Seven years ago, Chief Member and Founder of bgood collective Rabia Farhang made the bold decision to jump off the corporate ladder. After a 20-year career climbing the ranks in the fashion industry and enduring multiple rounds of restructuring, she’d decided enough was enough.

As she wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “That nonlinear path allowed me to pivot and redesign my next chapter on my own terms. It led to my new multihyphenate world… founder, caregiver, mentor.”

Farhang is far from the only woman redefining success and, thereby, ambition on her own terms. But this year’s Women in the Workplace report paints a slightly different picture. According to the annual report from Lean In and McKinsey, 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level compared to 86% of men. And that “ambition gap” widens significantly at entry and senior levels.

When ambition is measured solely by whether someone wants a promotion into the same structure they’re already navigating, the gap appears real. And given the report’s scale and rigor, that data is certainly valuable. But it doesn’t necessarily tell the full story.

When you zoom out, a different picture emerges. Chief and The Harris Poll’s Beyond the Ladder research — based on more than a thousand senior women leaders — finds that 86% of women are more ambitious now than they were five years ago, and 92% feel fired up about their professional growth.

Women leaders today aren’t abandoning their drive. Rather, they’re abandoning the outdated idea that ambition can only look like scaling the corporate ladder, rung by rung, inside systems that have historically sidelined them, undervalued them, or burned them out. If anything, the ambition is still there, it just looks different.

Ambition Is at an All-Time High, But Structures Are Shaky

The Women in the Workplace report does not show declining drive among women. In fact, 99% of senior-level women and 99% of senior-level men say that they’re motivated to do their best work.

So, why the gap in desire to be promoted? According to the Women in the Workplace report:

  • Women still face higher barriers to advancement. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 93 women are promoted and the number is even lower for women of color.
  • Caregiving remains disproportionately shouldered by women. Nearly 25% of entry- and senior-level women who are not interested in promotion say that personal obligations make it hard to take on additional work, versus 15% of comparable men.
  • Flexibility stigma — ”The unfounded belief that employees who make use of flexible work options are less committed” — is also having a negative impact on women in corporate roles.

These aren’t gaps in ambition — they’re gaps in structural support.

“Coming in to support people who were driving to do something with purpose and a mission was where I wanted to be,” Farhang explains. “My ambition shifted. It’s not that it went away. It just needed to look different.”

Her story, she adds, is similar to many other immigrant stories where “You put your head down, work hard, do the right thing, and build the life.”

“I think for a lot of people — no matter what your background is — you’re taught to work hard, get there, and achieve,” says Farhang. “This is the country where we’re all striving to get to that achievement. But nobody ever tells you life is about more than a salary or a title. It’s asking: What does life look like in the bigger picture?”

Beyond the Ladder: Women Redefining Ambition on Their Own Terms

When asked how they define ambition, 65% of the women polled in Chief’s survey ranked financial success; decision-making power; time and flexibility; and autonomy and agency above job titles. And thankfully women leaders aren’t just redefining ambition conceptually — they’re acting on it.

According to Chief’s research:

  • 96% of senior women have made at least one bold career move in the last three years.
  • 36% built a portfolio career.
  • 24% started a business.
  • 20% took on fractional leadership roles.
  • Many now hold an average of three simultaneous identities — executive, founder, board member, advisor, investor.

In other words, women are not shrinking their ambition. They’re designing bigger careers than corporate ladders can contain.

After experiencing severe burnout as a Chief People Officer in education during the height of COVID, founding Chief Member Lisa Friscia of Franca Consulting did something she’d never done before: she paused. Her exhaustion was not unique. In fact, McKinsey reports senior women were more exhausted, overwhelmed and burned out than any other group in the workforce, citing unmanageable workloads, emotional labor and pressure to support teams during crisis.

The experience forced Friscia to reevaluate what ambition meant to her.

“Early in my career, ambition was about the brass ring: getting the title, being in charge, and accomplishing things,” she says. “Now, ambition is about accomplishing things that actually matter to me.”

Like many of the women Chief polled, Friscia reclaimed proximity to the work that energizes her — consulting, designing leadership experiences, and exploring opportunities that feel aligned rather than obligatory. “Instead of trying to find one job that fits all things, I’m able to pursue different projects, opportunities, and partnerships that allow me to fill different parts of myself.”

Fellow Chief Member Anna Karp, a serial founder and faculty member at Columbia University, underscored this evolution: “If I change as a person and a professional, why should my definition of ambition stay the same? I think what’s important in terms of ambition is to do something that is rewarding for you professionally and that can also support your lifestyle.”

After experiencing both the heights of executive success and the depths of a company bankruptcy, Anna reframed ambition around personal growth, values alignment, and conscious decision-making, not external validation.

For Karp, ambition and success are two sides of the same coin. “For me, success is tied to growth. And many Chief executives are questioning that outdated definition of ambition,” she says. “They’re redefining themselves, becoming entrepreneurs, and going fractional, which ultimately means freedom, independence, and growth.”

But Karp didn’t always feel this way. “If you’d asked me about leaving corporate when I was a single mom eight years ago paying for private school and living in New York City, I would have told you I have no options,” says Karp. “But eventually I thought I don’t want to be CEO and stressed all the time with a stomach ache.”

These days, women are crafting multidisciplinary careers that blend corporate work with entrepreneurship, board service, consulting, and teaching. Fractional leadership, in particular, is exploding — with women leading the charge.

“Fractional leadership gives women real optionality — you can create a menu for yourself,” says Farhang. “It seems to me that women are embracing this way earlier and faster because we’re the ones that have to balance all the other things in life. You don’t want to sacrifice your ambition, you’re just navigating your ambition in a different direction than what it looked like 10 years ago.”

There are also women opting to pursue strategic “power pauses” by choosing to step back temporarily — not to retreat, but to recover, reassess, and return with even greater clarity.

Chief’s data shows many are choosing to step back temporarily — not to retreat, but to recover, reassess, and return with greater clarity. These pauses are not ambition cooling; they’re ambition calibrating.

What We Miss When We Misread Ambition

Labeling this moment an “ambition gap” perpetuates the narrow definition of ambition that has permeated society for so long. Because it’s not women who are falling behind — it’s the systems.

More than 80% of women polled by Chief agreed: “The playbook for career success I was handed 20 years ago is completely outdated.” So if corporate America wants to better understand women’s ambition, it needs to stop treating promotions as the end all and be all.

So yes, there is an ambition gap if we only count the ambitions that climb the corporate ladder. But that number only tells a partial story. If we want a more accurate assessment, we need to start measuring the ambition women actually have — not just the ambition that fits neatly inside a corporate structure.