1921: The Best of So Money: Money, Feminism, and the Power to Choose

Summary

So Money with Farnoosh Torabi – Episode 1921: The Best of So Money: Money, Feminism, and the Power to Choose

Release Date: December 22, 2025
Host: Farnoosh Torabi
Featuring: Neha Ruch, Katie Gaddy Tassen, Amina Altai, Dr. Corrine Lowe

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Overview

In this special "Best Of" year-end episode, Farnoosh Torabi revisits some of 2025's most compelling and candid conversations exploring the intersection of money, feminism, and the power to choose. The episode draws from a diverse set of guests—authors, researchers, and entrepreneurs—who each challenge the narratives surrounding women's work, caregiving, beauty, systemic inequities, ambition, and the value of our time. Through these highlights, listeners are invited to reflect more deeply on agency, options, and building a financial life that truly aligns with who we are and what we value.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Redefining the Career Pause with Neha Ruch, Author of The Power Pause

[04:43 – 16:01]

• Historical Narratives & Modern Choices:
  Neha Ruch examines how second-wave feminism in the 1970s proved women’s abilities in the workforce but also reinforced restrictive archetypes of women at home (the "June Cleaver" vs. "Michelle Obama" dichotomy). The cultural narrative of the "stay at home mom" hasn’t kept pace with modern realities—today, women have more education, delayed childbirth, and often make active, empowered decisions about career transitions.

  “When you ask them about the working mother, they’ll say, Michelle Obama, one is fact and one is fiction. And what it also highlights is that we never updated the perception of women doing work in the home.” — Neha Ruch [05:55]

• The Power Pause Mindset:
  Neha reframes career breaks as intentional, strategic choices—periods to grow personally, develop new skills, and build household resilience, not as steps backward or moments of loss.

  “When you step into a career downshift where you might be parting with your salary, you are still providing value to the household… The partner working out of the home is equally dependent on you for doing the unpaid work.” — Neha Ruch [08:43]

• Practical Advice for Couples:
  The importance of financial planning and open, respectful dialogue with partners is stressed. If a power imbalance exists around money, external help (like financial planners, marital counselors, or even postnuptial agreements) may be needed.

  “If you are in a relationship where it’s a much more traditionally minded partner and we are not able to get to a place of agreement…that is where…a postnuptial agreement [comes in]…guardrails to make sure that we’re protecting our partnership so that we can both feel safe and secure…” — Neha Ruch [14:43]

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2. Beauty, Money, and the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel with Katie Gaddy Tassen (Rich Girl Nation)

[16:01 – 25:10]

• Financial (and Psychological) Cost of Beauty Standards:
  Katie opens her book with a searing analysis of the "Hot Girl Hamster Wheel"—the often unexamined, relentless financial outlay required of women to meet beauty standards. This goes well beyond "choice," intersecting with systemic pressures and opportunity costs.

  “I had never heard somebody say, the beauty industry is terrible for women’s financial health… you’re spending an average of…$320 per month…over a 40-year career…that’s about a million bucks in opportunity cost… I don’t think many of us think about those decisions as optional.” — Katie Gaddy Tassen [19:36]

• Personal Choice vs. Systemic Influence:
  Katie challenges listeners to ask whether beauty-related spending truly feels like a choice and highlights how individual decisions are shaped (and shape) the experience of others.

  “The more people who labor and spend to uphold them, the more that pressure is exerted on every other woman to do the same…these are conversations that really exemplify that intersection between personal choice and systemic change.” — Katie Gaddy Tassen [20:35]

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3. The Motherhood Penalty & "The Bigger Math"

[22:51 – 25:10]

• Working Mothers and Short vs. Long-Term Financial Thinking:
  Many women contemplate leaving work when childcare costs seem to swallow their take-home pay. Farnoosh and Katie discuss the “bigger math”—how staying in the workforce (even for negligible near-term gain) is an investment in lifetime income, future options, and flexibility.

  “The bigger math is thinking about when you stay employed, even if in the short term it feels like a wash, you are investing in higher lifetime earnings.” — Katie Gaddy Tassen [24:35]

• Farnoosh’s Personal Investing Story:
  Farnoosh shares how aggressive mid-career investing built a financial buffer, granting security and choices as family needs evolved.

