Hey all, Joe here and you are listening to Under the Influence.

There's a very specific kind of rage that comes from realizing that the rules were rigged against you the entire time.

As women, we were told that we could have ambition, careers, power, money, independence,

all of the things, that we could have it all.

But only if we managed to pursue all of it while we also remained endlessly agreeable,

attractive, maternal, selfless, accommodating, emotionally available, and completely non-threatening

to men.

Even if we checked all the boxes,

we still weren't going to get all the things. Today I'm chatting about the new book, The Ambition Penalty, with Stephanie O'Connell. This conversation hit a real nerve with me because it gets

at the thing that so many of us are feeling right now.

Hey, Stephanie.

Hey, Joe.

Why does the world hate ambitious women?

It's a complicated question, and yet it's not at all because we've all felt it.

We've all experienced it.

We even know that you just put a different pronoun in front of the word ambitious and it changes the entire meaning. He's ambitious. What a go-getter. Just the guy we need.

What a great leader. She's ambitious. Difficult. Not a team player. Selfish. What a bitch.

Yeah. What a be. What a be. Edit as needed. Why? Why? Because we, whether we want to admit it or not, our perceptions of what we think power, authority, and leadership should look like still align with very patriarchal, white, heterosexual ideas of what power,

leadership, and authority should look like. Who we're supposed to listen to? Who should have

power? When people think boss, they automatically think male. And even if they think, well,

I don't think that women shouldn't be bosses, it still shows up in the reactions to women who do

try to assert authority or power or independence. We see it everywhere, whether it's in the workplace,

...