Men who are ambitious are leaders. Men who are assertive are business-minded. Men who negotiate hard are good at their job. Men who have strong opinions are visionary.
Women who are ambitious are pushing too hard. Women who are assertive are aggressive. Women who negotiate hard are difficult. Women who have strong opinions are abrasive.
This is the double standard in its simplest form. And it’s absolutely real. It’s not something women are imagining. It’s not something that’s going to disappear if women just have more confidence. It’s a structural thing. The same behaviour is read differently depending on who’s exhibiting it.
The exhausting part is that women know this and they still have to navigate it. You can’t just decide you’re going to stop caring what people think and be ambitious in the same way a man can. You’ll get read as difficult and it will actually cost you. So you develop strategies. You learn how to be ambitious without being threatening. You learn how to push hard without being aggressive. You learn how to have opinions without being abrasive.
Some strategies actually work better than others. The first is to build relationships before you need them. This gives you permission to be ambitious in ways that cold, transactional ambition doesn’t. If people like you and trust you, they’re more willing to read your assertiveness as leadership rather than aggression. This is infuriating because it’s not fair — men don’t have to do this, they just show up and people assume they’re competent — but it works.
This means investing in relationships that don’t have an immediate tactical value. Having coffee with people. Remembering things they tell you about their lives. Asking how they are. Being genuinely interested in them as people, not just as stepping stones to where you want to go. It’s not fake, but it is strategic. And it creates a kind of social capital that lets you be ambitious without being read as self-serving.
The second is to frame your ambition as advocacy for something beyond yourself. If you want a promotion, don’t talk about what you want. Talk about what you’d do in that role that would help the team or the product or the company. If you want resources, don’t ask for them because you want to do interesting work. Ask for them because you want to solve a customer problem. This works because it makes you sound like a leader with vision rather than like someone who’s just trying to get ahead.
This is also infuriating because it’s not true that you want these things for purely altruistic reasons. You want the promotion because you want to advance your career and make more money and have more influence. But if you lead with that, you’ll be read as selfish. If you lead with the vision and the impact, people will read you as a leader. So you learn to lead with the vision.
The third is to choose your contexts carefully. Some organisations and some teams are more receptive to ambitious women than others. Some managers will advocate for you and some will feel threatened by you. You can’t change the whole system, but you can choose to operate in parts of it that are less hostile. This is a luxury — not everyone can do it, and it’s a shame that this is even necessary. But it’s true.
The harder part is knowing when to stop following these strategies and just be difficult.
Because here’s the thing: there’s a point where trying to be ambitious without being difficult becomes so much work that it’s not worth it. You’re spending all your energy managing perception and positioning yourself carefully and building relationships for permission and framing things in a way that’s palatable. You’re making yourself smaller. And at some point, usually after you’ve been doing this for several years, you get tired.
You get tired of carefully choosing your words. You get tired of investing in relationships before you’re allowed to be ambitious. You get tired of framing your success as someone else’s vision. You get tired of modulating yourself. And you make a choice.
You either accept that you’re going to be read as difficult and stop caring, or you leave.
Some women make the first choice. They decide that if they’re going to get read as difficult for speaking their mind, they might as well actually speak their mind. They stop positioning. They stop strategising. They say what they think. They ask for what they want. And they wear the “difficult” label and keep going because the alternative is to spend their entire career managing other people’s perception of them.
This is genuinely brave and also genuinely costly. You will pay a price for being difficult. You might not get the promotion. You might be excluded from certain conversations. People might work to marginalise you. It’s not fair and it shouldn’t happen and it does anyway.
But here’s the thing about paying that price: sometimes you get to choose to pay it instead of having it extracted from you. And that choice itself is a kind of power.
Other women make the second choice. They leave. They go to companies or industries where the rules are different, or where there are enough women in leadership that the whole game changes. They go to smaller companies where the culture is different. They start their own things. This is also costly — you leave behind relationships and status and security — but it’s also freeing.
The lucky women get to make these choices from a position of some strength. They’ve got enough experience and reputation that they can afford to be difficult or to leave. Younger women, women without safety nets, women who need the paycheck — they might not have these options. They’re still managing perception and positioning and framing. And that’s where the real unfairness sits.
If you’re early in your career, the strategies I described do help. Build relationships. Frame your ambition as something bigger than yourself. Choose contexts where you’re more likely to be heard. They’re not fair, but they work. And you can use them to get to a point where you actually have options.
But also understand that this comes with a cost. The cost of managing perception, of making yourself palatable, of not always saying what you think. That cost is real and it compounds. Some women can pay it indefinitely. Some women can’t.
If you’re further along, if you’ve been doing this for years and you’re tired, it’s okay to stop. It’s okay to be difficult. It’s okay to say what you think. It’s okay to ask for what you want without wrapping it in a vision or a team benefit. You’ll probably pay a price. But you’ll also get something back. You’ll get to be yourself. You’ll get some energy back from not constantly managing yourself.
And the weird thing is that sometimes, once you stop trying so hard to not be difficult, other people respond differently. Not everyone. But some. The people worth knowing often actually respect you more when you’re real. When you’re not performing a version of ambition that’s palatable for male sensibilities.
The double standard is real. The exhausting work of navigating it is real. But the point at which you get to stop performing is also real. You just have to know you get to choose it.