We’re Finally Starting to Revolt Against the Cult of Ambition

    "It is a cruel irony that ambition is what’s often sold to women as an inextricable ingredient in our eventual liberation. From the career-branded Barbie dolls of  1990s girlhood, to the “lean in” ethos of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, to the so-called “girlboss” era of the last decade, an ethos of careerism has been intrinsic to the mainstream cultural conception of women’s “empowerment.” Women are told that we not only can have it all, but also we should welcome the workload with open arms.
But that Sandbergian logic has not delivered work force equity. Across class, race, profession and location, women overwhelmingly bear the brunt of unpaid chores and “emotional” labor, both at work and at home. The resulting ‘gender stress gap’ is undoubtedly compounded by a longstanding gender pay gap, both of which predate this pandemic. Before and during the ongoing crisis, Black and Latinx women in the United States have paid the steepest price.
All this has been widely discussed and covered in the media, but consciousness-raising hasn’t been enough to forestall a staggering collective setback in women’s economic outcomes. In April 2021, some 4.5 million fewer women were employed in the United States compared with February 2020. Either by personal choice or necessity, women’s labor force participation hit a 33-year low in January.
For those of us with the good fortune to arrive at this moment with life and livelihood intact, there are other morale challenges to contend with. Chief among these is the pressure to meet employers’ business-as-usual performance demands amid a year’s worth of unprocessed grief. And then there’s the knowledge that as workers toiled and fizzled, the nation’s billionaire bosses became even richer. 

One needn’t be lazy, weak or unwell to reassess whether it’s worth bothering. 

It’s a hard-won lesson for the goal-setting American worker: that as much as you might love your work, work won’t love you back. Despite the fondness you may feel for the people you work with, you are not a family.
Ambition won’t fix our broken relationship with work, least of all for the ambitious worker in question. A better solution is collective action: Unions demonstrably raise wages and workplace standards — across industries and even in nonunionized workplaces."