6/27/09

 

Harvard Business Review Online | Do Women Lack Ambition? http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0404/articl...
 
Do Women Lack Ambition?

For women—far more than for men—the decision to pursue an interest is reconsidered repeatedly and often abandoned. To realize their dreams, women need to understand why they are willing to walk away from them.
by Anna Fels

Anna Fels is a psychiatrist and a faculty member at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College in New York. This article is adapted from her book, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives (Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.).

“I wondered, before I came here, whether I was going to confess to you
this secret I’ve had since I was seven. I haven’t even told my husband
about it.” The woman across from me, a journalist in her forties, paused
and looked at me intently, trying to decide whether she should go on.
Sitting there under her worried gaze, I wondered where we were going
with this. As a psychiatrist, I’m used to hearing the most improbable
and even lurid of personal revelations. But this woman was not a
patient. She was a friend of a friend, who had kindly agreed to let me
interview her. It was actually the first in a series of exploratory
discussions I had scheduled as a start to my research on ambition in
women’s lives, and I had already found myself in unfamiliar territory.
How had my seemingly straightforward question about childhood goals
elicited a long-hidden secret?

The journalist looked at me uncertainly but continued. “When I was
about seven, I had a notebook at school, and I would write poems and
stories in it and illustrate them.…I had this acronym that was like magic,
like a secret pact with myself. I didn’t even tell my sisters its meaning.
It was IWBF—I Will Be Famous.” She broke into nervous laughter. “Oh
my God, I can’t believe I told you. You must understand: I didn’t want
to be recognized in the streets. My pact was tied up with writing and
being recognized for it. I’m sure it was tied up with my father’s approval
and the literary world he operated in.”

This was the long-held secret? Not sex, lies, or videotape, but an odd
incantation from childhood? It was the first of what were to be many
lessons for me on how hidden and emotion laden the subject of ambition
is for women. 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.

In fact, the women I interviewed hated the very word. For them,
“ambition” necessarily implied egotism, selfishness,
self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own
ends. None of them would admit to being ambitious. Instead, the
constant refrain was “It’s not me; it’s the work.” “It’s not about me; it’s
about helping children.” “I hate to promote myself. I’d rather be in my
workshop alone.” You could write off such comments as social
convention or mere window dressing if it weren’t for two facts. First, men simply do not talk this way. (Quite the contrary: The men I interviewed considered ambition a necessary and desirable part of their lives.) Second, the statements weren’t tossed off casually. Clearly, these accomplished women were caught up in some sort of fear. But of what?

 

The Two Faces of Ambition

As I tried to sort through the diverse responses to my questions and to
home in on the aspect of ambition that made these women so
uncomfortable, I realized I needed to backtrack. First I had to
understand what ambition consisted of—for men and for women.
In psychiatry, as in most branches of science, the study of a complex
phenomenon often begins with researchers tracing it to its earliest,
simplest form. So I decided to review the childhood ambitions recalled
by the women I had interviewed. Compared with the wordy, ambivalent
responses these women had given about their current ambitions, their
childhood ambitions were direct and clear. They had a delightfully
unapologetic sense of grandiosity and limitless possibility. Each of the
women had pictured herself in an important role: a great American
novelist, an Olympic figure skater, a famous actress, president of the
United States, a fashion designer, a rock star, a diplomat.
In nearly all of the childhood ambitions, two undisguised elements were
joined together. One was mastery of a special skill: writing, dancing,
acting, diplomacy. The other was recognition: attention from an
appreciative audience. Looking through studies on the development of
both boys and girls, I noticed that they virtually always identified the
same two components of childhood ambition. There was a plan that
involved a real accomplishment requiring work and skill, and there was
an expectation of approval in the form of fame, status, acclaim, praise,
or honor.

