About this episode

This episode discusses the systemic issues women face in the workplace, focusing on the ambition penalty and the widening gender pay gap.

You've been told the same story your whole career. Negotiate. Work harder. Be more confident. Speak up. And if you do all those things, the doors will open. But what if that story was designed to keep you quiet? In this episode, I sit down with Stefanie O'Connell Rodriguez, author of The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down. Stefanie is a journalist, the host of Real Simple Magazine's Webby Award-winning Money Confidential podcast, and the creator of the newsletter Too Ambitious — and she has spent years compiling the research that the mainstream personal finance world has been slow to reckon with. The gender pay gap in the United States just widened for the second year in a row. It's now back to where it was in 2005 — when many of us started our careers. Decades of girl power, leaning in, and girl-bossing, and we are right back where we started. This conversation is about why. And more importantly, what actually works. We talk about the ambition penalty — the real, documented, data-backed sum of professional, financial, social, and personal costs women pay for simply wanting more. We dig into the myths of meritocracy that have…

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