Ask and thou shalt receive (a pittance)

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It wasn’t until my first job as a manager that I realized that asking for a raise or promotion as a woman can be different from asking for these same things as a man.

About a year into the role, I told my higher-ups, all of whom were men, we should give a pay raise to a female reporter who was hands down the best journalist on my team. My request was only partially granted. The woman got a modest bump of a few dollars per hour, which, I was told, was all our cash-strapped news outfit could afford.

So imagine my surprise, when, a few months later, I learned we had agreed to pay a new male recruit with similar credentials and experience nearly three times that woman’s salary for, essentially, the same job.

To be clear, the new guy was an excellent hire. And he had simply asked for what he thought was reasonable. But, somehow, his request seemed to inhabit another plane of existence. One where the financial ceiling was much, much higher.

This is the memory that kept swirling in my head as I read The Ambition Penalty, a new book that argues that learning to ask for more hasn’t gotten women very far.

The author is a fellow personal finance writer, New York-based journalist Stefanie O’Connell. Here’s the exchange I had with Ms. O’Connell via e-mail, edited for length:

Q: What inspired you to write the book?

A: I grew up in the era of girl power, as part of the generations of women raised on the promise that they could be anything they wanted to be if they just “spoke up” and “took what they deserved.” By the time I started writing about personal finance, books like #Girlboss and Lean In had fully penetrated popular culture selling a similar story: That a woman’s greatest obstacle to realizing her economic, political or personal power was herself – that if she could just be confident enough or negotiate enough or be ambitious enough, she could access the same outcomes as her male peers.

But as the generations of women I grew up alongside aged into their peak earnings years, it became increasingly clear just how little these chronic gender gaps in pay, power and leadership were changing … in spite of that lifetime of “empowerment.”

The Ambition Penalty was inspired by this disconnect.

Q: In a little more than a decade, we’ve gone from Lean In to the era of social media that promises women results with minimal effort – cue the #lazygirl meme – or romanticizes domestic life, as with the #tradwife phenomenon. What happened?

A: The women raised on the promises of ’90s girl power and 2010s girlboss “empowerment” found that “doing all of the ‘right’ things” did not get them the same outcomes or opportunities as their male peers, nor did it spare them from the bias to burnout pipeline. As they’ve been left reckoning with broken promises (like getting what you want is as easy as asking for it), their exhaustion and disillusionment with that era of corporate feminism has been used to sell them a new fantasy.

In this fantasy, empowerment isn’t about expanding what women can and should have access to (like economic opportunity and professional power in addition to a fulfilling personal life), instead, it suggests that women shrinking their aspirations and wanting less is the key to unlocking their fulfillment, security and freedom.

In the book, I refer to this as the era of “anti-ambition,” a romanticization of women (and women exclusively) stepping back from public and professional life in ways that channel more of their labour into their homes and communities, where they cannot access the same pay or power for it – while men get to maintain the vast majority of public and professional power for themselves.

I call it a fantasy, not because women’s need for more sustainable rest, security and freedom isn’t real, but because anti-ambition trends (like the #tradwife) don’t deliver on their promise. They don’t do anything to challenge the systems that make women’s ambition so uniquely unsustainable to begin with, and they double down on “solutions” that set women up to have even less security and more burnout than before.

For example, these trends don’t romanticize basic income protections, affordable housing, accessible childcare, and other policies that would enable all of us to combine our personal and professional ambitions more sustainably. Instead, they romanticize a gendered division of labour and gendered division of power.

So while books like Lean In sold us a flawed story that women’s inequality was a result of their supposed “lack of ambition”: not leaning in, asking for more or speaking up enough – anti-ambition trends like #tradwife are selling a similarly flawed story by capitalizing on the backlash – claiming that women’s exhaustion and dissatisfaction with their stalled outcomes is the inevitable result of wanting too much.

Q: What can women do, right here and now, to navigate a world that makes it so hard and risky for them to pursue their ambitions?

A: Remember that inequality, across gender or any other form of identity, is not a personal problem, and therefore, it cannot be overcome with a personal solution. But the more that we are made to feel like these are our personal problems, the more isolated we become and the more we get cut off from our collective power. I wrote this book to help us interrupt that pattern.

Chart of the day

In this chart, Fred Vettese looks at what age Canadians are most satisfied with their lives. The results suggest Canadians are doing a pretty good job of saving for retirement.

New products that caught my eye

Wealthsimple is rolling out a new suite of family-focused financial products, writes my colleague Meera Raman. Among them, a kids and teens account where parents have the option of paying extra interest on the child’s savings.

Journalism callout

Private school enrolments have risen sharply. For a Globe story, journalist Kelsey Rolfe is looking to speak to parents who’ve enrolled children in private school, or are planning to do so. What prompted you to do this and how you managing the cost? If you’re open to sharing your story, you can reach her at kannerolfe@gmail.com