That the first of these—mastery—was fundamental to ambition seemed
nearly incontrovertible. Without mastery, a picture of the future isn’t an
ambition; it’s simply wishful thinking. (You may desperately want to win
the lottery, but that’s not an ambition.) Approximately half a century
after Freud postulated his “drive theory” of motivation based on sex and
aggression, researchers and theoreticians alike realized that a huge
portion of behavior simply could not be explained in those terms. Jean
Piaget and other developmental psychologists who focused on children’s
need to master both intellectual and motor tasks discovered that
children would repeat a task over and over until they could predict and
determine the outcome. Theorists such as Erik Erikson began to posit
that at a certain stage, children develop a “sense of industry,” or the
need to do things well, even perfectly. Robert White, one of the seminal
investigators of motivation, named this drive toward mastery
“effectance.” “It is characteristic of this particular sort of activity,” White
noted, “that it is selective, directed, and persistent, and that an
instrumental act will be learned for the sole reward of engaging in it.”
In Frank Conroy’s classic memoir of his childhood, Stop-Time, the
author captures the sheer joy that children, like adults, take in mastery.
The young Conroy becomes fascinated with the yo-yo and painstakingly
works through a book of tricks, practicing hour after hour in the woods
near his house:

“The greatest pleasure in yo-yoing was an abstract pleasure—watching
the dramatization of simple physical laws, and realizing they would
never fail if a trick was done correctly.…I remember the first time I did a
particularly lovely trick.…My pleasure at that moment was as much from
the beauty of the experiment as from pride.”

 

Doing a thing well can be a reward in and of itself. The delight provided
by the skill repays the effort of learning it. But the pursuit of mastery
over an extended period of time requires a specific context: An
evaluating, encouraging audience must be present for skills to develop.
Conroy, in the same childhood scene, rushes off to show his new
yo-yoing expertise to his friends and to two particularly proficient older
boys. It is vital for the expertise to be recognized by others.
We are not used to thinking of recognition as a fundamental emotional
need, particularly in adulthood. It’s nice when you get it, but if you
don’t, it’s not the end of the world—life goes on. We even tend to look
down on those whose eagerness for recognition is too obvious, too
pressing. And in truth, some people have needs for recognition that are
exaggerated and nearly insatiable; they require constant infusions of
admiration to maintain their tenuous sense of self-worth. In psychiatry,
such individuals are called narcissists.

But multiple areas of research have demonstrated that recognition is
one of the motivational engines that drives the development of almost
any type of skill. Far from being a pleasant but largely inessential
response, it is one of the most basic of human requirements. We all
want our efforts and accomplishments to be acknowledged.
In the typical learning cycle, recognition fuels the next stage of learning.
The early-learning theorist Albert Bandura was clear on this point:
“Young children imitate accurately when they have incentives to do so,
but their imitations deteriorate rapidly if others do not care how they
behave.”

And what’s true in childhood is no less true in later life. Research has
confirmed that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the acquisition of
expertise requires recognition. A rare longitudinal study by the
renowned psychologist Jerome Kagan looked specifically at this issue.
He and his coauthor, Howard Moss, examined the relationship between
“the tendency to strive for a mastery of selected skills (achievement
behavior) and social recognition through acquisition of specific goals or
behaviors.” They followed a cohort from childhood through adulthood,
and at the end of this massive project concluded that there was a high
positive correlation between mastery and recognition. According to
Kagan and Moss, “it may be impossible to measure the ‘desire to
improve a skill’ independent of the individual’s ‘desire for recognition.’ ”
Without earned affirmation, long-term learning and performance are
rarely achieved. Ambitions are both the product of and, later on, the
source of affirmation.

What’s Dashing Women’s Dreams?

There is no evidence that the desires to acquire skills and to receive
affirmation for accomplishments are less present in women than in men.
So why is it that we find such dramatic differences between men and
women in their attitudes toward ambition and in how they create,
reconfigure, and realize (or abandon) their goals?

One clue to the pressures that contemporary women experience in
connection with their ambitions can be found in the stories that
unusually successful women tell about their lives. In their best-selling
book See Jane Win: The Rimm Report on How 1,000 Girls Became
Successful Women, Sylvia Rimm and her coauthors, after profiling a
state senator, remark with puzzlement, “[The senator], like many of the
women of our study, attributes much of her success to luck.” In another chapter, the authors quote an eminent female chairman of a department
of medicine as concluding, “Everything has been rather serendipitous.
None of what I’ve described to you was planned.…I was able to get good
positions and good things just happened.” An interview from a women’s
magazine with one of the most famous women architects in America
revealed the intensity of the woman’s dread about receiving attention.
The magazine reported: “Laurinda Spear is so riddled with anxiety about
the way she might come across in print that she endlessly repeats the
same self-deprecating refrain: ‘Can’t you just say that I’m this totally
bumbling person?’”

