Step Away to Step Up: The Ongoing Death of Hustle Culture

I was delighted to take part in the Turing Community’s recent virtual event series: Women in Tech.  I joined other women developers and leaders globally for a multi-session event featuring career-centric talks, panel discussions, interactive workshops, networking opportunities designed to help women accelerate their tech careers.

I have long been an advocate for women to own the stage – both physically and metaphorically.  It’s part of my signature course offering, Women in Leadership, and it’s a philosophical pillar of everything I do.  Not just because I am a woman (a fact which does not require me to recognize a day or month devoted to it), but because I know that when women step into their power, they elevate and empower those around them: co-workers, subordinates, children, partners, and, yes, even their bosses.

More now than ever, women are the driving force behind The Great Resignation: the death knell of hustle culture and the demand for less doing, more being in everything we do.  

What if owning the stage actually means… showing up on it less?

What I mean is this: hustle culture teaches us that in order to BOSS UP (and change our lives, apologies to Lizzo) we have to SHOW UP.  All the damn time.

But what if stepping back is what is required to truly step up, BOSS UP, own the stage, make it happen, [insert your own favorite success trope]?

Life isn’t a treadmill, which only keeps running if we do.  There is much to be said about the importance of re-creation (and I said quite a bit here): it is the transformative ability to keep going as our very best selves, with our next-best ideas and reignited passions fully intact.

Stepping away from hustle culture doesn’t mean living listlessly, without ambition.  For most of us, ambition is a natural state – as opposed to something we choose.  We are ambitious because we have a deeply-ingrained vision which drives us (sometimes unrelentingly).  Ambition isn’t the enemy (and we couldn’t kill it if we wanted to); it’s simply a fire that needs to be tended to light our way.

Hustle culture makes women feel like they are less ambitious.

When we confuse hustle culture and ambition, women are the ones who suffer.

By measuring performance, character and commitment in work intensity and hours, hustle culture also disproportionately harms women, who still shoulder the vast majority of unpaid labor and are more likely to require time away from the rigid structures of the paid labor force to take on the unpaid work of caregiving.

Even the 40-hour work week — historic win though it was for workers’ rights — doesn’t benefit women. It was developed about a century ago by majority white, cisgender, heterosexual men under the assumption of having a partner at home full-time managing the unpaid labor of housework, cooking, cleaning and care work. In other words, even existing work structures are antithetical to supporting women’s ambitions.

And by conflating ambition with hustle culture it’s easy to perpetuate deeply entrenched (and flawed) beliefs that women are inherently less ambitious than men.

A recently released IBM study shows that between 2019 and 2021 the pipeline of women in leadership decreased.

“Part of the reason for these declining numbers is that despite more companies having diversity and inclusion initiatives, very few have actually taken the steps to prioritize these initiatives and few have worked to change the mindset and culture at their company.”
- Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s global markets senior vice said on CNBC’s Make It.

Given those findings, it’s not surprising that for women of color, who were most impacted by job losses during the pandemic, we also had the steepest declines in self-defined “ambition” over the past year:

54% of Black women and 42% of Hispanic women in 2021 describe themselves as “very ambitious,” compared to 75% and 65% respectively in early 2020.

Bottom line: It’s work, not ambition, that’s not working for women.

Time is finite, ambition is not.  And this is the sticking point for women: we’re not willing to give up our weekends, abdicate our roles as caregivers, mothers, wives and daughters, or lose ourselves to “succeed” in a way that we don’t get to define.

When ambition is mistakenly linked to how much can be crammed into a day, or how many weekends spent working, per the hustle culture model, women become disenfranchised from their concept of ambition.

But ambition is not an amount of hours worked. It's not waking up at 4am. It's not a diet, an exercise or a productivity hack.⁠ It’s not a lack of boundaries or a perpetual state of stress and busyness. It is not a single-minded hypercompetitiveness, chasing goals for the sake of checking things off a list — climbing a ladder that might not even lead to where you want to go.

⁠To be ambitious simply means to have ambition: that drive to create a life that reflects your skills and potential.⁠ To be valued for those qualities and abilities that you experience and value in yourself.

The ambition to feel that your work and the rest of your life actually work together, the ambition to enjoy your days, the ambition to help others, the ambition to have time to relax and have fun: all still ambition. And I believe ambition is a drive worth exploring and tapping into, even (maybe even especially) when what you’re driving toward isn’t what our culture expects you to want.

How is your definition of ambition at war with hustle culture?  I want to know!  Leave me a note in the comments.