Are talented women losing their ambition?

 
“I’m not sure I want to apply for a higher level role. It’ll be so much time dedication - and I value my work life balance.” That’s what a former colleague - a great product manager - recently said to me when we caught up over a coffee.

I was surprised. I had thought we all somehow want to progress?

That’s when I remembered - even my own ambition has changed throughout my career. I wanted to get into the C-suite, then focused completely on non-career life goals, and became ambitious again a couple of years ago.

So I started asking myself: are people born ambitious? Why do some people reach for the stars and put all their energy behind it, while others are genuinely happy where they are?

On my quest for an answer, I came across the 2025 Women at Work report by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org. It found something fascinating: there is now an ambition gap between men and women. Both are equally motivated. Both say their career is important to them. But women are less ambitious about wanting a promotion. Like the product manager I met. But why? What is suppressing women’s ambition?

What ambition actually is

Ambition is closely linked to motivation. At its core, it is the persistent drive to turn your efforts into a visible outcome - like a promotion or a pay rise.

It is worth separating this from something else entirely: the desire for power and control over others. That is a different thing. Ambition simply means you want your achievements to count for something.

And it does matter. Studies show that ambitious people are more likely to achieve career success, which ultimately shows up in income and life satisfaction too.

Where ambition comes from
 

Research links ambition partially to personality and upbringing - things like how conscientious you are, how much you are driven by external recognition, whether you grew up around success.

But it is also linked to your environment. And this is where it gets interesting.

Two things need to be true for ambition to grow. First, you need to believe that getting where you want to go is actually possible for someone like you. Second, you need to feel safe enough to take risks - because ambition, by definition, means reaching for something just outside your current grasp.

For many women in STEM, both of those conditions are missing.

When I thought more about the product manager I spoke to, I found myself wondering: had she ever actually seen a female VP of Product in her career so far? Had anyone around her made the path feel possible, or had she mostly encountered messages - subtle and not so subtle - that said she would need to change who she is to get there? If that is the world you are working in every day, why would you reach for more of it?

And if you are already second-guessing yourself in meetings, already exhausted from having to prove yourself - why would you then take on the additional risk of going for a promotion?

But you can make a change. In fact, you can create the conditions yourself, for your ambition to increase again.

Two steps you can take to increase your ambition

Step #1

Find a female leader who is a few steps ahead of you and ask for a conversation. It does not need to be a formal mentorship. Even one call can shift something. When your brain can see a real person who looks like you, who has navigated what you are navigating, it quietly starts to believe the path exists. That is not motivational talk - it is how the brain builds possibility. In environments where we rarely see people like us in leadership, this matters more than most people realise.

Step #2

Find two or three peers you can be honest with. The agreement is simple: you listen to each other, give advice, and support each other when things get hard. Research shows that women’s ambition rises when they spend time around other ambitious women. And when a risk feels too big to take alone, a small group makes it feel less daunting.

If you want to be in a community of other ambitious women, that’s exactly what I am building. Join the waitlist and read more here.

The one question to ask yourself

So does the product manager have a point about work-life balance? Maybe. Values are real and they matter.

But before you take that thought at face value, ask yourself one question: is this genuinely what I want, or is my ambition simply worn down by an environment that has made progress feel too hard and too lonely?

Those are two very different things. And only one of them is actually your choice.