One could chalk up these demurrals (and I heard many of them in my
own interviews) to women’s innate modesty or even see them as a sly
way of highlighting their achievements. But the fear, at times verging on
panic, that women express when they are personally recognized for
their work belies this interpretation.

It seems paradoxical. Women have gained hard-won access to training
in nearly all fields, and this type of expertise can bring enormous
satisfaction. But far from celebrating their achievements in newly
available professions, women too frequently seek to deflect attention
from themselves. They 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
microencounters in which quiet withdrawal and the ceding of available
attention to others is expected—particularly in the presence of men.
Women refuse to claim a central, purposeful place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition.

It’s tempting to conclude, as many have, that women aren’t actually
deferring to others when they remove themselves from the spotlight;
they’re just intrinsically different in their needs and style. Women, after
all, may just be less interested in personal attention than men. Or
maybe they simply don’t care about the types of recognition that men
strive for. It has been suggested, for example, that women have a
greater capacity for empathy than men, making it more painful for them
not to gratify the wishes of others or relinquish coveted resources. (And
recognition is nothing if not a coveted social resource.)

The belief that women’s deferential behavior with regard to recognition
is “natural” has not held up in the extensive research on gender that has
been conducted since the 1970s. By and large, the research has
suggested that to a significant degree, such behavior varies according to
social context: Girls and women more openly seek and compete for
affirmation when they are with other women—for example, in sports or
in all-girl academic settings. They have no difficulty aggressively
pursuing roles that complement rather than compete with males (such
as trying out for a female acting part, a modeling career, or a singing
group). But they change their behaviors when it comes to competing
directly with men.

Intuitively, we know this is true. As the recent best seller The Rules:
Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right tells women,
“Don’t be a loud, knee-slapping, hysterically funny girl. This is O.K.
when you’re alone with your girlfriend. But when you’re with a man you
like, be quiet and mysterious.…Don’t talk so much.…Look into his eyes, be attentive and a good listener so he knows you are a caring being—a
person who would make a supportive wife.” The book later
acknowledges, “Of course, this is not how you really feel. This is how
you pretend to feel until it feels real.”

 

Hidden Barriers

Although women are no longer denied access to training in most types
of careers, they have come up against what seems to be an even more
powerful barrier to their ambitions. In both the public and the private
spheres, white, middle-class women are facing the reality that in order
to be seen as feminine, they must provide or relinquish
resources—including recognition—to others. 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.

In the psychological instruments used for studies of gender, however,
such expectations are made explicit. The most famous and widely
applied psychological measure of femininity (as well as of masculinity
and androgyny) is the revised Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). The test
includes 60 descriptive adjectives—20 masculine traits, 20 feminine
traits, and 20 neutral traits—that subjects use to rate themselves. These
traits were originally chosen from 200 personality characteristics by 100
male and female undergraduates at Stanford University in the 1970s.
The students, mostly white and middle-class, were asked to rank the
desirability of these traits for men and women in American society. The
traits chosen to define femininity in the BSRI are: yielding, loyal,
cheerful, compassionate, shy, sympathetic, affectionate, sensitive to the
needs of others, flatterable, understanding, eager to soothe hurt
feelings, soft-spoken, warm, tender, gullible, childlike, does not use
harsh language, loves children, gentle, and (somewhat redundantly)
femininity.

Reading through these adjectives, two basic tenets of femininity
emerge. The first is that femininity exists only in the context of a
relationship. A woman’s sexual identity is based on qualities that can’t
be expressed in isolation. To quote the author Jane Smiley, “Does a
woman alone in a dark room feel like a woman?…How about a woman
reading a book or climbing mountains?”

