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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, Grace Tame here. You might know me as the 2021 Australian of the Year or quote unquote difficult woman. But did you know I'm also autistic? It took me a long time to get diagnosed. And sadly, that's true for a lot of women. I want to know why that's the case. That's why I'm taking over Ladies We Need To Talk for a series called Autistic AF.
Find it by searching Ladies We Need To Talk on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a Triple J podcast.
As soon as women's either financial means or status surpassed that of the man they were dating or seeing, suddenly these negative responses started to show up.
Hello, my friend, Dee Salmon with you for The Hookup Podcast, where we talk all things love, sex, dating and relationships. If you're new here, hello.
Every Tuesday, basically Pip, my co-host and I delve into a topic that either you've inspired, maybe you've DM'd us on our Instagram at Triple J The Hookup and you need help with something, or it's a debate you want us to unpack, or it's something that we see everyone's talking about online. And that's what basically happened this week. So a article went viral from The Guardian.
It says, single women are buying more houses, the men they are dating are not responding well. And Pip and I posted this on the Instagram and we basically said, can anyone relate to this? The article talks about the fact that so many women who are...
ambitious, buying houses, you know, doing well education or career wise, are finding that when they're dating, if they're dating men, there's a bit of a tension point there. Like guys are either not responding well or they're put off by that or they're intimidated or jealous or whatever it is. So we want to do an episode on this and see if there's something that you've noticed in your own life.
And so many of you told us that you have. So we unpacked it. We spoke to you. We And now I thought for this episode, why not chat to the journalist and the author behind the article that inspired this whole topic for us. So you're about to hear from Stephanie O'Connell. She is an award-winning writer. She's an author and she's a speaker, journalist.
Her book, her latest book is called The Ambition Penalty. And so I was really lucky to jump on Zoom. She's in New York.
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Chapter 2: What is the impact of women's success on their dating lives?
I was really lucky to jump on Zoom with her at 5am in the morning, her time. So So, so generous of her to make this work. And yeah, it was such an interesting chat. We spoke about her article and what inspired it, what she was hearing from all of the women she was interviewing.
We spoke about a lot of the research and the studies that she looked into, what some of the experts were saying in psychology around this tension that's very hetero and gendered. And also what she's learned, you know, writing about ambitious women who are dating men and how that kind of impacts their love lives.
She also gives us some advice at the end about, you know, if this is something that you can relate to, what should you do if you still want to find love, but you don't want to shrink yourself. And also what she predicts will happen in the future. Will guys who are dating women still be intimidated by their success? Who knows? It is such a fascinating chat. So yeah, let's get into it.
Stephanie, I'm so excited to chat to you. Thank you so much for coming on The Hookup.
Thank you for having me.
Now, your book, The Ambition Penalty, whilst does talk about relationships, focuses largely on women and ambition and money in the context of the workplace, right? Like you talk about how women can face a systemic ambition penalty, you know, the professional, financial and personal costs put on them when they pursue career growth or ambition in the workplace.
And in this article that you wrote for The Guardian, you focus on ambitious women, but how they've been experiencing dating and relationships when it comes to buying property, which I can't wait to unpack with you. But why was this something that you wanted to write about and explore? How did it come about?
So I had been writing about women in the workplace managing their money for a really long time. And what I saw covering personal finance was that women could do all of the quote unquote right things and follow all of the correct steps and still not get the same outcomes as their male peers.
And so it struck me that there was this disconnect between the advice women were getting and the outcomes they were receiving. And as I started to report on how the very same ambition that men could implement to get ahead at work, to access higher pay, to get more opportunity.
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Chapter 3: How do men react to women who are financially successful?
Did you find that, yeah, women's priorities are shifting now, whereas maybe previously we might have been, you know, growing up on Disney and fairy tales and rom-coms, like we might have seen our roles as women to try and find... a partner if we were dating men.
But now that's starting to shift and we have kind of other goals and things that we're looking for, like buying property or moving up the career ladder.
Yeah. So one of the things that's very clear is that women are not necessarily opting out of partnership, but they are not willing to sacrifice their other goals for the sake of partnership.
