Editor’s note: Please join us in welcoming Ruchika T. Malhotra, who will be a regular columnist for the Formidable newsletter. Ruchika is a journalist, speaker and the author of Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success.
I’ve always thought of myself as an ambitious woman despite never having a model of corporate ambition in my immediate circle of women growing up. Women in my traditional Indian diasporic community in Singapore were largely stay-at-home mothers and the few who worked outside the home weren’t making big bucks in corporations.
Yet, for me, seeing American women on TV in the 1990s created a vision for my life that revolved around corporations and pantsuits. At the heart of my ambition: to have a say in choices over my life and my body that I’d seen denied to every woman in my lineage before me.
A new report by The Economist confirms what teenage me knew; when women earn, they have more power in their homes. So off I went, eventually becoming the first woman in my family to earn a six figure salary, and in a year after, run a seven-figure business.
But now after over two decades of making my own money, I’m questioning the sustainability of the way I’ve been working and having my sights on earning the maximum I could. Especially when the workplace has become so inhospitable to women. The cancellation of the Grace Hopper Conference last week – a technology conference for women that I honestly thought was too big and famous to fail – was the latest reminder in the onslaught.
Over 845,000 women left the U.S. labor force in 2026 alone.
Apart from the women who have been pushed out, I’m also noting the drop in the number of women who aspire to get the highest-paying corporate jobs, as per McKinsey and Lean In data. For the first time since the Women in the Workplace report came out 11 years ago, their data found an “ambition gap” among men and women.
It’s because women are tired. Simplistic, I know, but also, real. There’s a growing ambition gap for entrepreneurial women like me. Women who have spent years building a financially viable business responsible for other people’s paychecks, who are also wondering: “is grinding this hard worth it if AI is coming for our jobs?”
I left a corporate job in 2014 after a short-lived stint in tech. I was fortunate enough to land on my feet (and the privilege of having a partner who financially supported me as I built), while building out my consulting, public speaking and writing business. Earning money ensured I was able to make so many decisions none of the women who came before me did: when and how many children to have, agency over how I spend my time and money.
That money came at a cost, though. Of gritting my teeth through covert and overt sexism and racism as a woman of color dealing with institutions. At the cost of time with my young child . The absolute exhaustion of running a second shift at home in ways most men, even in supposedly more equal societies, just don’t face.
Women are having important and necessary conversations about ambition and success at a time of polycrisis.
The Economist article highlights what I’ve seen in many societies – including in some families in the west – women are discouraged or actively prevented from working, even if that money would go a long way to help the household. Women at home are easier to control.
Add to this the glaring issue that impacts a rural woman seeking work in the global majority as much as it does the vast upper-middle class professional women in the west I talk to: how do we do it all while shouldering the lion's share of caregiving and responsibility for ensuring hot, healthy meals are on the table? Even in the most "gender-equal" societies, this tension between work and life is pervasive.
I don’t have a great answer yet, but I’m talking to many, many women about what ambition means to them when there is so much uncertainty and so much exhaustion. The only thing I know for sure is that almost all the women I’ve talked to who have been in the workforce for a decade or more are questioning, if not outright redefining, ambition. More are eschewing “male” styles of success that means grinding even if you don’t belong and embracing a rhythm that makes it less impossible to have a life outside of work.
Would I give up my ambition of earning money altogether? It feels impossibly hard knowing all I went through to get here. Although I am setting my sights on trying to figure out what’s a “good enough” earning amount (as opposed to always believing: more is more.)
Because here’s the truth: even after facing all the biases and the (micro)aggressions of being a woman of color at work, my life as a self-employed professional woman in America is a dream I know I'm carrying for all my ancestors. Sometimes, I think achieving that is already the greatest culmination of my ambitions. And sometimes, I worry I’m letting myself and all of them down.
I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about ambition and money.
— Ruchika T. Malhotra, [email protected]