  “I continued working…because I did the big math and it is already paying off…now when they’re 8, 10… I may not want to work as hard as I was five years ago, and I have the runway now to be able to have options. That was the biggest theme from your book…” — Farnoosh Tarabi [29:26]

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4. Painful vs. Purposeful Ambition with Amina Altai (The Ambition)

[32:49 – 38:24]

• Systemic Barriers to Women's Ambition:
  Women and people of color often start their careers equally ambitious as men, but are penalized for it. While “ambition” is celebrated in men, it can be seen as “difficult” or “unlikable” in women, especially women of color, who encounter disproportionate backlash.

  “Women and people of color experience an ambition penalty. So the data was collected in a gender binary. So men and women enter the workforce with the same levels of ambition. Men are rewarded for theirs. Women, it’s seen as a detractor.” — Amina Altai [32:49]

• Painful vs. Purposeful Ambition:
  Amina explains the two types of ambition—one rooted in core wounds and scarcity ("painful"), the other in purpose and self-awareness ("purposeful"). She urges listeners to recognize if they’re “in the wrong room” and not to stay and “outwork” broken systems.

  “It’s almost virtually impossible to outwork a broken system.” — Amina Altai [36:49]

• A New Script for Ambition:
  Ambition can—and should—be reframed as cyclical, tied to our deeper why, not simply accumulation for its own sake.

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5. Having It All? Systemic Constraints and Invisible Labor with Dr. Corrine Lowe

[39:23 – 45:57]

• Women Still Doing More at Home—Even When Breadwinners:
  Dr. Lowe’s research reveals that although both men and women are putting more hours into parenting than previous generations, men’s hours spent on cooking/cleaning have not increased since the 1970s, and women still bear double the burden—even as top earners.

  “Even when she’s the female breadwinner, she still does twice as much cooking and cleaning, so she doesn’t get the relief that her male colleagues get…” — Dr. Corrine Lowe [39:36]

• Outsourcing, Gender, and the Value of Time:
  Lowe draws a parallel between how families easily outsource "male-coded" chores (like car maintenance), but find it “unaffordable” or “against our values” to outsource "female-coded" domestic work. This exposes persistent undervaluing of women’s time, even among progressive couples.

  “They are taking the car to the mechanic. They are hiring somebody to clean the gutters…But it becomes an unaffordable luxury when it’s a female-coded task instead.” — Dr. Corrine Lowe [45:14]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Updating Outdated Narratives:
  “We never updated the perception of women doing work in the home…what we’re looking at is just a vastly more empowered generation of women who may be making it a choice or needing to make a choice.”
  — Neha Ruch [05:55]

• On Financial Foundations for Career Pauses:
  “Finances is literally the second chapter in the book, because I think it is the foundation of being able to walk through this stage with dignity and with a sense of possibility.”
  — Neha Ruch [08:44]

• On Beauty as a Financial Issue:
  “I had never heard somebody say, the beauty industry is terrible for women’s financial health.”
  — Katie Gaddy Tassen [19:26]

• On the Systemic Penalty for Ambition:
  “You are probably an amazing human, right? You can probably contribute amazing things to another organization that will see you fully. So I think sometimes it’s really important to recognize if we’re in the wrong room.”
  — Amina Altai [35:34]

• On Outsourcing and Valuing Women’s Time:
  “I do push back a little bit because for lot of the families that say, well, outsourcing isn’t financially feasible for us, they are taking the car to the mechanic…But it becomes an unaffordable luxury when it’s a female coded task instead.”
  — Dr. Corrine Lowe [45:14]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [04:43] – Neha Ruch on how culture shapes narratives of caregiving and career breaks
• [08:32] – Redefining power in career pauses and the role of planning and partnership
• [12:20] – Navigating resentment and imbalance in couples; postnuptial agreements
• [18:16] – Katie Gaddy Tassen on the financial implications of beauty culture
• [22:51] – The “bigger math” of working motherhood and childcare decisions
• [29:26] – Farnoosh’s investment strategy as career resilience
• [32:49] – Amina Altai on the ambition penalty and gender differences in being “seen”
• [34:22] – The pivotal distinction between painful and purposeful ambition
• [39:23] – Dr. Corrine Lowe on the invisible labor gap, even among high-earning women
• [43:35] – The undervaluing of women’s time and double standards in outsourcing

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Tone & Style

Throughout the episode, the tone is frank yet empathetic, blending deep societal critique with practical advice, humor, and lived experience. The conversations respect complexity—acknowledging both individual agency and persistent systemic barriers. Farnoosh and her guests speak candidly about money as a tool not just for wealth, but for independence, options, and authentic life choices.

