IshaiyaFreshlySqueezed

Bryce Covert has a really interesting piece on The Atlantic online  about the so-called “ambition gap” in the workplace, the excuse so often trotted out to explain away the nagging gender wage gap: “When researchers have studied the ambition gap,” she writes, “they’ve discovered something peculiar: It’s not there. Women do ask for more. They just aren’t rewarded for it.”

The phrase “ambition gap” has always irritated me because it presumes something that’s not really about ambition. It’s about the fact that women often wind up doing things other than/in addition to dedicating themselves to their careers, and the assumption is that a) this is a choice & b) as a result, women don’t get to advance as men might — that’s not an “ambition” problem, that’s a “society-wide, institutionalized sexism” problem.

As it turns out, personally, I was happy to plan my professional life in a way that…