Ep 65 | Who The Ambition Penalty Really Hurts
In this episode, Priya Malani sits down with journalist and author Stephanie O'Connell to name something ambitious women feel constantly but rarely have language for: you can do everything right and still feel like you're paying for it. Stephanie's book, The Ambition Penalty, traces why the gender pay gap hasn't moved in two decades and why treating structural problems as personal failures is exactly how those systems stay intact. The conversation covers everything from workplace dynamics to the unpaid labor quietly subsidizing men's careers at home — and why opting out of ambition isn't the answer.
Takeaways:
The gender pay gap has been locked in place for over 20 years, even as women have outpaced men in education for decades.
Married men earn significantly more than single men, largely because women's unpaid labor subsidizes their availability at work.
When women internalize frustration as a personal failure, it protects the systems producing unequal outcomes, which is not a side effect of those systems. It is the point.
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Guest Bio:
Stefanie O’Connell is an award-winning journalist covering money, power, and ambition whose work has been published in Slate, Bloomberg, Newsweek, USA Today, Glamour UK, Business Insider, and CNBC.com. She wrote, hosted, and co-produced Real Simple magazine’s Webby Award–winning podcast Money Confidential and publishes the Too Ambitious newsletter. O’Connell lives in New York City.
Guest Links:
Pre-order The Ambition Penalty
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Transcription
Unpaid Labor, Ambition, and the Penalty Women Face
What happens when men can't get married? Like, single men's incomes are very comparable to women's incomes. Because they do not have access to women's unpaid labor that is essentially subsidizing theirs, their careers and so like challenging the distribution of Labor in your own home. Even without children. Yes, yes.
Who the fuck am I to tell you what to do with your money? My name is Priya Malani, currently managing millions of hard working dollars. Enough for play, let's talk. Welcome to the F Word smart money.
Hey, guys.
Welcome to the F word. Today we're talking about something that most ambitious women experience, but very few people feel comfortable talking about. You can do everything right. You can get the degree, you can build a career, you can negotiate the salary, you can lean in, and somehow you still feel like you're paying for it.
My guest today, Stephanie O'Connell, is a journalist, speaker and author who has spent the last decade building one of the most thoughtful voices at the intersection of ambition, money, gender, and power. Her new book, which we're talking about today, The Ambition Penalty, dives into what happens when women succeed and why that success often comes with unexpected costs.
I'm really excited for this one. Welcome to the show, Stephanie.
Wow that intro was so much better than anything I could have said, so I can just leave now.
So happy to have you. Before we get to the book, I want to start with you. You've built this very thoughtful personal brand over the last decade with an incredible following. What do you stand for today, and what message feels the most urgent to you now?
I think that we are being told in so many ways that women are wanting too much and I think that message is being reinforced, absolutely everywhere. Even in progressive spaces, you'll hear these constant conversations around why having it all is just such an unrealistic expectation and in reality we're really just often talking about our ability to combine our personal and professional aspirations in the same ways that men get to. And there's a reason why these conversations around having it all and work life balance are only really happening in spaces that focus on women, because men are already having it all, and they're often getting it at women's expense.
And so even in that kind of more progressive framing of this conversation, I really want to step back and push back on this idea that women want too much, whether it's too much leisure or too much power.
Why Women Pay for Ambition: The Systemic Consequences
Wow, so well said. OK, so with that as our backdrop, you have this upcoming book, The Ambition Penalty, which I'll show here again for those watching. Can you define it for us? Like, what is the ambition penalty? And when you say women are penalized for ambition, what does that actually look like in real life?
The ambition penalty speaks to the ways that women's ambition gets weaponized against them in a way that is really not true for men, so ambition in men is very much rewarded, celebrated, supported. The same ambition when expressed by women, particularly in a professional context, a public context, and especially context in which men are perceived as being more naturally suited or having the vast majority of power. In those spaces, women often face a lot more scrutiny, a lot more backlash and a lot more penalties.
