It wasn’t that long ago that women weren’t even supposed to say the word ambition. It was a man’s word. One article, published in a national magazine in 2010, even declared ambition the new “Scarlet A,” stating that women felt ashamed to admit that they wanted power, success, and the corner office spoils that come with it.
Obviously, it’s not that women weren’t ambitious. They just weren’t proclaiming to be. There are reasons for that, of course. According to research published in the journal Applied Psychology, women are penalized when they succeed at tasks traditionally associated with men. Where men get to be bumptious in boardrooms, ambitious women are flattened into unlikable shrills.
