Concern about lack of resources has been mislabeled as women having less ambition.

Workforce data indicates women have higher engagement and career growth motivation, but also higher burnout.

Data suggests the glass ceiling seems to thicken at higher levels for female employees.

When women receive the same opportunities that men do, the "ambition gap" disappears.

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........

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