The Rise, Fall, and Complicated Legacy of Female Ambition
Remember 2013? Sheryl Sandberg told us to lean in. Marissa Mayer was scheduling bathroom breaks to squeeze more hours out of the day. The message was loud and clear: work harder, speak up, take your seat at the table.
A decade later, the vibe couldn't be more different.
Today's bestsellers tell a different story — one of burnout, breakdown, and the hard-won wisdom of slowing down. Authors like Jennifer Romolini and Amil Niazi chronicle the real costs of relentless ambition: the insomnia, the panic attacks, the marriages strained to breaking point. And honestly? There's something genuinely valuable in that corrective. Hustle culture was toxic.
But something more troubling is happening beneath the surface.
The "lazy girl job" trend encourages young women to find undemanding work and coast. Tradwife influencers romanticize financial dependency, racking up millions of followers, preaching a soft-focus version of 1950s domesticity. A teenager named Lil Tay made headlines declaring that any woman still working a 9-to-5 past 25 is a failure — she should have monetized her looks instead.
This isn't liberation. It'sa regression with better lighting.
The data backs that up. According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report, 80% of entry-level men aspire to a promotion — but only 69% of women do. The gender wage gap is widening for the first time since the Census Bureau started tracking it in the 1960s. Nearly half a million American women left the workforce in just the first eight months of 2025.
The hardest pill to swallow? Female ambition hasn't actually disappeared — it's just gone underground. The authors writing burnout memoirs worked obsessively to produce them. Tradwives build brand empires while performing financial helplessness. Even the celebrities who publicly reject "rise and grind" culture are, by definition, extraordinarily successful.
Women have always been expected to downplay their drive. What felt briefly like a shift — roughly 2013 to 2020 — may turn out to have been the exception, not the new normal.
The question worth asking isn't whether ambition is good or bad. It's why, in 2025, women feel they have to hide it again.