The Cost of Ambition Is Catching Up With Women in Business

Hannah Neeleman wakes up before the sun. She milks her cows. She bakes bread from scratch. Somewhere in between, she teaches dance to some of her nine children.

She trained at Juilliard and was on her way to a career in New York ballet. Then she married young, moved to the mountains and became, instead, the internet’s most-watched wife.

She now has 20 million followers across Instagram and TikTok and is the reigning face of #tradwife, a term used to describe women who choose more traditional gender roles, leaving paid work to focus on cooking and child-rearing.

If you haven’t yet heard of the term, you may know some of its relatives. 

There’s soft life, with more than a billion views. It describes women stepping away from hustle culture and choosing more rest and less pressure. There are also lazy girl jobs, roles that pay reasonably well, nothing spectacular, but don’t demand long hours or constant ambition.

I’ve spent the last seven years mentoring young women in business. Recently, I spoke to one of my mentees, who’s a few years into her career. She’s really sharp and doing very well for herself.

When we talked about these trends, however, she admitted that she watches the videos and often thinks about stepping back. Not to another job. Just … back. Fewer meetings and a role that leaves her alone after 6 p.m.

The standard read on all of this is that we’ve travelled back to some time in the 1950s or 60s. That we overreached and are quietly drifting home. Lean In and McKinsey even found that women are reporting less interest in advancing at work than they did a decade ago.

I don’t believe this to be the case, though. I think we need to look at what women were sold in the first place.

Before soft life, there was hustle culture

Before soft life, there was hustle culture. The girlboss era. Say yes. Reply at midnight. Take on more. Work weekends. Make yourself indispensable. Don’t complain. Don’t slow down. 

That was the blueprint for the early 2000s, and you just needed to turn on the TV to see it.  There was Miranda Priestly, the cold manager barking down a hallway in designer heels, an assistant sprinting behind her.

Boiler Room, a film about stock brokers in a room with the blinds down, screaming into headsets, selling stock and calling it hustle. 

Even Sex and the City had Miranda Hobbes — glass of red wine at midnight, still billing hours to make partner while everyone praised how driven she was. 

The message was clear. Women could have the career. They could have the big salary. They could have the corner office. But they had to become the kind of woman who could handle all of it without ever looking tired.

Vulnerability was a liability. Rest was something you earned later. If you put in the hours, it’d eventually pay off. 

The only problem is, though, for a lot of women, it didn’t.

The numbers never caught up to the effort

Take pay raises. For years, the assumption was that women simply weren’t asking for them.

Research by Warwick University found that wasn’t true at all. Women ask for pay raises just as often as men. The only difference is men were 25% more likely to get the yes. 

Then there’s motherhood. ONS data shows that five years after having their first baby, mothers’ monthly earnings are 42% lower than they were the year before they gave birth.

More than £1,000 a month, gone. Not because they stopped working. Not because they stopped trying. Because they had a child.

And for women who did decide to keep climbing that corporate ladder, the numbers weren’t much better either. As of last year, the FTSE 100 had eight female chief executives. The same number it had four years earlier. To put that in perspective, there are more FTSE 100 CEOs called Andrew and Simon than there are women.

So we put in the hours. We asked for the raise. We came back from maternity leave and tried to pick up exactly where we’d left off. Yet, the numbers barely moved.

Maybe that’s why the soft life is so appealing. Because after years of being told that the answer was to work harder, many women have started asking a different question: What if I just don’t want to do this anymore?

Final thoughts 

Women have every right to choose how they want to spend their lives.

I want to be clear: Although it isn’t the route I’ve chosen, I’m not against the farm, the children, the baking or the homemaking. If that’s genuinely what someone wants, more power to her.

But a choice made because the alternative was unbearable isn’t really a choice. It’s an escape route.

Nobody needs to ask whether Hannah Neeleman is happy. That’s hers to know. The more interesting question is why so many other women watch her, and other tradwives, and think leaving might be easier than staying.

My mentee isn’t dreaming about a farm in Utah. She just wants a version of her career that doesn’t cost her everything else. That’s not a big ask. It’s closer to the bare minimum.

We don’t fix this by asking women to want less. And we don’t fix it by getting nostalgic for the version of ambition we used to sell them.

Ambition was never the problem. What ambition cost was the problem.

If we want workplaces where women don’t feel the need to escape, we have to build ones that don’t require them to disappear to survive them.

Hannah Neeleman wakes up before the sun. She milks her cows. She bakes bread from scratch. Somewhere in between, she teaches dance to some of her nine children.

She trained at Juilliard and was on her way to a career in New York ballet. Then she married young, moved to the mountains and became, instead, the internet’s most-watched wife.

She now has 20 million followers across Instagram and TikTok and is the reigning face of #tradwife, a term used to describe women who choose more traditional gender roles, leaving paid work to focus on cooking and child-rearing.