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Conclusion

This "Best Of" episode of So Money unpacks how money, feminism, and the power to choose intersect in daily life. Listeners are left with a richer understanding of why our choices matter, how systems shape them, and how reframing old narratives—about work, care, ambition, and value—can lead to more empowered and intentional financial lives.

For the full stories, listen to the original episodes with Neha Ruch (Ep 1774), Katie Gaddy Tassen (Ep 1832), Amina Altai (Ep 1880), and Dr. Corrine Lowe.

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Transcript

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

So money episode 1921 our year in Review the best of finance and feminism.

[Capital One Representative]

You're listening to so Money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Tarabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers and from Farnoosh yourself. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to SO Money.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Welcome back to so Money everybody. We're wrapping up the year and we're heading into the final stretch of 2025. So as is our tradition here on the podcast, I'm doing something a little special with the show. And over the next two weeks, I'm bringing you a best of so Money series. We're revisiting some of the most powerful, thought provoking conversations of the year. And these are the episodes that have really sp, I think, the biggest reactions, the deepest reflections, and in many cases, the most honest conversations on the podcast. And today's theme sits right at the heart of the show. Finance and feminism. We're going to look back at conversations that challenged how we think about work, ambition, caregiving, beauty, standards, power, and the systems that shape women's financial lives. One conversation, in fact, we just had last week that was really transformative for me, in fact. And these are not just money conversations, right? They're conversations about choice, agency, and options and how we ultimately shape lives that actually support the people that we're becoming. First up, in episode 1774, I sat down with Neha Roosh, who's the founder of Mother Untitled and the author of the Power Pause, a new book that came out this year. In our conversation, Neha reframes what many people still call a quote, unquote career break, particularly for mothers, not as a step, but as a strategic, intentional chapter that can actually strengthen your long term career and financial life. We talk about why the term stay at home mom feels very limiting for so many women today, and how outdated cultural archetypes are still shaping modern decisions. And why financial planning, partnership, and mindset matter so much when navigating a career pause. So whether you're considering stepping away from work, whether you're already on a pause, or whether you're just trying to understand how transition can work better for families, Neha's insights are both validating and very practical. In this first excerpt, we get into why the language around caregiving matters a lot and how we get stuck with a narrative that no longer reflects reality. Take a listen.

[Neha Roosh]

Well, if we look back in the 1970s, right, we did such an incredible job with second wave feminism in being able to prove women's capacity in the workforce. And at the same time, we saw the rise of television, the rise of print advertising for vacuums and dishwashers, all selling this idea of life being easier at home. And to sell those ideals and values, we started to see pictures of women in aprons. We saw June Cleaver on the TV screens with Leave it to Beaver. And anyone who was choosing or needing to spend time in the home very quickly became categorized as defending tradition or with this one static archetype. And still in our research, when polling the general population of America, they will still say, june Cleaver is what they think of with the stay at home mother. And when you ask them about the working mother, they'll say, Michelle Obama, one is fact and one is fiction. And what it also highlights is that we never updated the perception of women doing work in the home. And the reality, what we know now is that shut in and staying in one place is, yes, implied by linguistics of the phrase stay at home mother. But it is not true to the reality of American mothers on pause. What we see in reality is that modern women are having children much later, right? They've accrued a lot more education and work experience than the prior generation. They have more equal relationships with their partners. Maybe not perfectly equitable, but we're seeing dads spending three times the amount of time with their kids than any generation prior. We're seeing a boom of freelance and entrepreneurship because women are using digital tools and technologies to stay connected. And so what we're looking at is just a vastly more empowered generation of women who may be making it a choice or needing to make a choice.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

Right?

[Neha Roosh]

We'll get into the finances of this, but we're seeing one in three women having to choose to be at home because of the cost of childcare. We're seeing men and women step into periods of career breaks, but still growing alongside their kids and really with the intention to return to the workforce. So the goal of this work is to create a much more fluid narrative around the decision to shift your priorities for a chapter.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Neha's work really challenges this idea that stepping out of the workforce has to mean stepping down in power. And that's what her book is actually really all about. It's called the Power Pause. And so I wanted to dig deeper into what she means by power and how women can feel empowered during a career pause, especially when finances, identity, and partnership dynamics are involved. And later, you'll hear us get into what happens when one partner controls the income. What if asking for help feels risky? And how do couples navigate a pause when they're not fully aligned? Your book is called the Power Pause. I want to understand this emphasis on power a little bit more, what you mean by it. I would think that in order to step into this pause and feel empowered, there is a requirement for a plan. There should be some sort of financial security to, you know, to help you feel like you can sustain this. What else, though? What do you really want us to shift as far as our mindset when it comes to stepping out of the workforce into this role at home, because so many do feel like it is a step down and it's. It's giving up. And you want us to rethink that with your title. So tell us more about this idea behind the power pause.