The second tenet that emerges from the BSRI adjectives is that a
woman must be providing something for the other person, be that
person a lover, a child, a sick parent, a husband, or even a boss. Giving
is the chief activity that defines femininity. This may help explain why
professional women are credited with being highly supportive managers
and excellent team players. By focusing their energy on these aspects of
work life, women can be both businesslike and feminine.

Near the top of the list of resources that women are asked to provide is
recognition. They are asked both to supply personal recognition for their
husbands and to relinquish recognition in the work sphere to the men
with whom they work. When women speak as much as men in a work
situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity routinely assailed. They are caricatured as either asexual and unattractive or promiscuous and seductive. Something must be wrong with their sexuality.

Masculinity, by contrast, is defined neither by relationships nor by what
men provide for others—except financially. One can be masculine in
solitary splendor. The BSRI adjectives that describe masculinity are:
self-reliant, strong personality, forceful, independent, analytical, defends
one’s beliefs, athletic, assertive, has leadership abilities, willing to take
risks, makes decisions easily, self-sufficient, dominant, willing to take a
stand, aggressive, acts as a leader, individualistic, competitive,
ambitious. (“Masculinity” is the twentieth trait.) The “other” appears in
these adjectives chiefly as someone against or over whom the man
must assert himself. Not only can a man be solitary and masculine, but
if he’s in a relationship that involves overt dependence or being
influenced by others (and virtually all relationships do), his sexual
identity is at risk.

College women have been shown to identify with more of these
masculine traits in recent years than they have in the past—without
dropping any of the feminine ones. These young women have, for
example, been found to endorse goals such as becoming an authority in
one’s field, obtaining recognition from colleagues, having administrative
responsibilities, and being better off financially. But it is unclear how this
apparently broadened gender role plays out in their actual lives. As the
author of one study notes, “Soliciting the respondent’s expected career
goals at only one point in time at such an early period in the individual’s
life tells us very little about the degree of commitment attached to these
career goals.”

At each historical juncture where women have achieved access to social
influence and recognition—legal and political rights, educational
opportunities, career options—their capacity to be “real women” has
been impugned. They are labeled as bluestockings or spinsters or
agamic (the Victorian term for women who pursued higher education
and were therefore considered asexual). In the present, this painful
questioning occurs when career women move beyond the student or
early career stage and are trying to start families. Many articles and
books caution that career women will fail to get married, or, if they do
get married, will be unable to have children—or if they do have children,
will be bad mothers. They will somehow fail to fulfill the feminine role.
The data on which these “facts” are largely based do not support the
conclusions. But for women, they raise an understandably frightening
specter.

Clearly, there are many situations in which both the masculine and
feminine BSRI traits are compatible and even complementary. You can,
for example, be a dynamic leader who is also sensitive and responsive
to the needs of your staff. But there are also scenarios in which the
traits inevitably conflict. Such conflicts arise when jobs become more
competitive and when couples begin to have children. Increasingly
precious and limited resources must be allocated: time for work, for
leisure, for financial independence, for career advancement, and for
power. It is precisely at this time in a woman’s early adulthood that the
mandates of traditional femininity reemerge in full force. Women must
decide whether to subordinate their needs to those of their male
partners and colleagues. What should a young married woman do if her
husband wants to move overseas to advance his career even if it
disrupts or derails her own? Should she be “yielding,” “loyal” and
“cheerful,” or should she be “independent” and “forceful”? What happens
when her partner’s meetings last later and later, and there’s no parent
home with the children unless she leaves the workplace early? Should she be understanding and sensitive to the needs of others (feminine) or
willing to take a stand (masculine)? What happens when a previously
supportive male mentor finds a more proactive, independent, or
competitive stance alienating?
Women have greater opportunities for forming and pursuing their own
goals now than at any time in history. But doing so is socially condoned
only if they have first satisfied the needs of all their family members:
husbands, children, elderly parents, and others. If this requirement isn’t
met, women’s ambitions as well as their femininity will be called into
question.

Getting Ambitious About Ambition

In addition, for a woman’s ambition to thrive, both the development of
expertise and the recognition of accomplishments outside of the family
are required. The elimination of the barriers that have historically kept
women from mastering a subject—such as restrictions on admission to
professional schools or the habit of doing business and advancing
careers inside men-only clubs—has brought women a long way toward
realizing their ambitions. But the pressure on girls and women to
relinquish opportunities for recognition in the workplace continues to
have powerful repercussions.

