "real" job.
Meanwhile, while stressing about some volunteer deadlines coming up, my 15 yo son asks me "why do you do so much unpaid labor?" in response to me hedging on being able to take him back to practice after he takes the bus home from school (vs. him just hanging out at school until practice). The irony being that I'm not paid for shuttling him around either. Then the mom guilt of "I should be enjoying this privilege to spend time with my teen (even if it's just sitting next to him in the car while he scrolls his phone) before he leaves the nest forever." Ugh.
Georgiana, I really feel what you're saying here - especially your point on the feeling guilty/whiney/privileged about your situation. I'm in the exact same situation: we made a choice when my oldest was born (almost 19 years ago) that I'd stay home, but at that time, his career was just beginning. It was ROUGH, because I was in a career before kids that really required my being there full-time in person (PR, events, fashion world, etc), so it wasn't practical for me to go back, although I desperately wanted to work, have a business, something part-time/flex. Meanwhile, his income grew, making it less imperative that I earn an income, but my resentment (and shame) grew from not contributing, although, similar to what you said, my husband has always been supportive of whatever I wanted to pursue. In fact, I am writing my memoir now about how I fully lost my identity due not only to becoming a mother, but also because of my feelings around how I contributed financially to the family while also trying to understand and fulfill my own personal ambitions/passions. I came to realize that it's okay that my "work" is my creativity (writing) and my handling 100% of the domestic work/keeping our lives running. No guilt required. It's a work in progress!! Thank you, everyone, for sharing and being so vulnerable about this topic. I'd love to hear more from anyone who resonates. It will help inform my memoir. :)
ugh all of this! Glad you're son is aware of the unpaid labor...I'm dedicated to my Children being more aware early enough to make different decisions in their partnerships someday!
Resonating immensely to this. I’m in that first year of seeing child needs go up + need more flexibility + partners salary exponentially exceeding mine stably yoy equation and having been wondering wait how is this suppose to change and what does this equation look like when my 2and 4 are teens
Exactly this!
I had this same dynamic with my now ex partner and eventually retrained so I could support myself financially. then left him and now we are 50:50. But the wage gap never closed and he earns more than double. I so resented doing all the domestic physical and emotional labour and at least now I have every second week childfree to focus on my work and free time hobbies and leisure
Happy you’ve found the balance you needed!
Just sending you solidarity, Jess. This is also my reality (more or less) and reading this comment was a gut punch (I mean that in a complimentary way). ♥️
Bummer eh? Have you moved toward any solutions?
I feel for you, Jess. Could you possibly get into a real estate project that would result in passive income? Eventually the passive income plus your active work could exceed your husband's income, and he could back off work a bit. Obviously not an immediate fix, but an option to work toward.
Tara, I currently have a multi unit rental property, it does produce income and I work very part time after building/developing it...however, with the debt it carries, the REAL payoff wouldn't be for another 10 years where, yes, we could live primarily off my income. This has been a puzzle I've been trying to solve for many years as I know he's burned out. My most recent diagnosis and attempted solution would be for me to sell my business, use the profits (about $300k) to bolster a "Coast FI" of sorts. We have considerable assets (home, retirement) but only recently did I start to explore what this early taking the foot off the gas would look like. I'm 40, my Husband is 39. I think if we can sell my business in the next year, I could pivot to a less overhead way of making money, maybe bring in about 1/3 of what he does, he can slow down a bit and by 45-50 we can start supplementing some income from our Brokerage Account and slow work down as we become empty nesters. I'm weekly re-running scenarios. Our life (once we downsize our house, aren't needing to invest so much or save for kids' future education) will be quite simple actually. With just my Husband and I, we can get by with much less. We just did the whole "suburbia utopia" while our kids have been in school. I think we're about 5 years out from really tipping the scales, as long as we can figure it out, I have a bit more patience in me. I'm working hard to challenge his engagement in our finances, domestic work and some mental load. It's a tricky puzzle. Thanks for your insight too.
Wow, you have an incredible amount of capacity. Seriously, I'm blown away by all you're holding. Your husband is lucky to have you.
Does anyone else read Katie's blogs for the vocab word practice alone?
1000% … I am constantly looking up new to me words.
Katie!
I really enjoyed this piece. Thanks for spending time on this.
Your closing point (never having seen a male self-help business book sparked a conversation about flexible schedules and universal childcare) hit hard, and made me reflect a little bit. A few years ago, I read Susan Faludi's Stiffed (1999). It's an interesting companion text to your work here. She argues that the post-WWII promise made to American men (that loyalty, craft, and social utility would be rewarded) was systematically broken by the same corporate forces that now tell women to "start with yourself."
The men she profiles (shipyard workers, aerospace engineers, even Promise Keepers) were betrayed not by feminism but by an economy that discarded them once they stopped being useful. The bitter irony is that the masculine identity crisis Faludi documents (men clinging to consumer culture as a surrogate for lost purpose) is structurally parallel to the burnout memoirs you're describing. Both are symptoms of the same broken compact between individuals and institutions. Yet these two conversations rarely talk to each other.
