Challenging perceptions of what ambition looks like for women in the industry

I am ambitious. Unapologetically so. I like working and more than that, I want to work. For years though I tried to temper how that looked. Early in my career I softened my edges, careful not to appear ‘too much’. I told myself I didn’t quite know what I wanted yet or that I was still finding my voice. In reality, I knew I wanted influence, ownership and growth. I just wasn’t sure it was safe to say that out loud.

Ambition, when attached to women, has always come with caveats. “She’s intense”. “She’s blunt”. “She’s a bit full-on”. Rarely: “She’s clear” or “She knows her value”. As a society, we have tarnished the word ambition when it comes to women. We have made it something to manage rather than something to admire. Herein lies the problem because men are rewarded for ambition. It is assumed. It is expected. A man who declares that he wants more – more responsibility, more money, more power – is considered focused, strategic and driven. Yet, when a woman demands the same, she is often assessed for tone before she is assessed for talent. Nowhere does this tension become more visible than around motherhood.

I am of the firm belief that ambition does not die in the delivery room. However, unfortunately, the way the world responds to it often changes overnight. When a man becomes a father, the narrative is largely uninterrupted. His professional capability is not interrogated and his hunger for his role is not questioned. He is not asked whether he still wants the big account, the travel schedule or the promotion. If anything, fatherhood can enhance perceptions of stability and leadership.

When a woman becomes a mother, her ambition is suddenly up for debate and the questions come in thick and fast: Is she coming back full-time? Will she still want the pressure? Should we offer her something “less intense”? While these questions are intended with care, they are rarely neutral. They assume that ambition is fragile in women. That it is incompatible with care. That it must be dialled down to accommodate life. The structural reality is that women’s lives often carry more logistical and emotional labour. It’s an unavoidable, uncomfortable truth, but instead of redesigning systems to acknowledge that, we subtly redesign our expectations of women. We shrink the definition of ambition to fit the system, rather than expanding the system to fit ambition.

In industries like mine – brand, marketing, media – ambition is often confused with performance. We reward visibility, the busiest calendar, the loudest voice, a constant online presence. These are the optics of success. I have performed that version of ambition; I have said yes to the extra meeting, the additional project, the “quick” call. I have stretched myself thin to demonstrate value. It looked impressive on paper. It felt productive in the moment. It was also wildly unsustainable.

Motherhood forced a recalibration, not because I became less ambitious, but because I became clearer on my expectations, boundaries and what mattered to me in this new stage of my life. Some of the most ambitious decisions I have ever made would not traditionally be labelled as such. I turned down a private equity deal because the timing did not align with my family. I restructured my business model to prioritise longevity over short-term revenue spikes. I built a portfolio career that allows for scale and presence at home. None of those decisions were retreats. They were all strategic moves that no one is applauding.

Ambition is not defined by how loudly you chase growth. It is defined by what you are building towards. We have been conditioned to associate ambition with expansion at all costs. Revenue up and to the right. Headcount growth. Bigger offices. Bigger teams. Bigger noise. In many cases though, ambition can be far more nuanced. It can be about leverage, ownership, equity and designing a career that compounds rather than consumes.

The women I see operating at the highest level are not less ambitious because they factor in family, energy or longevity. They are more deliberate. Every decision ladders up to a clear end goal. They understand trade-offs and they make them consciously. I reject this being classed as softness because it actually demonstrates an incredibly high level of strategic maturity. The problem is that our dominant narrative still centres on uninterrupted careers and on systems built around the assumption that someone else is absorbing domestic responsibility, with metrics that reward constant availability. 

When women step outside that model, their ambition is often reinterpreted as a compromise. If they scale aggressively, they are asked how they are coping. If they scale cautiously, they are labelled risk-averse. If they protect their time, they are difficult. If they don’t, they are praised for their “commitment”. We don’t just have to be ambitious. We have to be palatable while doing it. We have to reassure rooms that our ambition will not inconvenience anyone. This is the double bind. We are encouraged to lean in, but only if we do it gracefully and do not disturb the system too much. We can be ambitious but only if we maintain warmth, humility and approachability at all times.

Ambition by its nature disrupts. It challenges hierarchy, it questions pay gaps, it negotiates terms and it says no. Ambition requires boundary-setting, and boundaries, particularly in women, are still too often interpreted as hostility. When a man protects his time, he is decisive. When a woman protects her time, she is uncollaborative. When a man negotiates hard, he is commercially astute. When a woman negotiates hard, she is demanding.

These are often not dramatic confrontations. They are micro-signals; reactions, raised eyebrows, subtle shifts in tone and over time they shape behaviour. So, women adapt. They soften their language, dilute their ambition, add qualifiers and over-explain. The cost of this is not just emotional. It is economic. When women are conditioned to downplay ambition at key life stages, industries lose leaders. Businesses lose operators. Boards lose perspective. The irony is that ambition coexisting with motherhood often sharpens it. As you shift into being ‘mum’, your time becomes finite, you protect your energy like never before, you’re sharper on decisions and your tolerance for wasted motion drops dramatically. You learn quickly what matters because you have to. 

Ambition after motherhood is rarely about proving, it is about building well and constructing something that works – commercially and personally – at the same time. It is about understanding that scale without sustainability is a huge liability, not a badge of honour. This is the shift I believe we need to see more clearly. Equally, ambition is not one size fits all and is a constant, individual evolution. It does not have to look like constant acceleration,  exhaustion and unsustainable volume. It can look like ownership, equity, saying no and designing systems that do not rely entirely on you. Not for everyone, but for me it looks like boardrooms AND babies.

The question is never whether women are ambitious enough. The question is instead whether our definitions are expansive enough to recognise ambition when it does not perform to the usual parameters. Until we interrogate that, we will continue to misread ambition in women as aggression, distraction or compromise. As I said, ambition does not die in the delivery room. What often dies is our permission to express it in the same way. If we want to genuinely move the conversation forward, we need to stop asking whether women can “have it all” and start asking why ambition has been defined so narrowly in the first place that we’re expected to try. Ambition is not about fitting into a pre-existing structure. Instead, it is about having the confidence to reshape it. Perhaps the most ambitious thing a woman can do in this industry is refuse to shrink her definition of success to make everyone else comfortable.