Reframing Ambition
5 minute read
Clare Booth Luce was an early 20th-century playwright and politician, a woman of wit, intelligence and social standing. She once insightfully said: “Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’” This made me think about the extraordinary pressures placed on ambitious women. To fail is to disappoint not only yourself, but the entire ‘sisterhood’. Very few of us can carry the expectations of an entire subset of the population on our shoulders and expect to succeed.
Except former tennis champion Billie Jean King that is. I read an interview with the 77-year-old in The Sunday Times Magazine last weekend, which described the 1973 ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis match in which she competed against fellow player Bobby Rigg. The 55-year-old had previously proclaimed that women were inferior, couldn’t handle the pressure of the game, and that he could beat any female player of any age. King wiped the floor with him in three straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The match was attended by 30,000 spectators, watched by 50 million television viewers, and became a kind of poster event for women’s rights, which raised the stakes exponentially.
But King succeeded despite the intense pressure and scrutiny. Perhaps elite athletes, then, can shoulder the stress of representing a generation of expectation, but I know I couldn’t. On the flip side, I imagine Hillary Clinton felt she had let down not simply every American woman who had voted for her, but every single one of her female supporters around the world when she lost the 2016 US presidential election. This must have felt almost as crushing as losing to Donald Trump.
It seems to me that having ambition is a far less complex matter for men. It’s not something they have to identify within themselves, come to terms with or apologise for. For women, there are layers of considerations involved in embracing this aspect of our personalities. What sacrifices will I have to make? How will I be viewed? Do I need to behave differently? Will I alienate my peers or my seniors? In 2019, Forbes reported on a Columbia Business School study in which a class of students were presented with the same study, but half of those studies used the name Heidi while the other half used the name Howard. “The students rated Heidi and Howard equally competent, but while they liked Howard, they didn’t like Heidi,” explained the article.
We all know that ambition in women is considered by many to be an unattractive quality, but it’s still shocking to see this so firmly reinforced in an official study. It’s not surprising then that American politician Stacey Abrams – the first black woman to be nominated by a major political party for the role of governor in 2018 – once announced: “[Women] should have aggressive and wild ambitions that are only anchored by plans, not by doubts.” I think her choice of language here is poignant. I think she specifically uses the term aggressive, which is frequently flung at ambitious women the way stones were at prostitutes thousands of years ago, to normalise its association with our gender. Wild is another interesting choice of words because it’s always been socially acceptable for boys to be wild as children, but not girls.
Women are entitled to their ambition, just as men should be permitted to step back from theirs if that’s what they wish. On both sides of the gender divide, men and women are still somewhat boxed into archetypal notions of male and female.
Part of the solution too, though, is to look at how ambition is defined. Often for women, it’s about breaking glass ceilings and becoming the ‘first’ so that you won’t be the last (as Kamala Harris famously put it), but is this actually how we as women frame ambition in our minds?
Some of us do, certainly (although not me I should add). But not every woman has this same benchmark for achievement and success. In the same way that workplaces are finally looking for diversity of employees, so too they should be welcoming diversity of ambition. We’re not all striving for the top job. Many of us want to work with great people on interesting projects, have flexible hours and earn a decent income. Is this less lofty? Less worthy of support by companies? Does this not qualify as ambition? A few years ago, a former colleague of mine returned to her full-time job in media after having had her second child, looking for flexibility, but was refused it. The only solution for her was to leave the company. Still an incredibly ambitious woman, she now runs a successful PR company, but because she looked for an alternative work model to the traditional 9-5, she was written off as not committed.
Part of the reason why ambition has historically been seen as ‘unnatural’ for women is because it quite simply hasn’t been facilitated, just as it wasn’t for this former colleague. It’s staggering to think that the ban on married women working persisted in Ireland until 1973. In more recent times, an enormous 43% of women have taken a career break to care for children or elderly parents, according to Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. Is it any wonder that female role models in traditionally male roles have been thin on the ground over the years? We’re only human after all.
The definition of ambition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which reads “an ardent desire for rank, fame or power” (I think this must have been written by a male lexicographer), seems anachronistic now. As women, we need to give ourselves permission to demonstrate our ambition in a myriad of ways and to be proud of it, whether it takes the shape of a top job or a flexible one. A friend of mine left Dublin a few years ago and now works freelance from her new home, a converted schoolhouse in the country. This is my ambition – to live and work in a beautiful place on my own terms. I’d take her life over Anna Wintour’s any day of the week. Does this make me unambitious? I don’t think so. Ambition, I think, can be viewed from a micro perspective as well as a macro. I strive to create the best piece of work I can with every project I take on. I think that’s a very worthy ambition. It’s not showy and it’s not trailblazing, but it’s one I have absolute control over, which gives me great comfort. My success is in nobody else’s hands but my own.
When writing about women and the workplace, I often reference the 1980s film Baby Boom because the tale it tells is as resonant today as it was 40 years ago. Diane Keaton, who is on the path to a partnership, is forced out of her job when she’s saddled (this is how she initially sees it) with the baby of a distant relative. It demonstrates firmly that to be a mother and succeed in the corporate world requires much more than just ambition. It requires a supportive partner, a trustworthy childminder, a housekeeper, and compliant children. Something men have traditionally always had in the form of their wives.
Even if you had all of this extra assistance, it might increase your career success, but it could damage your domestic bliss, because according to a 2020 article in The Atlantic, a study in Sweden revealed that “certain kinds of promotions nearly double the rate of divorce for women, but not for men.”
This is yet another pressure that’s placed on ambitious women; to take responsibility for holding the family unit together and not to ‘disappoint’ their partner. If women prioritise a career, they’re seen as neglecting their family, if a man does, he’s perceived as providing for his.
Sheryl Sandberg succinctly summed up everything I’ve tried to explore in this piece when she remarked: “We can each define ambition and progress for ourselves. The goal is to work toward a world where expectations are not set by the stereotypes that hold us back, but by our personal passion, talents and interest.” Exactly.
Marie Kelly, August 2021
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