‘The Ambition Penalty’ Review: Misconceptions in the Office

Stefanie O’Connell has crunched the numbers and it turns out that women aren’t equal after all. Decades after the gender revolution, women still don’t measure up to men when it comes to metrics such as pay, promotion and work-life balance. When they try to get ahead, we are told, women face an onslaught of “professional, financial, social, and personal costs.” And while it’s the women who suffer directly from this inequality, both men and women, Ms. O’Connell argues in “The Ambition Penalty,” pay the price by letting the workforce remain a battle of the sexes instead of seeking mutual benefit.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Ms. O’Connell, a finance journalist, came up in the heyday of the girlboss, when Sheryl Sandberg was telling women all they needed to do was “lean in” and assert themselves to achieve full equality with men. The future was female, girl power ruled the world and organizations such as STEM Like a Girl popped up to help young women break into so-called hard industries where they were underrepresented. But when they tried to STEM like a woman, they found that the empowering mantras of corporate feminism didn’t align with reality. “Girl power really does work . . . for girls,” Ms. O’Connell writes. “For women, that power starts to stall almost immediately.”

Why are women working so hard to achieve their ambitions and then failing, or abandoning them entirely? Ms. O’Connell says the central problem isn’t individual actions but collective beliefs. Our misconceptions and stereotypes about men and women at work shape our reality—and could reshape it, if only we would accept the hard facts and work to change them.