One key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that
“feminine” women will forfeit opportunities for recognition at home and
at work. Being silenced or ignored often remains a baffling and
frustrating barrier to women’s understanding of how their lives are
shaped. This is a “sin of omission” rather than one of commission, so it’s
hard to spot. It’s not as obvious as being denied the right to vote or
access to birth control. Women tend to feel foolish asking for
appropriate acknowledgement of their contributions. They find it difficult
to demand appropriate support—in the form of time, money, or
promotion—to pursue their own goals. They feel selfish when they do
not subordinate their needs to those of others.

This subtle, incremental, but ultimately powerful dynamic militates
against women’s pursuit and attainment of their goals in most fields. For
them, or for anyone, the motivation to learn a skill or to pursue any
endeavor, including an ambition, can be roughly calculated on the basis
of two factors: how certain the person is that he or she will be able to
attain the desired goal and how valued the expected rewards are.
The rewards aspect of this calculation is problematic for women.
Although they may find mastery as satisfying as do their male peers, the
social rewards that women can expect to reap for their skills are
diminished. The personal and societal recognition they receive for their
accomplishments is quantitatively poorer, qualitatively more ambivalent,
and, perhaps most discouraging, less predictable.

It gets worse. To attempt to master a skill, particularly one that requires
prolonged effort, you must believe you are likely to succeed. And here
we see the long-term impact of the relatively low recognition that girls
and young women receive. Despite the fact that girls’ and women’s
achievements, particularly in the academic sphere, frequently outstrip
those of their male peers, they routinely underestimate their abilities.
Boys and men, by contrast, have repeatedly been shown to have an
inflated estimation of their capabilities. Paradoxically, these inaccurate
self-ratings by both women and men seem to be accurate reflections of

the praise and recognition they receive for their efforts. The impact of
these findings on the selection and pursuit of an ambition is obvious: If
you don’t think the chances are great that you will reach a career goal,
you won’t attempt to reach it—even if the rewards are highly desirable.
Despite the fact that girls’ and women’s achievements, particularly in the academic sphere, frequently outstrip those of their male peers, they routinely underestimate their abilities.

This, for women, is why early aspirations so often do not translate into
achievement later in life: A lack of appropriate affirmation of
accomplishments in combination with threats to women’s sexual identity
inevitably lead to demoralization. And so the process continues. At many
junctures in their lives, both women and men must reevaluate the
meaning and value of their ambitions and decide how intensely to
pursue them. But when women revisit their calculations, they are more
likely than men to conclude that their goals aren’t rewarding enough to
justify the effort required to reach them. So they abandon their
ambitions. Sociologists who have compared middle-class females’ goals
to their actual situations in midlife have found the correlation to be
surprisingly weak. As one author discovered, “Women are only slightly
more likely to follow the paths they expect to [early on] than not.”

Set Up for a Fall

Where does this leave contemporary women? Over many decades,
opportunities for women have slowly increased through the different life
stages, starting with girlhood and working up to young womanhood.
Access to grammar school education for girls was followed by access to
high school and college programs. By the early twentieth century, a few
women had gained admission to graduate and professional schools, and
in the 1970s, women began to graduate from these programs in
significant numbers. By the 1980s and 1990s, women were assuming
places in the lower ranks of the professions in ever-greater numbers.
Today, the time when women become second-class citizens, when their
options are radically reduced in comparison with those of men, has been
pushed yet later into their lives. Girls and women still receive less
favorable treatment than their male counterparts throughout their
childhoods and adolescence—but the discrepancy has narrowed. Many
young, middle-class women have experienced a shift toward more equal
opportunities right up to their early careers and marriages.
Women now experience the most powerful social and institutional
discrimination during their twenties and early thirties, after they have
left the educational system and started pursuing their ambitions. At the
age when women most frequently marry and have children, they must
decide whether to try to hold on to their own ambitions or downsize or
abandon them. Often, a young woman must make this decision at the
moment when she is just learning to be a parent, with all its attendant
fears, pleasures, insecurities—and around-the-clock work.
As with past obstacles women have faced, the current ones have proved
stressful, confusing, and painful. In all such transitions, there are no
easy solutions. Institutional changes and cultural norms lag behind
social realities. The lack of adequate social support, ongoing career
opportunities, and financial protection for women who provide child care
is the contemporary phase of women’s long struggle for equal rights.

