What the "Ambition Gap" Gets Wrong About Women
Reluctance to lead might be wise ambivalence about what leadership costs.
Posted June 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
This year, for the first time in the 11 years that Lean In and McKinsey have tracked women in corporate America , they reported an “ambition gap.” Eighty percent of women said they wanted to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86 percent of men, with even wider gaps at the ends of the leadership pipeline (69 percent of entry-level women versus 80 percent of entry-level men; 84 percent of senior women versus 92 percent of senior men).
I’d argue that “ambition gap” is a misdiagnosis of the problem. And misdiagnosis creates problems for how we choose interventions. If the problem is women’s ambition, then yet again we continue to perpetuate the message that the problem lives inside women and therefore can only be fixed by fixing women. Yet again, we’d be telling women that they just need more confidence , more leaning in, more hunger for the pursuit of leadership. If the problem is something else, we’d be aiming all that energy at the wrong target.
Instead, I’ve been calling it “ wise ambivalence .” It’s not an ambition problem, but a support-and-systems problem that women are reading accurately and wisely, wondering whether it’s all worth it. (Funny enough, a LinkedIn connection said my “ wise ambivalence” label might be a complete understatement! At this point, I wonder if “wise resistance” might be an even better label.)
The Data on the “Ambition Gap”
There’s now plenty of data to support the idea that the “ambition gap” is a problematic misdiagnosis. First, to their credit, McKinsey’s own report makes it clear that lower interest in promotion does not mean lower ambition. Their data indicates that when women receive the same career support, sponsorship, and stretch opportunities that men do, the gap disappears entirely. A gap that disappears the moment conditions are equalized isn’t a problem located within women.
Second, Gallup found in its Q4 2025 workforce data, published this past March 2026 , that women had higher engagement scores (34 percent vs 28 percent for men) and were more likely to say they were extremely motivated to pursue career growth (20 percent vs 16 percent for men). If women had an ambition problem, we’d expect their engagement and career growth motivation to be lagging, but the opposite was true.
And here was the biggest surprise: They found that despite higher engagement and career growth motivation, women also had higher burnout scores (31 percent vs 23 percent of men), with the gap being widest at the top (29 percent of women in leadership vs 19 percent for men in leadership, averaged from 2022 through 2025).
That is not a picture of people who don’t have ambition. That is a picture of people who have such deep ambition that they will sustain high effort under significant strain, while wisely wondering whether it’s worth it to keep going. When someone looks at a deal that is this imbalanced, where they give more than they get, and where the odds are stacked against them constantly, we usually don’t call that kind of hesitation a personal deficit. We usually call it thoughtful discernment.
Third, in a 2021 Yale study of nearly 30,000 workers at a large North American retail chain , researchers Kelly Shue and colleagues found that while women received higher performance ratings than men (7.3 percent more likely to earn a “high” performance score), they still received lower potential ratings, by 5.8 percent. And those lower potential ratings explained up to half of the gender promotion gap. We already knew that women are more likely to be promoted based on what they’ve proven (multiple times), while men are promoted for their future potential. But this study proved that when women and men with identical scores were tracked over time, the women went on to outperform, but were not promoted at rates matching their performance.
As Shue put it, “even when women have exceeded expectations with higher performance scores, they still don’t get the benefit of the doubt”; instead, they “get progressively lower potential scores relative to their actual future performance as we rise up the corporate ladder.” Meaning, the glass ceiling actually thickens as we climb.
So, now imagine a woman who is more engaged, more motivated, and outperforms her male peers more often. She gets less sponsorship, fewer stretch assignments, and less support as she is systematically scored as having less “potential” than her own future performance would prove. And she’s becoming more burned out by the minute.
And then she is asked to take on the next role. Or she looks at the next opportunity and does her own calculation. And she decides it’s not worth it. Is this truly to be considered a dip in ambition?
As the kids say, “the math ain’t mathing.” I’d assess this as a clear-eyed read of a system that asks her to invest more for a lower expected return. No financial investor would recommend betting money on that deal.
Why This Matters and What to Do (and Not Do)
All this matters because the two “diagnoses” send us in opposite directions: One direction is a “Lean In 2.0” smorgasbord of more confidence workshops, power stances, and imposter “syndrome” (it’s not a syndrome, it’s a phenomenon) busting trainings that treat the symptoms but not the problem and address the individual rather than the system. Please, no more—we’ve had more than we can eat of that expensive, high-calorie, low- nutrition “fix-her” smorgasbord.
The other direction is one in which we fix the root of the problem and thus eliminate all the symptoms: add the appropriate support, audit the potential ratings, and recalibrate the deal. Do that, and McKinsey’s own data tells us exactly what will happen: the gap will automatically close.
Change the conditions, and I promise you will retain your most talented women, because they are, at least for now, still motivated and engaged, and have demonstrated they are willing to make it work if the deal feels like they will get a return on all that investment.
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Mira Brancu, Ph.D. , is a leadership advisor and team development facilitator. A former senior leader and clinical psychologist, she helps clients navigate uncertainty, transitions, and challenging workplace dynamics and systems.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.