The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life

A big idea self-help book about the decisions that shape women’s lives, in the vein of Designing Your Life

What happens to women’s ambition in the years after college? The essays which were the catalyst for this book began as a series for the Atlantic, a project between two friends who had attended Northwestern University together in the early 1990s. What became of all the brilliant, hardworking women from their college days, they wondered as they shared work and family woes and triumphs over a glass of wine one evening.

What did life look like for other midcareer, midlife women? The data Schank and Wallace culled from the group of women they interviewed--over forty of them in all--revealed a surprisingly clear road map, with consistencies and pitfalls the authors hadn’t expected to find. The women fell into one of three categories: high achievers, those who were scaling back, and those who’d opted out. But, most important, no one woman stuck to a single track in the twenty-five years since graduation. Our culture and the popular media might seek to pin women into boxes, but real life is in fact more fluid. Those common moments of transition, crisis, and achievement reaped rich insights and strategies.

Tackling topics like the changing meaning of ambition, the near-lethal combination of modern parenting and a 24/7 work culture, and what sexism in the workplace does and doesn’t look like, the issues here are perennially topical. A love letter to a new generation of working women or anyone at a crossroads, from women who set out to rule the world and stumbled into various permutations of their best lives, The Ambition Decisions pinpoints the variables that push women toward making big decisions, and make those decisions easier.