When Anna, a 32-year-old IT professional, started her first job, it wasn’t long before she found herself facing a bad case of job creep. “They said, ‘Hey, can you do this other thing too for a little bit? It’ll be like 10% of your time.’ But that turned into basically doing a second full-time job,” Anna told me.
So she scheduled a meeting with her manager to ask for a salary that accounted for the added responsibilities of her expanded role. “I laid it out, ‘Here’s what I’ve taken on, here’s how I’m spending my time, here’s what my days look like. Can we renegotiate a salary to compensate me for the work I’m doing?’” Anna said. Not only did her manager refuse her request, he not-so-subtly shamed her for asking. “‘You’re asking for more money? We’re a startup,’” she remembers him saying. “It was kind of like, ‘You’re ungrateful. How dare you ask for more money, even though we’re asking you to do two jobs?’”
After that initial negotiation attempt, everything felt like a fight. Her boss would make promises of bonuses and higher pay if she took on more obligations and work beyond her job title, but though Anna did those things, the raises never arrived. “It makes you feel crazy,” said Anna, “You’re getting feedback like, ‘This is how you get recognized and this is how you get rewarded.’ I did all those things.” Yet every time Anna tried to advocate for herself in the ways she’d been taught, she found herself thwarted or dismissed. “It starts to make you feel like, ‘Well, am I overasking? Do I really deserve to make this amount?’ You’re fighting to get paid. You feel like you’re getting there and you’re having the right conversations, but it’s kind of like spinning your wheels,” she said.
If any of this sounds familiar, know that it’s not just you.
The very characteristics and behaviors that men, particularly cis, straight, white, able-bodied men, can reliably implement to get ahead, when enacted by women, even in the same situations, are often perceived as a liability, not an asset.
He’s independent. What a go-getter.
She’s independent. How selfish.
He’s ambitious. That’s just what we need.
She’s ambitious. Who does she think she is?
He’s assertive. What a great leader.
She’s assertive. What a bitch.
A reason not to hire, work with, promote, or reward women can be the same reason to hire, work with, promote, and reward men.
“Aiming high is perceived differently when enacted by empowered women than by empowered men,” Jennifer Dannals and colleagues found in their paper “The Dynamics of Gender and Alternatives in Negotiation.” In the study, they analyzed the results of over 2,500 negotiators to understand why women typically experienced worse negotiation outcomes. Were they less assertive? Negotiating less frequently? Doing so less effectively? The researchers found no evidence for any of these go-to explanations. Women were less likely to get what they asked for not because they weren’t being assertive but because they were.
Women’s assertiveness challenges patriarchal gender stereotypes of how women “should” behave—warm, compassionate, and loyal. And maybe more to the point—not assertive, aggressive, or ambitious. Dannals’s research suggested that it’s this patriarchal gender role “transgression,” rather than women’s negotiation tactics in and of themselves, that triggers the penalties against them.
But if having access to equal opportunity, power, and pay depends on our willingness to ask for more, and women aren’t supposed to ask for more, how are we supposed to get ahead? How do you achieve your professional ambitions when you’re more likely to be punished for having those ambitions in the first place?
This catch-22 is what researchers refer to as the double bind: We tell anyone who wants to get ahead that they need to be strong, bold, and assertive—traits that (conveniently) align with patriarchal stereotypes of masculinity (particularly in individualistic cultures like those of the U.K., Australia, and the United States). But because these patriarchal gender stereotypes also dictate that women be nurturing, accommodating, and deferential to others (especially men), ambitious women often find themselves in a no-win situation: If they express stereotypically feminine qualities, their competence and leadership potential can be questioned. And if they express stereotypically masculine qualities, they can be labeled unlikable, “not a team player,” or “not a good fit.”
These biases are most commonly found in roles and industries stereotyped as masculine—which just happen to be those that offer access to higher pay, greater autonomy, and more power. A 2020 paper studying women’s successes in male-stereotyped domains like STEM and finance, for example, showed that women who were arbitrarily assigned to leadership roles in these fields faced fewer penalties when they succeeded than women who had actively pursued their leadership positions. So it was OK for women to successfully lead as long as they hadn’t actively aimed for the opportunity to do so.
This is where we can directly see the ambition penalty in play. When women are perceived as pursuing a professional or leadership goal, the pursuit is resented even more than the actual achievement of that goal. It is this expression of ambition—the “audacity” of women to raise their hand and put themselves forward—that triggers the greatest blowback against them.
For those of us raised on advice like Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Girl, Stop Apologizing, the backlash that can follow what seems like a straightforward request for more opportunity or responsibility can come as a hard shock. “I did feel like Damn, should I have just left it alone? Should I have not pushed hard on the salary? I was definitely blaming myself,” remembered Carla, who, after years of working to transition into a marketing role, had her job offer rescinded when she tried to negotiate a bump in salary from $40,000 to $45,000 a year.
Or Nadia, a publishing professional in her thirties, who after four interviews and being assured that she was everyone’s top choice was told, “It seems like actually, this isn’t a good fit for you, and good luck finding something else,” after asking for a salary commensurate with her experience. “You feel stupid for thinking that you could negotiate. You feel worthless—like they really don’t value you at all. And that your work isn’t really worth anything,” said Nadia.
Yes, we were part of a generation that was warned (and warned again) that women just don’t assert their ambitions enough. But the data show that these claims simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. For example, in a 2018 paper titled “Do Women Ask?” researchers discovered that women asked for raises just as often as men did. But women were still less likely to receive them. “Our main finding—women do ask—holds in both large and small companies, and holds for women with and without advanced levels of education,” wrote the authors, concluding, “While women do now ask they ‘don’t get.’”
“And yet we’re still getting told, ‘Just ask, just ask,’” said Caroline, a twenty-six-year-old tech worker whose job offer was withdrawn after she asked to negotiate the salary and benefits. “I’ve talked to three other women that said, “Yes, this happened to me. I tried to negotiate and the company either ghosted me or rescinded the offer.’”
So while encouraging women to advocate for themselves and take ownership of their ambitions is not a bad thing in and of itself, the existing dialogue still too often positions it as a simple and straightforward solution to chronic and sometimes even violent inequality. And in the process, the double standards perpetuated by sexism, racism, and other biases that pervade our day-to-day realities remain casually overlooked.
For example, research has found that women are given more negative evaluations when they self-promote—with women who self-promote during a job interview rated less likable and worthy than those who do not. And it turns out that it’s this real increased potential for backlash, not a lack of confidence, that prevents women from self-promoting to the same extent in the future. Now if we consider all the ways in which women’s ambitions are penalized, we can start to understand how much of what we’ve attributed to “women holding themselves back” is actually a response women have consciously or subconsciously adapted to avoid these penalties of their own ambitions.
In other words, it’s not a fear of self-promoting or speaking up or asking or negotiating that’s the problem; it’s the consequences women still disproportionately face when they do. And recognizing that distinction can clarify where the responsibility for change really lies.
Excerpted from The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up—and Then Pushes Them Down. Copyright © 2026 by Stefanie O’Connell. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