As for male-ambition narratives that actually address your point: the pickings are remarkably thin. Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People (2018) is probably the closest thing I've seen. He explicitly calls the U.S. lack of family leave "barbaric" and "economically irrational," and folds it into a broader argument for restructuring the economy around human flourishing rather than productivity metrics. His book is framed as policy, not memoir, which, I think, proves your point: men get to make structural arguments without anyone demanding that they first account for their personal relationship to ambition.
Meanwhile, Scott Galloway went on his podcast in February and called dads "mostly a waste of time or space" in a newborn's life and said he's skeptical of mandatory paternity leave. The backlash was significant, but notably, no one questioned whether men should be ambitious at all. The implicit assumption, as you wrote, is that it's not their problem to solve.
Thanks for writing this! The "gap between widespread recognition of what needs to change and the change itself" is a brutal place to live. I think naming it is worth more than the usual recitation of policy proposals.
Richard
"An individual desire for achievement is often discussed like it exists in diametric opposition to systemic change"
Love this quote, and it confirms my own feelings/suspicions about recent trends in the motivational women-at-work literature I've been seeing for the past handful of years. As someone who is moderately ambitious, although nowhere near the mythicized Boss Babe, the pendulum swings between extreme ambition and complete burn out are head spinning, and feel a bit drippy with agenda. Surely there is a midpoint here where a woman can have a moderately successful career without either going full silicone valley entrepreneur or burn out completely and stay at home making sourdough bread (I say with love as someone with a sourdough starter) and ultimately not be pathologized. Feels a bit damned if you do, damned if you don't. Lots to think on here and I don't have fully formed thoughts.
I don't have any sort of proposed solution for this, but I did appreciate your balanced look at the situation. And of course, books and articles that push further to one side or the other will generate more clicks and interest, and so will sell better than a nuanced take.
"feel a bit drippy with agenda" is how i felt too! thank you for reading
"While the average 30-year-old woman may recognize much of her anxiety about being a working mother is a byproduct of structural failure and social conditioning, this awareness does little to improve her reality, where she must confront that anxiety anew every morning when her alarm goes off and commit to a plan for the day despite it."
Sister, yes. Every day when I look at my calendar (because I have to have everything on the calendar - life would not happen without it), I think how much more efficient my life would be if I didn't have to work outside the home. Running a house and multiple calendars is a full-time job. However, I have to go to work every day while not making enough money to sustain any help inside the home. My husband is retiring from 25 years in the military and can be a stay-at-home husband, but I actively reject that to my core. He's not good at it, and I don't like my job. Then my inner feminist says he'll get good at it, and I have to be a good example to my daughters. UGH!!!! I need tangible takeaways from these memoirs! Not just suggestions from high-net-worth women that can afford to have a staff of people!
as someone who (a) has no children and (b) still pays for household help because it allows me more time to work, i can confirm it makes a fuck ton of difference
Reminds me of Ali Wong’s bit about “do you know how much more successful I’d be if I had a wife?”
haha, I wouldn't be opposed to a domestic partnership with a fellow female. Under the surface is the battle cry to my partner, "get on my level!"
I've let my husband know that I'm not opposed to a sister wife.
This is a really fantastic, nuanced take.
wow, thank you mae!
Great review of Emma Grede's book - I have just downloaded it and will listen this weekend.
Personal flourishing for more people, more fully! Thanks you for putting words to this sentiment. There’s always been some friction for me with the anti-ambition rhetoric. I fully understand pulling back from the workplace due to burnout, but an ambitious person is an ambitious person. If they’re really ambitious, that ambition will manifest elsewhere. One of the capitalist’s broad-level arguments against socialism is that if people don’t have to work hard for their money, then they won’t work hard. I say pish! People work hard at so many things. Ambition manifests in so many ways. Why else do people run marathons, or cultivate crafts, or climb mountains, or organize their communities? Personal fulfillment, yes, but also /working hard feels good/. We like it. The goal of systemic change shouldn’t necessarily be less work, but instead opening doors to doing work we enjoy.
Petition to rename Diabolical Lies “Damned Whores and God’s Police”
next tee and tote 💁🏻♀️
I have a lower stress job with a pretty good schedule (school nurse), my husband is wonderful, there is no deficit on his end as far as home and kids stuff. He's home Mon-Fri, and works the entire weekend, and I work Mon-Fri and am home weekends. Even in this situation, I feel burnt out. I need at least 1 day to myself, I go for walks but I don't exercise otherwise and I need to. I am constantly, actively looking for alternative work situations where I can work as little as possible for same or more $ (beauty of nursing is its flexibility).
I often fight with myself in my brain between "working 5 days a week is f ing terrible I hate this", then I think "I should be grateful, I have a beautiful office and nice coworkers and a good situation, I have a good life". Is it something like the hedonic treadmill of "I can make my life better, I have to figure out a way"?