[Neha Roosh]

You know, we just talked a little bit about the identity, and the reason that I put this book together is exactly what you said. We need a plan and we need a guide to be able to walk through this chapter in our career story, right? Because it is one chapter of our life with more strategy, and we had yet to see a real roadmap for how to walk through this as a way in which we also are still growing alongside our kids. So you brought up finances is literally the second chapter in the book, because I think it is the foundation of being able to walk through this stage with dignity and with a sense of possibility. I think the first mindset shift is that when you step into a career downshift where you might be parting with your salary, you are still providing value to the household. And in an ideal world, you and your partner are having this conversation three to six months ahead of the actual break with your employer. So ideally, you are creating a budgeting plan in which you are together saying you're shifting the household income to allow for one partner to be at home, because it is something both of you value and respect. In that way, you are now an interdependent household where the partner working out of the home is equally dependent on you for doing the unpaid work of not just taking care of the kids and the laundries and the diapers, but the intellectual and emotional labor that goes into running a household today, right? Managing doctor's appointments, it's advocating for your child who has diabetes. It's setting up a social web that makes sense for your child's needs and wants, and it's being able to set up your family to thrive, and it's allowing that other partner to single task outside of the home. That singular mindset is incredibly, incredibly important because as you navigate the day to day in sort of the middle section of the book really relies on also being able to say, I deserve to be whole and healthy and supported during this stage of life. And so if we together are creating a budget that allows for this shift in household income, we together are going to budget for other things that allow us both as individual contributors and leaders within this household organization, to thrive, and that allows you to be able to get a little bit of help or ask for a little bit more help from your partner so that you can reinvest it back into yourself and we can talk a little bit more about that. But the fundamental premise is that in stepping into a career shift for family life, you're also making room for yourself to develop new goals that are intentional, move yourself forward in small ways, be able to find new ways to nurture your network and discover new interests. And all of that together becomes a non traditional set of experiences that you're adding into your career portfolio and can really shape how you come out the other side.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

And yet I think that the challenge for some couples is that while the mom is on board and has read the power pause and is ready and willing and has done all the things and has her ducks in a row, maybe her partner sees money as a source of power and whoever makes it has the veto power in the relationship. I often hear from stay at home moms, they're hesitant to ask for help to invest, actually pay for, you know, a housekeeper to just invest in their own wellness, anything that would cause departure from their sort of job.

[Amina Altai]

Right.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

And I'm just curious, how much of this do you hear and what's your advice for those couples that are not seeing eye to eye on how this can be a power pause for the both of them?

[Neha Roosh]

