The Tamesis
Times have certainly changed, however. “Female executives now make up about 29% of C-suite executives, just under a third. That’s a significant difference from 17% when we started in 2014,” said Megan McConnell, a McKinsey partner and co-author of the annual Women in the Workplace report. “Meaningful progress has been made in increasing female representation, especially at the top of companies.”
In ten years, girl bosses may be gone. But the tensions she exposes between ambition, capitalism, and whether women can truly reinvent the systems they enter remain unresolved. With some figureheads from the OG era returning and a new ownership model emerging, the question is whether we’re entering GirlBoss 2.0 and what will be different this time around.
The ambition gap is not about ambition
For much of the 2010s, women were told that the path to empowerment was to “lean in,” a mantra popularized by Sheryl Sandberg in her 2013 book of the same name. The idea is that women should feel more confident pursuing leadership positions, whether that’s speaking at meetings, negotiating for promotions, or continuing to work on career advancement despite structural inequalities in the workplace – with the hope that once more women are in positions of power, the system itself might start to change.
But in the years since, the cultural conversation around ambition has changed dramatically. On social media, new female archetypes have emerged: the traditional wife, the stay-at-home girlfriend, the “soft life” advocate and the burnout feminist, each promising a break from the ruthless productivity of the girlboss era, sometimes wrapped in reactionary ideas about women’s place in society.
This shift is starting to show up in the data. “This is the first time in five years of tracking ambition that we’ve seen a gap,” McConnell said. “We double-checked the analysis multiple times because it was surprising. The question is: Why are we seeing a six-point gap? [in ambition] A relationship between a man and a woman that we haven’t seen before? “
Structural inequality remains a key factor. This year, McConnell said, only 93 women were promoted for every 100 men promoted, a number that dropped to 74 women of color for every 100 men. In North America, black women lag behind, with only 60 women promoted for every 100 men.
When the researchers examined this gap more closely, they found that it was not a breakdown in motivation but a realignment of expectations. McConnell said many respondents questioned whether the trade-off was worth it when considering senior positions. On average, women still earn about 84 to 85 cents for every dollar they earn, according to Pew Research, a pay gap that has widened over time and fueled a sense that greater responsibility doesn’t always translate into proportional financial rewards.
“Women will look up and see the quality of life of the people currently in these positions, but that’s not necessarily admirable,” McConnell explained, noting that men don’t face the dual pressures of work and caregiving responsibilities in the same way.
Crucially, when McKinsey adjusted the data to account for career support, including sponsorships, extension opportunities and active management advocacy, the ambition gap largely disappeared. “The data shows that there is both an ambition gap and a support gap,” McConnell said. “If companies address the support gap, the target gap should shrink.”
