The Rise of Soft Ambition

Maybe you're over hustle culture. Maybe you're done never saying no. Okay, but first: Can we tell you about a side of the buzzy character trait that no one is talking about?

- ANDREA STANLEY

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 them.

Obviously, it's not that women weren't ambitious. They just weren't proclaiming it. 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.

Nevertheless, we persisted. We got side hustles and leaned in and cracked glass ceilings and became the first woman to [insert a whole bunch of things]. Throughout the mid- to late 2010s we owned our ambition, letting it ooze out through a sea of classic girl-boss tropes: A woman's place is in the boardroom! The future is female! It was never a dress!

But then another shift happened: Shortly into the pandemic, we entered the "Age of Anti-Ambition," according to a piece that ran in the The New York Times last year. It was just one of a bazillion stories about how hustle culture is dead (heck, we wrote about it, too) and how we have entered an anti-work era. Nap dresses and cottagecore went viral. Give us our #SoftLife.

The articles weren't wrong. In my personal life, I saw it, too. When a friend in her mid-30s left her enviable "dream" job, her coworker sent her an email saying she hoped she was on to bigger and better