 

Stressed for Success

As contemporary women evaluate their goals, they must decide how
much of the stress that comes with ambition they are willing to tolerate.
I have vivid memories of being among the first large wave of women
medical students and doctors. My first interviewer for medical school, a
surgeon, asked antagonistically how I could possibly care for my
children. In medical school, many of the physicians who taught us were
openly hostile to women students. I recall a lecture on endometriosis
entitled “The Working Woman’s Disease.” The hospital didn’t even have
uniforms that fit us: For a while, we all looked like little girls dressed up
in Daddy’s clothes. When my female peers and I moved on to our
residencies and fellowships in our early thirties, there were no
established policies about pregnancy leave, no options for part-time
work, no available child care. I gave birth to one of my children after
finishing my patient rounds at nine o’clock at night. Luckily, the delivery
room was across the street. At that historical moment, becoming a
physician was a brutal, confusing, and often demoralizing process for a
woman.

Twenty years later, many of the problems my colleagues and I faced
have been addressed. But in this field, as in many others, the most
intense social pressures are no longer about mastery. Hardly anyone
claims today that women lack the native ability to become
neurosurgeons or executives. And the problems don’t tend to arise in
college or in the first few years of a career. These days, the threat to
women’s ambitions comes at a later phase of women’s lives, when they
have families and are advancing to more competitive positions in their
work. Women who pursue careers must cope with jobs structured to
accommodate the life cycles of men with wives who don’t have full-time
careers. And they must suffer the social pressure to fulfill more
traditional, “feminine” roles. It’s a situation that still creates
unnecessarily agonizing choices. Too often, when the choice must be
made, women choose to downsize their ambitions or abandon them
altogether. As at each prior time when women gained new opportunities,
the early stages of change are exhilarating, but also painful.
Interestingly, many famous writers have claimed that in later life, after
their children have been raised, women develop a new resilience and
energy. Dorothy Sayers referred to such women as “uncontrollable by
any earthly force.” Margaret Mead described an age of “heightened
vitality” that she called the Third Age. Isak Dinesen proclaimed,
“Women…when they are old enough to have done with the business of
being a woman, and can let loose their strength, must be the most
powerful creatures in the whole world.” I have often wondered whether
the newfound strength of these women reflects the fact that their sexual
identity is no longer assailable. “Been there, done that,” they can say to
anyone who questions their capacity for relationships. The classic
reproach (always aimed at women and never at men)—that they are
promoting themselves at the expense of others who need their care—no
longer applies. In a very real sense, it is the first time in their lives that
they are free to express, without fear of reprisal, the wide spectrum of
feelings and behaviors previously reserved for men.

It’s no secret that women receive less recognition for their
accomplishments than men do. The documentation is substantial, and
the findings are consistent.

Preschool

By nursery school, the differential in attention received by girls and boys
is already evident. In one representative study of 15 coed preschool
classrooms, investigators found that “all 15 of the teachers gave more
attention to boys.…They got both more physical and verbal rewards.
Boys also received more direction from the teachers and were twice as
likely as the girls to get individual instruction on how to do things.”

Grammar School

Studies show that in grammar school, girls have stronger verbal skills
than boys do. One might assume that this would serve girls well, but
they continue to get less recognition than boys. One three-year project
looked at more than 100 fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade classrooms in
four states and the District of Columbia. The conclusion: “Teachers
praise boys more than girls, give boys more academic help, and are
more likely to accept boys’ comments during classroom discussions.” In
high school, the pattern becomes even more pronounced, particularly in
math and the sciences.

