ive—
for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging
women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for
being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a
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social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.

And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a
young age. When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they
emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a
“good man” before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout college, I vetted every
date as a potential husband (which, trust me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen).

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When I was graduating, my thesis advisor, Larry Summers, suggested that I apply for international
fellowships. I rejected the idea on the grounds that a foreign country was not a likely place to turn a
date into a husband. Instead, I moved to Washington, D.C., which was full of eligible men. It worked.
My first year out of college, I met a man who was not just eligible, but also wonderful, so I married
him. I was twenty-four and convinced that marriage was the first—and necessary—step to a happy
and productive life.

It didn’t work out that way. I was just not mature enough to have made this lifelong decision, and
the relationship quickly unraveled. By the age of twenty-five, I had managed to get married … and
also divorced. At the time, this felt like a massive personal and public failure. For many years, I felt
that no matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the scarlet letter D
stitched on my chest. (Almost ten years later, I learned that the “good ones” were not all taken, and I
wisely and very happily married Dave Goldberg.)

Like me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women
and Foreign Policy Program, was encouraged to prioritize marriage over career. As she described in
The Atlantic, “When I was 27, I received a posh fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and
work at the Wall Street Journal.… It was an incredible opportunity for a 20-something by any
objective standard, and I knew it would help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My
girlfriends, however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my boyfriend at the time to live
abroad for a year. My relatives asked whether I was worried that I’d never get married. And when I ↓↓網↓
attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took me aside to remind me that ‘there aren’t many
guys like that out there.’ ” The result of these negative reactions, in Gayle’s view, is that many women
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“still see ambition as a dirty word.”

Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than
men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or
dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising
children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And
there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not—and should not have to—
aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

I also acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women. I have breast-fed
two children an