Well, we get into this in the book and laying out sort of a series of different scripts and scenarios. But I would say this conversation around what you envision for your family relies on that mindset. And if you're running into hiccups in adopting that mindset, now is the time to work through those hiccups because it doesn't quite work unless you're both on board and you're both respecting each other's contribution. And so at that juncture, you might bring in a marital counselor, you might bring in a financial planner to basically chart out and guide you through the planning around the cost of childcare, the cost of the cost of other services that support your family. And what you don't want to do is sort of create a line item budget and say, okay, these are all the cat, this is all the cash flow that's going to supporting our household if we outsource it. And now I'm going to become a piggy bank for our family, because we don't. I think that's where we run into the trap of if I'm not doing paid work, this is my entire value. And now I have to work 24, seven without breaks. What we want to do is basically, yes, acknowledge that by stepping into more of the family work, you're alleviating the cost of childcare. Absolutely. And you still need to be able to do that with a degree of support to be able to be a healthy and whole partner. Right. And so being able to chart it all out in terms of the cash outflow that's going out for outsourcing versus one of you staying in the home is important and valid. But I think if it's getting to that, you also want to be able to have whole and healthy conversations about what will it take to be able to do this in a sustainable way. Because no one person should work 247 without breaks. And our households are best served when both partners are healthy and whole. So what will it realistically take to be able to do that? And you want to be budgeting for in advance, some degree of cushions. And we talk through, you know, how we can get into creative forms of childcare and planning. But before that, if it looks like you are in a relationship where, you know, it's a much more traditionally minded partner and we are not able to get to a place of agreement, that is where if one partner still wants to take a pause or needs to because of the cost of childcare. I do spell out the idea of a postnuptial agreement because I think that while we often fear documenting or betting against our marriage, I think of it more as guardrails to make sure that we're protecting our partnership so that we can both feel safe and secure and then operate in a way that feels healthier and more empowered. And I think the last part of that is if you still feel like your marriage is on the rocks, this is not the time to take a pause from paid work and income. We talk about there being many ways to make room for family life, Right? And sometimes it is a full pause, sometimes it is a downshift of working hours. Sometimes it's more boundaries around the work that we do. But I think the financial planning piece of this allows us to have a really specific conversation about what can our what can our household afford, what do we equally value, and what might we decide on as an alternative if it's not the right time to that was Neha Rouge.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Be sure to check that out. If you haven't listened to the full episode that was episode 1774, I've got that link in our show notes. Neha's work is a powerful reminder that career pauses don't have to be passive, apologetic, or Even permanent, with intention, with planning, with partnership, they can be chapters of growth, not erasure. Next up, we're shifting from caregiving and career pauses to another area where money and gender collide every single day, and that's beauty culture and the cost of keeping up. For this, I sat down with Katie Gaddy Tassen in episode 1832. You know Katie, she's the founder of the wildly popular Money With Katie Platform, host of the podcast by the same name. And she joined me earlier this year to talk about her bold, brilliant new book called Rich Girl Nation, which is part manifesto, part money guide, and fully grounded in the realities that women face when navigating a financial system that was never designed with us in mind. Right. So we talk about everything from the beauty tax and the motherhood penalty to workplace politics and why financial independence isn't just about early retirement, it's about creating options. In this excerpt, you'll hear us talk about why Katie opens her book with a chapter called the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel and why beauty standards aren't just a cultural issue, but a financial one. What I love about your take and the way that you deliver your content is that it's not just tips. It's context plus tips. It's analysis plus advice. It's real. And even the way you organize the book. I've read a lot of personal finance books. I've written a lot of personal finance books. I think this might be the first book for women about money where you tackle these. For example, the first chapter, the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. We all know that there is a tax for being a woman in this country. If you want to look a certain way, the culture tells you have to look a certain way. And so you try to uphold these standards of beauty that ends up costing us. And you decided to start with that. Why?

[Katie Gaddy Tassen]

To me, the Hot Girl hamster wheel was the concept that was most conspicuously absent from all other personal finance advice that I had read. Yes, and most of the personal finance advice that I read in the beginning, to be totally honest with you, was written by men, because most of it is written by men. And so I remember doing my first budget audit when I was like, okay, I'm going to get my life together. I'm going to. I'm going to become financially independent. It was Inspired by a Mrs. Frugal woods interview on the Choose Fi podcast. And on this podcast, Mrs. Frugal woods talked about the fact that she doesn't buy makeup, she doesn't pay for haircuts, and this was Like a radical admission to me as a 22 year old woman living in Dallas, Texas, where it's like the bigger and blonder the hair, the closer to God. Everyone has fake nails, everyone has fake eyelashes. Now, five to 10 years later, everyone has fake lips. It is a very high level of aesthetic upkeep that is just the baseline in that city. So it really surprised me to hear another woman talking about beauty as a financial topic. I had heard about, oh, the beauty industry is terrible for women's self esteem. I had never heard somebody say, the beauty industry is terrible for women's financial health. And so I felt like that was a topic that I really needed somebody to speak to directly and lay it all out on the line for me and say, hey, you are totally free to spend your money however you like to, but you should know that you're spending an average of at the time, for me, it was around $300 per month. That is actually quite in line with the average, which is around $320 per month as of 2017. And that over a 40 year career of you spending that way, just know that you're giving up about a million bucks in opportunity costs. If that's fine with you, go forth and prosper. But I don't think many of us think about those decisions as optional. I know I didn't really feel like it was optional to have a nice manicure in my office because everyone else did. And so I think that these are conversations that really exemplify that intersection between personal choice and systemic change. Because Jessica Defino does wonderful work on this. The way that beauty standards work is that the more people who labor and spend to uphold them, the more that pressure is exerted on every other woman to do the same. While it's comforting to think about those decisions as being made in a vacuum, the reality is if I get Botox and walk down the street, the women that I interact with are going to subconsciously receive the message that their faces shouldn't be moving either. And so I think when we start to talk about how we can change our own personal decisions and link that back to and here's how that's going to impact the people around us too. It's going to make us healthier, wealthier, wiser, but it's also going to lessen the pressure that other women feel to meet those norms, I think that's a really critical conversation for personal finance professionals to be having. And I think it just perfectly illustrates how a lot of these financial choices that we think of as individual really are not.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Right. So the question you must ask yourself is if you are going to go do the thing that you want to do for beauty reasons, are you doing it because you want to or you feel pressure to? And I think it's also important to realize why this is so important. $300 a month, a million dollars in lost wealth. But also you're talking to a demographic that makes significantly less than men, right? We live longer than men, so we need our money to last longer than men. It's especially important to have this conversation with women. Look, if men and women were both spending money on makeup equally, it would still be more important to tell the women, that's right, because you're not earning as much. You're, it's, you're not able to endure your career typically as much because again, society places this pressure of caregiving on you disproportionately than on men. That conversation naturally led us to another topic that so many women wrestle with, especially mothers, which is how to think about work, childcare, and long term financial trade offs. Katie references something I've talked about on the show for years, which is the bigger math, the calculus. Here's that part of the conversation. Let's talk about that chapter where you talk about every mom is a working mom.