I'm going to push back on this a little bit, not because it's wrong but because it shares some blind spots and unconscious assumptions with what it criticizes, which is namely: ambition at/for WHAT?
Yes, women are punished/discouraged for displaying the same singlemindedness and drive that is endlessly rewarded and encouraged in men. But part of that - and what both tend to share - is an assumption/belief that 'ambition' is a morally neutral and/or positive trait, detached from any consideration of what that ambition is for. This seems deeply evasive to me; artistic and organizing/activist ambition has some of the same problems and patterns as purely monetary/status ambition, and often are present in the same person, but their end goals are still different in terms of what the individual expects to happen as a result of their ambition - artistic achievement or broader social change is not quite the same thing as individual capital and power accruement.
The 'anti-ambtion' memoirs you critique are obviously opportunistic in some ways, because they're predicated on women 'leaning out' while the male power structure remains in place, but the real issue is that they enable (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) weaponizing a left-wing argument - capital and corporate power is evil and fundamentally hollow - for potentially right wing ends, namely the 'back to the kitchen' argument. Men are not generally being targeted by this argument for many reasons, but the primary one is that the kind of man who believes in capitalist/corporate power would immediately (and correctly) clock it as leftist and spurn it. Part of the 'women are fundamentally moral beings' fallacy is that it's believed that they would be more sympathetic to a pro-social argument on its own merits - they can perhaps be swayed away from atavistic purposes, whereas the only way powerful men can be 'swayed' is to defeat and destroy them, which is obviously a lot more inflammatory.
The 'why are women the only ones expected to care about flexible time/childcare/paid family leave' point reminds me of something Ann Snitow wrote about her ambivalence about being in a 'women's peace organization', because it fed into the stereotype of women as intrinsically maternal and nonviolent, forever appealing to men's better angels - but at the same time, who else was going to do this?
“The kind of man who believes in … power would … spurn [the lean out argument]” + “at the same time, who else was going to do [women’s peace org]?”
I think there’s some blind spots and unconscious assumptions in your own argument, Tyler. It sounds like you’re availing the monolith of men who like power as “able to see through the bullshit argument” while women are trapped in the perpetuation of their own stereotypes. This shows some intrinsic assumptions about gender differences and characteristics that I would like to push back on.
You misunderstand me: I'm not saying men are uniquely able to see through arguments while women are doomed to perpetuate them blindly - I'm saying that society/culture has reasons for what it puts to people. For instance, I do believe that both 'ambitious' men and women alike would benefit from 'leaning out' and to stop seeking power as a goal in and of itself, with men likely to benefit more than women, BECAUSE it's so central to their existence. Unfortunately, society does not WANT highly ambitious men to stop that, and it only wants highly ambitous women to stop as part of a crypto conservative 'self-help' tactic that they can invert again once the cycle starts over. So the actual, defensible leftist argument gets twisted and buried, which was my (perhaps ineptly made) point - I don't know how many real people actually believe what gets sold to them, I'm just saying that the kind of people in charge of what does have their own opinions about it.
I could've worded that 'who else is going to do this' part a little better - I don't mean that women are the only ones with an investment in peace, or that they are doomed to use reactionary arguments in its favor. I just mean that, if you're a woman and want to make a woman's argument for peace, you're often going to have to have a women's group devoted to it. Hopefully, you DON'T end up inadvertantly making those arguments. And I thought this was relevant because, while it IS deeply unfair childcare and family leave are assumed to be 'women's issues' that could and should only be fulfilled to further entrench the woman's role as caregiver, those things still need to happen, not least for the betterment of many real women. So at a certain point, you need to figure out how fulfilling that can be done with a minimum of unintentional reinforcement, but still get done
"I have yet to encounter a self-help business book written by a man that results in a conversation about the legitimacy of advice." That's the whole argument in one sentence. The structural critique is correct and also being used as a mechanism to police women's wanting. We can hold both.
I am taking this as permission to start devouring female hustle culture media again, thanks Katie!!
Thank you for including my book! Also obsessed with this topic.
This one really resonated (again!)! It made me pull back out a long-ago bookmarked article from Anne-Marie Slaughter that someone shared with me not long after I had my first kid: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/. Interesting to go back and read it nearly 15 years post-publication. It felt like one of the first, more honest takes I read about the (un)reality of integrating it “all” and the utter myth of being able to find “balance” if I just “leaned in” enough...(side note: I’ve just realized there is a follow-up book to this article that purport to flesh out the argument in a broader landscape than the limited scope of the article/respond to some criticisms and this post has motivated me to buy it).
I find so many women struggling with the issued you flagged and that are being teased out in the comments. This conversation is particularly resonant for me, personally, as I find myself in a period of transition - trying to figure out what to do as I step away from a conventionally successful legal career, in part to focus on my family. Though we cannot seem to find a straightforward or simple path forward in light of the individual, collective, systemic, and cultural headwinds, I do take a bit of solace in feeling - at least within my circle of community - like there is dialogue about it and I’m not alone.