Women: It’s OK To Be Ambitious

Why do so many women shy away from that word?

What of women’s ambitions? What have women been taught about ambition? How are ambitious women portrayed? What do women think about their own ambitions?

It seems many women have a conflicted relationship with the word ‘ambition’.

Can we begin by stating clearly and confidently that there is nothing at all wrong with ambition?

It took me a long time to embrace my own ambitious nature. In fact, for a long time, I didn’t understand myself to be ambitious. And if I had, I might have thought that was a bad thing to be.

As psychiatrist Anna Fels discovered in her research into Women and Ambition,

“I soon came to realize that although the articulate, educated group of women I interviewed could cogently and calmly talk about topics ranging from money to sex, when the subject of ambition arose, the level of intensity took a quantum leap. …For them, ‘ambition’ necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends.”

It is time to stop this way of thinking and begin to celebrate ambition in women the same as we do in men.

Leaving gender aside, what is ambition? A drive to express something one feels inside — to get it out — to create, to actualize a vision, a dream.

Ambition is a push from within that utilizes our will forces. We have to work hard to actualize an ambition and yet the ambition itself often makes us willing to do that work.

Often ambition can make us feel that we cannot not do the work. In that way, it is a gift. It motivates us, makes us strive for the seemingly impossible.

Why is it then, that is has, and continues to be, difficult for a woman to own her own ambition?

“…clearly these accomplished women were caught up in some sort of fear. But of what?”

Social conditioning teaches women that being ambitious is a negative thing to be. Surely we have all heard comments about other women, “She’s so ambitious,” said in and derogatory and shaming way, that lets us know it is frowned upon. Or we have been asked directly, “Why do you have to be so ambitious?”

If she were a man, would anyone ever say or ask that?

It’s crazy that in 2022, women still face these kinds of microaggressions, but they really do.

Fels writes that the data shows that

“It is difficult for women to confront and address the unspoken mandate that they subordinate needs for recognition to those of others — particularly men. The expectation is so deeply rooted in the culture’s ideals of femininity that it is largely unconscious.”

Far from celebrating their many achievements, women

“refuse to claim a central, purposeful place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition. Furthermore, on close inspection, it emerges that it’s not only women of achievement who anxiously work to relinquish recognition — it’s nearly all women. Studies have demonstrated that the daily texture of women’s lives from childhood on is infiltrated with micro encounters in which quiet withdrawal and the ceding of available attention to others in expected — particularly in the presence of men.”

So how about we stop this nonsense and begin to embrace our own ambition and celebrate it on our women friends when we see it.

And for anyone reading this: I see your ambition and I praise it.

© Theresa C. Dintino