[Katie Gaddy Tassen]

So this is the chapter in the book that was inspired by a conversation that you and I had on my show a while back where you taught me about the bigger math. By bigger math, you meant that even if when your children are young and you are staying in the workforce and we know childcare is astronomically, inexcusably expensive in this country, it is laughable the extent to which the federal government expects families to privately bear this burden. We know that this is true. And we also know because of all of the factors that you just listed, the lower wages, the tendency for the management class, women included, to view mothers as less committed, less competent, perhaps more likely to call out because again, if you have a family, you have other obligations. And this is something that we all need to understand and be supportive of.

[LinkedIn/Ghelt/Quince Advertiser]

But.

[Katie Gaddy Tassen]

If your net income during the time that your kids are in childcare is mostly just going to childcare, it is really easy to view that as a wash and to go, I guess I should just stop working. I guess it would just be better for me to stay home because right now it's like I'm just working to pay for childcare. But you taught me about the fact that is an investment in the future when you leave the workforce, when you take a few years off. It's not that you can't do that and there's absolutely ways that you can be strategic about this. So I don't mean to say that it's definitionally going to set you back, but oftentimes that is in reality the practical effect for people is that they take five, six, seven years off, they try to get back in and they find that the workforce they're trying to reenter is very different and they're now starting from a much lower place. So the bigger math is thinking about when you stay employed, even if in the short term it feels like a wash, you are investing in higher lifetime earnings. And to your point on my show, more flexibility later in your career when your kids are older and they're getting off the bus, when they're 13, 14 years old and they really need you there at home. And like now you actually might be able to be there because you have a little bit more seniority, you have a little bit more trust in your organization. You have a longer track record, you have savings.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

I'm Farnoosh Tarabi, host of so Money.

[LinkedIn/Ghelt/Quince Advertiser]