And this book is really about articulating what those penalties look like whether it's asking for more money from an employer and being faced with backlash in the form of being either labeled unlikable or difficult to work with or not the right fit having even a job offer rescinded, as happened to some of the women I interviewed for my book. Or whether it's asking for more support from a partner in the home and being met with withdrawal or accusations that you're expecting too much Again this idea of too much or even in the case of the research that I document in the book Physical and Emotional Abuse.
That's incredible. I don't know if I've I told you this, but when I was working at Merrill, I got pulled aside and told that I was too aggressive. And I sort of repressed that memory because I just moved on from it. But like I've lived that doing what I thought everyone else was doing.
And of course I was working on a trading floor. So who I was looking to for inspiration as to how to be were men. And then when I was like that, it was like, Hey, I actually got pulled into the office and told like, you're a little bit aggressive.
That's such a good example. It's such a. It's such a perfect textbook case of this.
And the real consequence of that shows up in women's outcomes, right you're we're looking at data today and I point this out in the book where pay gaps haven't really moved in 20 years. Women's representation and leadership is falling funding for women LED businesses is a pittance and even getting worse over the last couple of years so.
A lot of us have been raised on this story that not only did we just need to do the same things as our male peers to get ahead and are now kind of facing the backlash and the disillusionment from the consequences of that. But we're also reckoning with this bigger story about what we thought we were going to be able to achieve collectively.
We thought we were on the path to progress and I think for some of us, we think, OK, if it's not us, it's the next generation. But this book really stops for us to consider and say, where is that delusion coming from because we are many of us now, you know in the height of our earnings years. This is like the peak. And this is decades of girl power later this is decades of women being more educated than their male peers later. This is decades of women leaning into their careers and we're no better off.
So this book is really about confronting a system that has the same inputs, but produces different outputs depending on the identity of the person. So it's OK for him to be aggressive, but it's a problem for you.
From Childhood Ambition to Adult Societal Expectations
What was the moment in your life when you realized it wasn't just a you thing? And you realized like, oh wait, this is by design. This is happening to everyone.
I wish I could isolate it to a single instance, but I have always been an ambitious person and what I really noticed in my life personally was the extent to which that was seen as a wonderful, wonderful thing when I was a kid and then all of the sudden when I became an adult woman with the actual power to act on my ambition suddenly it was like, wait, why are you so obsessed with what you do or what's actually going on with like your personal life, why don't you have kids yet? You know, it was this obsession about why I wasn't fulfilling the role of a wife and mother and caretaker first above all other things.
And I thought it was so disorienting because it was like, what do you mean, you know? I I was raised on this 90s girl power message, right? And then all of the sudden it's like the script flipped and nobody said anything explicitly. But nobody was really caring about anything I did for work, but I was going to like these 10s of thousands of dollars of of weddings every year and it was just like wait, this is the only thing we celebrate, you know, and, and to be fair, like I'm married now. I have a kid now I still have an issue with this idea that the only thing about a woman worth celebrating is her marital status or her motherhood status.
Where does that leave, first of all, those of us who choose not to opt into it. And even if we do opt into it like why does that have to become a subsuming identity, and the reason it has to become an identity that subsumes women is so that it protects men's access to power. Like men are allowed to be husbands and CEOs or Fathers and founders right this this is again coming back to this idea of what is considered mutually exclusive for women being mutually reinforcing for men. And we don't say that explicitly now, but we still have the same systems to reproduce the same outcomes, even if we do it in less explicit ways.
The Ambition Penalty: A Systemic Problem, Not Personal Failure
OK, so most of my listeners are high earning 30 somethings, ambitious, often partnered, many thinking about navigating kids while making and trying to make a solid 6 figure income. Yeah, on paper they're doing everything right. But I guess underneath there's this undercurrent of can I have both? Can I build wealth, which is what you're speaking to, and build a family? Can I lean in without like, losing something that I also care about? Who did you write the book for and what do you want her to feel when she finishes it?