College

In the late 1980s, a women’s college that was in the process of
becoming coed videotaped and analyzed coed classes elsewhere to
“make sure that the quality of the women’s education would not be
affected.” To quote the abstract of the resulting paper:

“Do men get more for their money than women when they invest four
years and tens of thousands of dollars in a college education? Close
examination of videotapes of classroom interactions reveals that they
generally do.…Should a teacher choose a first volunteer to answer a
question (as often happens), that student will most likely be male.…Tacit
collaboration of faculty members permits men to dominate class
discussions disproportionately to their numbers.”

Graduate School

One study found that in graduate school, women “are more likely to be
teaching assistants rather than research assistants, as compared to
men, and receive, on the average, less financial support.”

First Jobs

Several studies have looked at the effect of gender on recognition in the
workplace. Here is a summary from one such investigation:
“Two groups of people were asked to evaluate particular items, such as
articles, paintings, résumés, and the like. The names attached to the
items given each group of evaluators were clearly either male or female,
but reversed for each group—that is, what one group believed was
originated by a man, the other believed was originated by a woman.
Regardless of the items, when they were ascribed to a man, they were
rated higher than when they were ascribed to a woman. In all of these
studies, women evaluators were as likely as men to downgrade those
items ascribed to women.”

In one study, male and female researchers took turns assuming leader
and nonleader roles with subjects performing a problem-solving task.
The researchers found that regardless of which role the woman took,
“The trained females received a greater number of negative facial
reactions than positive ones.…When women [were] assertive and acted
as leaders the negative reactions outnumbered the positive ones;
women end up with a net loss.…The naive participants [the subjects]
paid less attention to the women than the men; for example, they made
fewer facial reactions to the women per minute of talking time.”

Getting Ambitious About Ambition

What can be done in the face of the overwhelming odds stacked against
women’s ambitions? Here are some recommendations and observations.

Organize

Women must see themselves as a political constituency (one that
encompasses the majority of voters) with one set of goals in particular:
the support of mothers in the workforce as well as mothers who choose
to remain at home with their children. Women will be able to fully share
in the satisfaction that ambitions can provide only when they are
confident that their children are well cared for.

Don’t Expect Things to Fall into Place

Because so little is mapped out for them at this moment in time,
women, more than men, need to actively imagine themselves into their
futures. Unlike men, women have few accepted roles in our society—or,
more accurately, they have too many: innovative professional, devoted
mother, competent employee, sexually attractive babe, supportive wife,
talented homemaker, and independent wage earner, to name a few. It
falls nearly entirely on the individual woman to carve out a life for
herself with adequate meaning and satisfaction—not an easy task for
anyone, let alone an impressionable young person. For each woman, life
must be a creation of sorts and also an assertion of values, priorities,
and identity, because no role is unquestioningly accepted in our society.

Provide for Structures of Recognition

To sustain their ambitions, women must formulate life plans that include
the potential for receiving earned recognition—and that recognition must
primarily be based on talent, skill, or work, rather than on appearance,
sexual availability, or subservience. This means identifying, critically
assessing, and purposefully developing “spheres of recognition” that can
provide sustaining affirmation. If we have no opportunities for
appropriate support, we have to acknowledge this and find other
venues. Otherwise, the situation is not only a dead end but one that will
engender painful and unnecessary self-doubt.

Blow Your Own Horn

Even when discriminatory factors are not at play, women have much
more difficulty than men developing relationships with people who have
the power to advance their work. Actively pursuing advantageous
connections runs counter to the classic ideal of femininity. Women in
virtually every profession express their distaste for cultivating such

relationships, labeling it as “pushy.” Unfortunately, there is ample data
that in and of itself, high-caliber work is unlikely to produce proper
recognition for accomplishments.

Realize It’s Never Too Late

As profoundly social beings, we work throughout life to maximize
affirmation. In some ways, this is a disturbing realization; we would like
to believe that by the time we reach adulthood our goals are formed and
we are largely self-motivated. The available research, however, does not
support this view. To an astonishing extent, opportunity for mastery and
recognition continually reshapes our ambitions and modulates the effort
we expend on them. Powerful mentors, opportunities for learning new
skills, promotions, admiring peers who provide collegial support,
institutional recognition, and broad cultural trends all continuously mold
ambitions. At what point does ambition become fixed? In short: never.