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

One thing that I did when my kids were little, littler. They're still little. They're 8 and 10. I was very aggressive with investing, so maxed out all my retirement accounts and invested in a brokerage account. This brokerage account, I didn't know what to call it. I was like, I don't know, this could be like, supplementary for my retirement. Who knows? But I don't need this for the next five years at least. So I'm going to take a risk and invest this money now. Five years, six years. That brokerage account has grown, and for me, it serves as a source of calm. Where now in my mid-40s, my kids are older, they do need me more in, in more mentally difficult ways. Like, I feel like when you have little kids, it's very physically exhausting. As they get older, they challenge you. It's a lot of like, mental gymnastics with this is at least my family. Anyway. All this to say that I continued working. Yes, because I did the big math and it is already paying off. Not when there are teenagers, but now when they're 8, 10. And we're living in an economy with so much uncertainty. I may not want to work as hard as I was five years ago. And I have the Runway now to be able to have options. Which is the biggest theme from your book that I took away, was that if there's anyone out there, man, woman, do you want options? Do you want to have choices in your life that you can afford, that you can create and then afford. Like, the option may not even be out there, but like, you can put it, make it out, out of thin air yourself. I think that's a message that is universal but is not often communicated well. And you do it very well. That was Katie Gaddy Tassen, episode 1832, and her message is clear. Money isn't just about spreadsheets or sacrifice. It is about choice, context and freedom and understanding how systems shape our personal decisions. Next, we're turning to ambition, the very thing many of us were taught would set us free. But that can sometimes quietly burn us out. This year we talked to Aminah Altai in episode 1880. Amina is an executive coach and author of the new book the Ambition how to Stop Chasing and Start Living. Amina's story begins with a terrifying wake up call. Years of overwork and over striving nearly cost her her life. And what followed was a deep reckoning with ambition, especially for women and people of color navigating systems that reward hustle but punish visibility. In our conversation, Amina introduces the idea of painful ambition versus purposeful ambition and explains why the problem isn't wanting more, but why we want it and what it's costing us. Here's a piece of our conversation where we unpack how gender, power and broken systems shape ambition and what to do when the system doesn't reward your best work. Are there gender differences in how women and men approach ambition? And I guess also a follow up to that. Is it our fault the fact that maybe women have a different approach because society expects them to show up differently? They don't get the trophies as quickly as the men, maybe, or they don't get. They don't get as many permissions to fail. And so that creates a more challenging road to being ambitious.

[Amina Altai]

Exactly. So this is the trap, right? It's like the playing field is not equal. And I think that we've long known that. So when you look at the data, women and people of color experience an ambition penalty. So the data was collected in a gender binary. So men and women enter the workforce with the same levels of ambition. Men are rewarded for theirs. Women, it's seen as a detractor. If you're an ambitious woman that negotiates her salary, you're seen as difficult and unlikable. Women of color actually are the most ambitious cohort in corporate America, but experience the most backlash and the most headwinds. Right? So there's this trap for us of we're told to take up space, we're told to speak truth to power, we're told to throw our hat in the ring. And then when we do those things, we're told that's inconvenient and that doesn't work and you're unlikable. And so then we try to outwork this broken system and then that's partly where we fall in the trap. Right? And so there's a systemic piece that we have to talk about and then a lot of us internalize that bias and then it becomes a mindset piece as well. So my book is split into those two parts of talking about the systems, but also what we make manifest in our own minds and our own practices that keep us in the trap.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

So then, if ambition itself isn't the problem, what actually needs to change? Here's Amina inviting us to flip the script. Let's double click on the system. So let's say you are that woman at work who is ambitious and wants a raise and has all of the the points to meet that raise has exceeded expectations, driven revenue, all the things, right? You've been taking notes and you've done all the things textbook wise that you're supposed to do to present yourself and make a case for earning more and they reject you. What next?

[Amina Altai]

Two things. So in the book I talk about there's two types of ambition. So I think ambition itself is neutral and natural. Right. I define it simply as a desire for more life, a wish to grow so that can't be right for some people and wrong for others. Right. It's the world that we live in that is telling us this. NARRAT and. But there's two ways that our ambition can move. It can be painful ambition or it can be purposeful ambition. So painful ambition is ambition that's driven by a core wound. And there are five of them. Rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal and injustice. And so if we're coming from that place with our ambition, it's the house of cards. And that was partly my story. I had a rejection wound and then the mask that I wore was control. I had a betrayal wound. Sorry. The mask that I wore for rejection was avoidance. For the betrayal wound, the mask that I wore was control. So you have these wounds and then you have these masks. Masks that you wear. And when you build your ambition upon that, it's kind of a house of cards. So it's not our fault. Right. But when the come from is that place of pain, it has certain hallmarks that don't serve us right. We move at unsustainable paces, we instrumentalize our minds and bodies. We can be hyper individualistic. So the invitation is to pivot into purposeful ambition where we've done the work on the wounds and we're moving in a different way. So I think it's important to look at our side of the street. That's not the only thing.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Right.