So yeah, I absolutely wrote the book for these people. I would say like the archetype in my mind is really the generations of women who grew up on the Spice Girls and independent woman, Destiny's Child and and and having this messaging their whole lives about everything that they could have and be and be seen and valued for only to have basically, the rug pulled out from under them when they actually became adult women and tried to claim that power for themselves. And then we're really faced with this unexpected backlash for being too much when it's the exact thing we told we would be celebrated for and the thing I really want people to understand as they're experiencing these things is that they, first of all, are not alone in their experience.
I share a lot about some of the data that I share in the book, which is very data-driven. And the thing I hear from people all the time is I thought it was just me. I thought it was something I was doing. I thought it was a problem of my own making, like maybe I was too aggressive. And I think what I'm really trying to expose in this work is that you are being made to feel that way by design. You have been taught to internalize responsibility for every single problem and to reframe what is in fact a systemic power structural problem as a personal individual 1 so that you do not challenge those systems of power and they can stay intact.
Because what happens is when you experience backlash and you're taught to internalize it and blame yourself for it, then you just go inward and you'd stop looking at the environments around you you don't build community with other people who are going through the same thing because you think it's just you and then you do not have the power or the support or the resources to actually challenge those systems of power that reproduce unequal outcomes across identity.
So this book is about first of all realizing the extent to which these things that we think are individual issues are part of a common shared experience. And they are shaped by power dynamics. And then second, it's to help people build solidarity and community because we don't really lack solutions to these problems. We lack the collective action and the collective will to actually implement the solutions we already know work.
Unifying Thread: How Hierarchy Reinforces Systems of Oppression
Well said. So do you have a source that you can point to? Like, is it capitalism? Is it that simple? Like, how do you say who's responsible for these systems that we're part of that make us feel this way?
All systems of oppression, right? You know. You can talk about patriarchy. We can talk about white supremacy, we can talk about capitalism. And there is so much in all of those things to dig into. But what the collective, you know, unifying thread between those systems are is this idea of hierarchy and this idea of how hierarchies are reinforced in ways where people are incentivized to try to maintain their relative privilege over their absolute well-being.
And so in a system of patriarchy we see men and women are alike are hurt by systems of patriarchy, but because the incentive is for men to maintain their relative power over women, if the system still maintains that men will accept worse out outcomes for themselves as long as it means they're still better off than women collectively. And this is true in systems of white supremacy too, you know. We see this with like the defunding of public goods. When a public good like higher Ed for example became accessible to people of color, to women, all of a sudden the public funding for higher Ed got scaled back and scaled back and scaled back, and it became this personal responsibility instead of a public good. And that's when you see student debt go through the roof.
And so maintaining that system of exclusion, even though it harms everybody by making higher Ed inaccessible, because it still effectively makes it harder to access for others the system operates as it's intended to to continue to reinforce hierarchy. Basically.
Challenging Systems: Unpaid Labor and the Marital Wage Premium
That's exhausting.
It is exhausting, but and that's why it's so important to kind of call out what's actually happening here as this isn't a you issue. And I think when we talk about things as systemic, people often are like, well, if it's systemic, there's nothing I can really do about it. And the other thing about this book is that it really seeks to challenge that message, not only in helping people build solidarity, but to also recognize the systems that they are part of every single day and the power and refusal that they can enact every single day.
So in the book I break down, you know a system isn't just a federal policy. You know you have an interpersonal system of relationships with your friends, with your family, with your peers. Your household, A spouse, you have your institutional systems the school where your kids go or where you go, you have your workplace you have your communities and then you have your political and social system. So that is OK, the government. But it could also be your local government. It could also be your state government, it can also be sure. The federal government. But you can really challenge Systems and the way they reinforce these hierarchies at every single level and one of the things that I try to point out in the book is how challenging something at an interpersonal level has these ripple effects that kind of go bottom up instead of top down.