And that was a theme that came up when I was interviewing some of the experts for this piece, was really pointing out how in a very recent past in which women do not have equal opportunity to access things like financing, lending to purchase homes, to make enough money to be able to buy them.
Women were really dependent on men in ways that meant they kind of had to trade off any other kinds of aspirations or standards they might have in order to be seen as desirable. So if you literally can't own your own home without a male cosigner, then part of getting access to a home isn't just finances, it's about making yourself palatable to a man.
And so in that landscape, there was just a different standard of priorities for what trade-offs you were willing to make.
And I think we have not reckoned with the fact that as much as we know we're in a different landscape, there hasn't been a reckoning with how this changes the dynamics of dating because people don't understand just how much heterosexual relationships have really been about trade-offs that women had to make.
not that they wanted to make and so we have this language of give and take around relationships like well you get this and i get this but that was very much an uneven trade in a way that i think we haven't really recognized until recently as more and more of these stories are coming up where women are just pursuing their ambitions the way men do And yet it is being seen as a problem.
And it's only a problem in a world in which we've all been conditioned into thinking that, oh, of course women should sacrifice what they really want and what they really want to achieve for themselves. And so I think in the data that what we are seeing now is that women are...
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Chapter 4: What insights does Stefanie O’Connell share about women's ambition?
When I talk about these things, there's often this very misogynistic assumption that, well, if a woman earns a lot of money, there's something fundamentally wrong with her. She must be incredibly selfish. She must be a bad partner. She must be ignoring her man in ways that kind of justify this mistreatment. And what the data show is that the only thing
That is the problem here is the way, at least statistically, is the way men are responding to women earning more. It's not their incomes in and of themselves. that are creating the problem. It's the response when men believe they should always have more of it.
And so I just think that's such an interesting disconnect when we see women's incomes going up, everybody's really benefit, everyone's benefiting. It's just when it gets like, okay, well, if you're suddenly making more than me, that's when we're getting the problem. Well, then that's not a me problem, that's a you problem.
It's completely linked to the ego, isn't it? It's about what you said, that power and that dominance. What do you think about the current state of heterosexuality? This is something that we've covered quite a bit on The Hookup.
Chapter 5: How does the ambition penalty affect women's relationships?
I know you quoted a study in your article, Ipsos One, around 31% of Gen Z men thinking that a woman should obey their husband. You have obviously been studying and writing about this for a long time now. What do you think about the current climate with the manosphere and these kind of ideas that seem to be really coming to the forefront?
when we think about that data, like that 31% of Gen Z in the younger generation?
I think it's a crisis. I think the state of heterosexual relationships have probably always been in crisis in ways that we never reckoned with because of what I said before about how much of economic dependence by design really was something that forced women into trade-offs that we just would never expect of men.
And I don't think we have ever really had a moment where we, as much as we might recognize it in theory, but in practice to reckon with how much those relationships were inequitable is not something that I think we've really come to terms with. The amount of sacrifice that women have been expected to make and continue to be expected to make.
I've talked about in my book, just like the level of household inequality in heterosexual relationships is huge. astounding just how little that has changed over decades and decades, even as women have increased their workforce participation, outpace men in markers of wealth, status and income.
Even when women earn more than their male peers, they're still carrying so much more of the unpaid household labor, of the child care. so much more of the sacrifices in ways that really hurt women's well-being.
And so I think what we're kind of coming to terms with now is how little has changed in terms of the expectations put upon men in relationships and how they show up, even as women are now carrying both the paid labor and all of the unpaid labor that they did in the past. In fact,
time use status shows that women, again, even when they outpace their male peers on income, are spending more time than their mothers did in childcare. And so we are seeing just enormous pressures on women in ways that I think really reveal just how broken heterosexual relationships are today. And so I think
People who are dating, especially younger women who might be seeing women who are my age and midlife kind of in the trenches of having young children, being in their mid-career, really struggling through these things. They're looking at this and saying, if that's what it takes, I don't want it. And I think they're right.
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