Single ambition

Having a partner shouldn't mean giving up your goals, drive, and talents.

This is just funny.

A wise young woman and famous childless cat lady once said, “a man does something, it's strategic. A woman does the same thing, it's calculated.”

It’s 2024 and there’s still a specific language around the way we talk about ambitious women. That language, as well as stereotypes, and stigma, affect the way women approach romantic relationships, too.

Women still give up their ambitions in an attempt to land and keep a male partner. I personally have been told this before that men don’t like ambitious women because they don’t want to compete with a partner and that a woman’s ambition is emasculating. Frankly, I don’t want to be with a man who’s afraid of my goals and drive. Their insecurities aren’t my problem.

I have always been ambitious, not as an attempt to prove anything, but rather because there are so many interesting and exciting things to do. I was a good — and no doubt nerdy — student who cared more about my grades than I did about boys and drinking at the school dances (I love to dance, though).

In high school, when other girls my age were talking about marriage and kids, I was thinking about a career, making my own money, and getting out of the community where I grew up. I didn’t even date anyone in high school. It’s probably no surprise to anyone I knew when I was younger that I am now 53 and a spinster (I decided to really own that word, by the way).

I also have never believed in “having it all.” I know what I want, which is different. The push to “have it all” is a trap for women.

My own ambition has had mixed results. I spent my early 20s trying to figure out what career I actually wanted. I briefly thought about architecture, and even went back to take high school math to get a better grade. I eventually ditched that plan for journalism school after earning a degree in history. I don’t regret that move.

I am also fairly ambitious about how I spend my free time, especially now that my daughter is a young adult and has a life of her own. Several years ago, I took a course to learn how to ride a motorcycle, but I crashed into a wall, somehow escaping injury, and failing the test. I still love motorcycles, but am a better passenger.

Then, I took pole dancing lessons, which proved to be almost as challenging as riding a motorcycle, but less dangerous.

I’m now at least a competent horseback rider, with plans to improve, and my photography skills are shaping up, thanks to my new obsession with birdwatching.

But frustratingly, women still pay a price for their ambition when it comes to relationships.

In 2017, three researchers at Harvard University did this study called “Acting Wife: Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments.”

The three authors, Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara, and Amanda Pallais, wrote about their findings in this article in the Harvard Business Review.

In their experiment, a career counsellor give a group of MBA students, both women and men, a questionnaire about their career ambitions, including salary expectations, hours they’d like to work, and willingness to travel for the job.

Here’s a summary of what they learned:

When students thought that their answers would only be viewed by their career counselor, women who were single and women who weren’t answered similarly. However, when single women expected their classmates to see their answers, they portrayed themselves much less favorably to the labor market. They lowered their desired yearly compensation from $131,000 to $113,000, on average, and reduced their willingness to travel from 14 days per month to 7 days. They also reported wanting to work four fewer hours per week. Finally, they reported significantly lower levels of professional ambition and tendency to lead. Women who weren’t single did not change their answers when they expected classmates to observe their choices, and neither did men, regardless of their relationship status.

To rule out an alternative interpretation, that single women are simply more humble in public, we included a placebo question on self-reported writing ability. Writing skills are valued in the labor market but carry no penalty in the marriage market. Thus, if single women are generally more humble in public, we should see that rating decline as well. However, single women (and all other groups) rated their writing skills equally in the public and private treatments. These results indicate that single women, but not women in a relationship, avoid actions that could help their careers when these actions have negative marriage market consequences.

All of this, of course, is bullshit. Relationships require compromise, but not sacrifice of anyone’s goals, drive, or talents. We may have come a long way, ladies, but we still have some distance to go.

Here is the researchers’ conclusion:

Our results suggest that single women avoid actions that would help their careers because of marriage considerations, and that marriage considerations may be an additional explanation for gender differences in the labor market. Many schooling and initial career decisions, such as whether to take advanced math in high school, major in engineering, or become an entrepreneur, occur early in life, when most women are single. These decisions can have labor market consequences with long-lasting effects.

So, who was that wise young woman who said that quote about the language we use about ambitious women? It was Taylor Swift, of course.

It just seems right to end this post with a song.

As always, thanks for reading,
Ambitious Spinster