So it's really fascinating. I point to some of the data in the book about what happens when men can't get married. Like, single men's incomes are very comparable to women's incomes. Because they do not have access to women's unpaid labor that is essentially subsidizing theirs, their careers, and so like challenging the distribution of Labor in your own home.
Even without children.
Yes, yes.
Can you say that a little bit more about that? I don't think that that feels immediately intuitive.
There's something called the marital wage premium, so you may have heard about the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus, where having children effects men and women's careers differently. But even independently of children, married men have significantly higher incomes than single men, and a lot of that is because the workplace often rewards people who don't need flexibility and people who can work very, very long hours. And I argue in the book that this is actually very discriminatory in part because women can work the same amount hours and still not access the same rewards. They still won't be paid the same. To value availability more than performance is discriminatory. Right. So it it's a way of reinforcing gender discrimination. You change what metrics matter. The metric that matters is the performance is the output. But that's not how you reinforce gender hierarchy. To reinforce gender hierarchy you have to use an irrelevant metric like hours worked. Because men have more hours to give because they don't do any unpaid labour, relatively speaking, compared to women, and we see this in the data around single men versus married men and their incomes.
So there's I think it's a 2023 paper I put in the book about how gender wage gaps are closing in part because young men are not getting married at the same rate and they wind up projecting that if men were unable to marry, I think they said their work hours would fall by 10 or 20%? Like it's a very very significant amount and if you can't maintain your earnings advantage without access to a woman's unpaid labor, then that is just by definition, exploitation. So when I'm saying we can challenge systems at every level, like challenging inequality in your own home is one of the most valuable things that you can do in disrupting these systems.
Oh, that's helpful real quick.
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Dismantling Systems: Why It Benefits Everyone, Not Just the Marginalized
OK, so we go to our government, state government, local government, we're pushing against these systems. But I I just know, and I'm thinking this a little bit too, like I'm so busy and now it's my responsibility. What would you say to the person who is kind of like Stephanie, you've got to be kidding me. How is this my problem to solve?
Well, whether we take responsibility for solving for it or not, we have to live with the consequences of it and the costs, I think are much higher of living with it than in challenging it. And I also want to say, you know, I do not think it is the responsibility of those who are most marginalized by these systems to have primary responsibility for solving them. First of all, we're not endowed with the power to do so. The people who actually have the power are the ones benefiting from these systems, right? But that's why I do hope more people read this book than those who are most harmed by the system because like at the end of the day, it is in everyone's interest for these things to get better, as I mentioned before like relative power is not better than absolute well-being, right? We're all better off, we know that. More egalitarian societies have less income inequality. They have higher living standards. They have longer lifespans for men and for women. For everyone. Egalitarianism is good for everyone but the pitch is always about like the zero sum mentality that for women to have equal access or for anyone who's been marginalized to have equal access, it means that someone else is being harmed.
And we're seeing this right now in this whole like men are falling behind male loneliness epidemic conversation. It's really reframing the harms of patriarchy for everyone as the fault of feminism, which is really wild. But if it is effective, it's effective. You have this being platformed across every major media yeah outlet with almost no pushback. When in fact, like, yeah, men have not been going to college at the same rate as women for over 40 years, and yet the gender pay gap has been locked in place for two decades so. Being able to earn more money with less education is literally the definition of privilege. And that is yet being reframed as something that is being taken away from men. And so I think we really again need to step back and understand how these are part of larger systems that do hurt everybody in some respect, but that dismantling those systems no matter where you are in the higher arbitrary hierarchy that system creates, you will be better served by dismantling it.
Confronting Unequal Dynamics: Prioritizing Equity in Relationships
I love listening to you, it's such a well researched point of view. How do we push within our relationships, heterosexual relationships, for that equality?
My take on this is pretty controversial, I would say. I think it's because the research I did for this book was just so clear. The extent to which inequality is explained away in the home and justified in the home is shocking. Like the amount of Labor that women do, no matter how much they earn, no matter how much more they work, no matter the circumstance of literally anything, they could be having AC section and still be doing the majority of Labor the next day in the household. Because there is no excuse too small apparently, for women to be expected to do, you know, the vast majority of everything.
