What kind of environment deserves your ambition?

Two of my clients are negotiating new job offers, which is always exciting! When these opportunities come, the typical discussions happen: compensation, vacation time, flexibility, professional development stipends. But both of these clients were in a position to ask for something new. They wanted to own the content they create in their role, and they wanted permission to hold contract or consulting roles on the outside.

What struck me is that both of these women are staying in corporate, yet they still wanted to protect their ability to build something of their own. That instinct, to hold onto your intellectual property and your career flexibility even in a role you're excited about, is showing up everywhere right now.

Never before have I seen more women exploring self-employment and non-corporate options. They're curious about building multidimensional careers, where you have a second career that complements your day job, as a way to grow their skills and hedge their risk against a trajectory that doesn't feel as certain as it used to.

I can't help but think a shift in tone on women in leadership is driving this. A recent Bloomberg editorial by Beth Kowitt captured the energetic shift my clients are feeling. She highlights a string of concerning data points: 

• The gender pay gap has widened for the second year in a row, the first consecutive increase since the 1960s. 

• White men made up the majority of new S&P 500 board directors last year for the first time since 2017, while women took about a third of new seats, down from 44% in 2022. 

• The employment rate for Black women is in one of its steepest declines in 25 years. 

• …and women still make up just 29% of C-suite jobs.

Kowitt notes there's no single factor behind these declines. They're the result of a web of cultural, political, and policy shifts: the rollback of DEI programs, the curtailing of flexible work arrangements that research showed did more to diversify corporate America than many formal DEI efforts, the demand to return to the office five days a week, the scaling back of paid leave, and the calls for more "masculine energy" in the workplace.

Meanwhile, women started 44% of new businesses in 2025, up from 29% in 2019, according to Gusto. What I can tell you, from my conversations with women and from my own experience, is that at some point swimming against the current gets exhausting. Some are ready to be their own boss while others are ready to stop pouring all of their ambition into one place and start choosing themselves in small steps that open a wider path forward.

My own business has felt these shifts, mostly through fewer corporate engagements and fewer companies enrolling women in my public programs, citing reduced budget for female employees. I'm not immune, and that's exactly why I'm grateful I built a career with more than one dimension. When one revenue line takes a hit, the others hold me up.

It's not all decline, though. There are always outliers. I have corporate clients, like Businessolver, who are truly the exception. They've kept doing the work to support and advance women, and their talent and recruitment pipelines are thriving because of it.

So while this data might feel like a panic alarm, don't treat it as one. If you're a woman, or you work with women, or you want to promote more women, and these statistics leave you feeling a little helpless, that's normal. As I wrote in Closing the Confidence Gap, yes, there are systems that need to change, and we are each one powerful person inside a system who can drive that change.

🔥 You always have agency in making the next right choice for your own benefit, growth, or well-being. Have you sensed this shift at work for women in the last two years? Have you changed your ambitions or career goals because of it?

PUT THIS IDEA INTO ACTION

Whether you stay, pivot, or build something on the side, you always have agency in the next right choice. Here are some places to start:

1: Don't wait for the system to fix itself or a specific set of circumstances before you make your move. You can advocate to change the systems while you also make the next right career decisions for yourself.

• Choosing yourself is always the right option and this can start small by investing in your own development, education and skillset.

• Advocating for change and choosing yourself are not in competition. You get to do both.

2: Get clear on your values, because the external benchmarks for success are less reliable right now. As companies make quiet shifts in who and how they invest in talent, the scorecard by which success is defined can keep moving. 

• Resentment is a huge clue that something isn't aligned for you and needs to be removed or changed. Pay attention to where it shows up in your work. Let this inform you of what needs to be changed.

• When you know what you stand for, you have a steadier compass for making the right next career choices.

3: Check in with your ambitions. McKinsey found the largest ambition gap in 11 years between women and men who want to be promoted.

• The question behind the question my clients are truly asking is "what kind of career or environment deserves my full ambition?"

• This reframe around ambition is important because what appears to be a “lack of ambition” could be women choosing alternate career pathways and no longer investing energy in work environments that stopped supporting them.

4: Your talents are profitable. As a young professional, I once heard author Daniel Pink say, "Talented people need organizations much less than organizations need talented people." I clung on to this quote for 8 years before I fully left corporate but it was the paradigm shift I needed to realize that your talents hold more power than you think.

TRY THIS NEXT: Take an honest look at where you're bringing your talent right now, and ask yourself whether that environment has earned your full ambition. If it has, how can you invest in it even more boldly? If it hasn't, where else could that talent be placed, inside your current role, alongside it, or somewhere new?"

Kelli Thompson is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and executive coach who specializes in helping high achievers advance to influential leaders in their organizations. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Closing The Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck.

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