And I think that we have been sold this fantasy frankly, that if we communicate a different way, if we just unlock this other system, if we just get this like special calendar, it's all going to lock into place. We'll find the right combination of words to be treated with equal respect and like our time is important and our life outside of dishes is important and researching this book really clarified for me that that is not true and so what I think needs to happen is for relationship equity to be a higher priority than relationship stability and that is very uncomfortable.
So what I mean by that is having an equitable relationship try like actually enforcing that boundary is incredibly difficult because men will often lash out in response and so you have to be part of this is a safety issue first of all, so assuming you're, this is not going to be a safety issue for you and I understand if it is, what does it look like to say no, I'm not going to do more than, you know, 50%. Honestly, try even less because they really need to step up More than that, what does it look like? Does it if you actually enforce that boundary, You know, do they get mad? Do they do they like start pouting right before you're supposed to go to your in laws house and then it's all really uncomfortable and so you just give in. Is that what happens? Is it just that like, oh they get tired and stressed and kind of like start lashing out. Is that what happens? Because that is honestly an abusive dynamic. And I think what is happening is like a mass abuse problem in heterosexual relationships, according to the data even if it's not physical. This is a kind of like emotional hostage situation where women feel like they cannot enforce boundaries of any kind because of the way their husbands respond.
I spoke to women who were like going on a work trip and all of a sudden they had to leave because I don't know if anyone saw that that show all her fault but like apparently a husband cannot be trusted on to watch his own child and that is not someone who respects you as a full human being. They are sabotaging your life outside of marriage and motherhood, your earning potential, your autonomy, and I think it's it's really easy to reduce these things in one off instances as making sense, like if you only look at each one one of these instances in isolation you can always justify it. But what you cannot justify is the extent to which this pattern holds across every single circumstance in ways that take away women's power take away their time, their energy, their leisure, their access to opportunity and channel that into supporting men's needs, men's interests.
If there's a career opportunity, where do we move? We're moving overwhelmingly to where men want to go. Men have 25% more access to paid parental leave than women. Can you believe that? Can you believe that? And and they're less likely to take it. And who pays for that? We do. We do. So it's just like I think it's really uncomfortable to say actually no if you cannot meet me as an actual partner then this relationship is not something I want to partake in, but it's I think it's it's necessary.
Yeah, that speaks to the earlier phase. Like is this something we should be testing for in the dating phase? And if so, how will this partner be an equitable partner? I, I just see so many romanticized situations like, oh, you know, I'm, I'm happy to do it. Or I you, you want to be like the cool girlfriend. Just thinking of all these different ways in which we sabotage ourselves because we don't set the right expectations from the beginning. So anyway, the question is, how do we test for partners who will meet us when we're dating them? Because that's what dating is. You're supposed to be testing if they're going to be a good partner.
Building Resilience: Diversifying Support Beyond the Nuclear Family
It's so hard. I I also just want to extend a lot of grace to anyone who's feeling this because also, these things change over time. You don't know how it's going to be I wish I could say that there's something you could do to see into the future and see how someone's going to behave. But it's very difficult. It's very difficult. Almost everyone I know has gone into relationships with the best of intentions and it has not saved them from these things. And I think it's because, like, it's not just an interpersonal problem. Again, it's because these dynamics are amplified by the incentives that are the institutional environment right where Yeah, well, men get paid more on average. So when someones career has to go second like it does often happen to be a woman who makes less money and so her career gets deprioritized.
But I want us to challenge that kind of thinking and say, well, actually 45 percent of mothers in the United States are breadwinners in their families, so just comparing a woman's income to the cost of childcare doesn't make sense in the way we often say it does. So first of all, let's challenge this idea that it makes sense always for women to deprioritize whether that's like in the context of the interpersonal dynamic we're navigating right now in our relationship or like testing in the dating phase, but like also more broadly when we talk about these things. And I think maybe that's that's part of the test is being able to talk about these problems as the systemic things and issues they are and whether you are in a relationship with someone who can kind of engage in that bigger picture conversation because it's understanding these as systemic problems that is going to be really necessary if you're going to be able to have someone meet you to to challenge that system together.
And then if they aren't able to meet you, being strong enough to say like, OK, I am going to exit this relationship because sometimes the desire to be in a relationship is so strong that you, I've done it myself, you ignore flags.
And I think one of the most important things is building your sources of support outside of your relationship, I think one of the most undervalued things in this culture is our community connections and our friendships and the sources of social support. You know we talk about investing, right? You don't want to be invested in a single stock, but that's what the nuclear family basically is.
I love that.
Right, like put all of your reliance and like your financial future into this one partnership with this one person in all of your emotional needs and all of everything you know or or make that your primary and man is that risky, right? Even if it goes well, that's risky. And not just from a financial perspective, from emotional perspective. You need to have a wide network. You need to diversify, you know, make your life an index fund. Whatever an ETF like get, get diversify, get a lot of different people, a lot of different exposure to different sectors, right? I'm really extending this analogy here, but I think it's so important because it's not just again about the money. If my partner decides that they're going to pout when I say I'm going to enforce this boundary and actually do have this work thing I have to go to and I need child care like I need to have other people to call to help me to enforce that boundary. I can't enforce the boundary if I don't have a system of support and it's not just financial. It has to be this social and emotional and all these other things.
And that's how other cultures work outside of America. But again, the systems here are designed to actually isolate us in the situation of who lives within your house can benefit from health insurance. And like you can't parlay all these other benefits to people outside of your nuclear family. There's like this inherent benefit to isolate and and stay in your little group.
Yes.
Breaking Isolation: Modeling New Dynamics & Patriarchy's Harm to Men
And this is true beyond the home, like so many of these systems of power that we're talking about, they really rely on this individualism, this isolation, this idea that it's just you personalizing A systemic problem or a collective problem. So anytime that you can break out of that, recontextualize your experience within a broader experience of something that is happening to you know all women in your situation or you know so many women who who are being told that they're too much and then building community like that is a challenge to the system you are building those sources of support. You are breaking out of the isolation that the system depends on.
You don't need the system. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful idea. I I want everyone to read this book.
I find it's very helpful to always think about whatever the relationship I'm talking about as an institution. So like it's not about me versus you or man versus woman. It's about like what does it mean to be a husband in America, you know. Or wherever you are. Or a wife And what are the things that happen on average with in those roles and what are the expectations. And how do they differ. And that same with like being a mother and a father.
Like we you say that and it's like, oh, well, mothers are expected to do more childcare. They're paid less. They're constantly subject to guilt even though they do more than anybody. And then I'm talking about motherhood as an institution and not just like me or you. And this idea of like it's all about like this, this battle of the sexes or this individual thing? No, it's about wait a minute, how do we say you know why is motherhood like this, while fatherhood is rewarded with greater opportunities, more support, more pay and saying OK, what can we do to say like this is not the way we want to partake in these institutions. We want them to be something that are more expansive and supportive for everyone, and we don't want to pass down this idea that we've inherited of what this is supposed to look like to to those who are shaping and so you know, what are we modeling in our homes?
And I think about this all the time. Like I constantly think about how obsessed people are with the screen time stuff and I get it like yeah, the phones. I'm addicted to my phone. I'm so aware of how you know my kids sees me on my phone, but man am I. I am so much more worried about the idea that my kid is going to see me doing more so much or of of the doctor's appointments or the dishes or the scheduling. Like that's what I'm worried about modeling. I'm worried about modeling a power dynamic where my needs aren't seen as the same or equal or worthy. You know, that's the thing that I think we should be stressing about and not like these, these in the scheme of things, relatively trivial and in spree time might not be a good example because I know it's not trivial. But I think my point is like, we really underestimate how much these are things that we are modeling every day, and our refusal isn't just about refusal for ourselves, it's a refusal about you know what we choose to say is acceptable for those who are who are seeing us live it?
Well said. What we model to our kids is what we model to our kids. OK, so let's talk about men because I they're listening to what message do you have for them? Because clearly ambition penalty is not a woman's issue. So what message do you have for men? What is their role? Our partners, our colleagues and leaders of this country, how do they help to change this?
Patriarchy harms men. It's patriarchy harms everybody. It what it really relies on. Is a binary. It relies on an idea of if you identify as a man, you must be this list of prescriptive things and if you identify as a woman, you must be this list. And what that does is it sets women up for penalties when they assert things that are quote, UN quote, masculine assertiveness, ambition, but it also sets men up for backlash if they assert things like care or compassion And so honestly, what a tragedy. What a tragedy for everybody to have the things that make you fully human and to cut off half of those things from your ability to access without penalty that is hurting all of us and so where there is a legitimate claim to this idea of like a male loneliness epidemic, it's in that same system that is is penalizing women for their ambition. That's the same system that is, you know, cutting men off from their access to compassion and care and community. And that is something we all benefit from dismantling.
Help us and you help yourself.
Stephanie's Best Bite, Book Information, and Final Thoughts
I mean, really, it's true. OK, Stephanie, so many great things to think about, but I'm going to shift gears. We always end the show with a segment called Best Bite. I'm a big foodie and I love a good recommendation. Is there anything you've eaten recently? You live in the city? So I'm kind of, I'm excited for this one and a different part of the city than me. So what is something that you've had recently? They were like Priya. Go here and order this.
I'm a huge fan of Xian Famous Foods in New York City. Yeah, yeah, I'm vegetarian. So I get their veggie noodles. Tan pulled noodles. I like spice and I get the salad with it the the cucumber salad with it. So that's my go to.
That sounds delicious. I've been there vintage. How do you why you say? I don't know how to say it. It's.
Xian. Xian. You know I was there in 2 1008 and somehow I didn't get the pronouncing.
Well, I'm excited, That sounds delicious. And I'm also a Spice Girl in that I love spice, so I can't wait to try it. OK, let's talk about your book. How do we get our hands on it? How do we follow you? You have so many great, so much great wisdom to share. Tell us your handles and also how we get a copy of The Ambition Penalty.
Yeah. So the ambition penalty is available for pre order now It officially comes out May 19th, 2026. It can be ordered now and it will it will ship on that date to you wherever you get your books and I'm also on Instagram at Stephanie O'Connell, Stephanie with an F and I have a newsletter called Too Ambitious and I dig into all of these things. I really do focus a lot on research and the actual data behind a lot of the points that I was talking about today. So if you want more on that should get the book and come check out my social.
Amazing. Stephanie, thank you so much for being here. I think this conversation is really going to hit home for a lot of people, but especially high-powered women who've been just wondering if it's a them problem.
I hope so. Thank you.
Thank You for Listening: Episode Outro and Legal Disclaimer
Yeah, thank you for joining me. And to everyone listening, if this episode helped you put language around something you've been feeling but didn't quite know how to talk about, I really hope you share it with a friend, a colleague, or your partner. These dynamics don't change by staying silent about them. Also, please make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss future conversations. And if you have a minute, we'd greatly appreciate if you leave us a rating or review. It genuinely helps more people find the show. All right, that's it for today. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to the F Word with Priya Malani. If you like what you heard, hit subscribe wherever you're listening and leave us a review while you're at it. Or approval junkies. Don't forget you can find a ton of great resources, content, courses, and other freebies at stashwealth.com
THE STUFF OUR LAWYERS WANT US TO SAY: Stash Wealth is a Registered Investment Advisor. Content presented is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to make an offer or solicitation for any specific securities product, service, or strategy. Consult with a qualified investment adviser (that's us) before implementing any strategy. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. There…we said it.