[Amina Altai]

But I think the work starts with us. And then I also think sometimes if the room doesn't understand us, we're in the wrong room. And so that's always the answer. It's not always quit your job. But you are probably an amazing human, right? You can probably contribute amazing things to another organization that will see you fully. So I think sometimes it's really important to recognize if we're in the wrong room.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Yeah, I write about this in a healthy state of panic. A whole chapter on the fear of rejection, which I think dovetails so much, what you're saying. This fear of rejection and our drive for ambition go hand in hand. And sometimes, though you're right when you're fearing rejection, let's question it, right? Let's not run away from it. Let's not pretend it doesn't exist. Let's not try to be fearless, but let's, like, face the fear and go, why are you here? Is it because, like you pointed out, there are some holes to fill? Like, maybe you haven't really done what you need to do to get across to the finish line. And so you go back and you do those things and then. Or maybe it's, again, to your point, you're in the wrong room. Like the rejection, you're fearing it because it's real and it has nothing to do about you necessarily. But this sort of. This group, the spaces, their mindset, and there's nothing really that you can do about that. And we, too often, we stay. We try to fix it.

[Amina Altai]

I think that's one of my toxic traits, too. I like, literally like the idea of staying too long and can I fix all the things? And I think that's probably one of the things that exacerbates illness, injury and disease for a lot of we. I think women and women of color have a tendency to make ourselves wrong because so much of that story is mirrored back to us from the world. And so we can. I can fix it, I can change it. I can do the work, I can outwork the problem, right? But I think it's almost virtually impossible to outwork a broken system.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

So what is the. The script flip that you want people to have around ambition?

[Amina Altai]

So I don't want anybody to be less ambitious. I'm one of the most ambitious people I know. I know you are, too. And everybody listening, probably the same thing. But the invitation is to be in that right relationship, relationship with ambition. So as a culture, we come to understand ambition is more. For more sake all the time, right? More money, more power. And that's somehow going to make us feel whole. But it's not the truth, right? We can get all the shiny objects, all the accolades. The work is on the inside. And so in the book, one of the things I talk about is how ambition actually goes in cycles. It's like nature. It's like a perennial flower. So you have these seasons where you want to grow, right? Maybe you want to write a book or get a promotion or get a raise. And so you nurture your inner and outer environment and you have this beautiful momentary peak in the sun. It's gorgeous. And then the wind shift and the petals fall off and you wind down and you go back underground and maybe that ground is even fallow until it's nurtured enough that you can rise again. And so I want to invite us all into the cyclical nature with ambition, but also to allow it to be that purposeful nature as well. So not that pain fueled, driven by the core wounds, but instead connected to.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Our deeper why that was amina Altai, episode 1880. That link for that episode will be in our show notes if you want to go back and listen to the full conversation, which I highly recommend. And if you'd like to check out her book, it's called the Ambition A powerful guide for anybody who wants to succeed without sacrificing their health, their values, or their sense of self. And to close, we're going to revisit a conversation that really made waves not just in academia, but across the Internet. I recently sat down with Dr. Corrine Lowe, a professor at UPenn's Wharton School and the author of a new book called Having It All. And her work examines women's lives through data. She challenges long held assumptions about marriage, motherhood, work, and happiness. And you may have seen the headlines or debates sparked by her research, but on so many, we went deeper. And in this upcoming excerpt, Corrine helps us rethink about the what it means to have it all.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

What the data shows is that what we are trying to do right now as working women, especially as working moms, is uniquely challenging from a time perspective because we are trying to do more in our careers and our jobs are demanding more from us than ever before, while at the same time gender roles have not changed in the home. So men are doing the same amount of cooking and cleaning as they did in the 1970s, and they do the same amount in the household, no matter who earns more money, a topic that I know that you've looked at. And so even when she's the female breadwinner, she still does twice as much cooking and cleaning, so she doesn't get the relief that her male colleagues get because they have that help at home. And then finally that the time that we Spend with our kids has just exploded. So we're spending twice as much time with our kids as parents a generation ago. And so all of that adds up to us being very tired, which I know is going to sound familiar.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Say that some of the data did really surprise me. And I don't know if it's because I live on the east coast in more of these, like, you know, more progressive areas of the country. My husband's very involved. I feel like we'll get to mental load in a moment. I think there is an imbalance there, but I think when it comes to child rearing and things like that, it feels like, look, we're both very tired at the end of the day. So there, there is that. And we know there's an increasing number of stay at home fathers. So how did you go about finding that data, Especially around the fact that men are doing as much work, or let's just say the same amount of work as they were in the 70s home.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

Well, so I want to make a distinction here between childcare and then and cooking and cleaning. So what stayed constant is the cooking and cleaning time, which I actually find is a really good proxy for the mental load. It's this kind of unglamorous work of running a household that you just have to like keep doing every day, you know, and you don't necessarily get like an intrinsic reward from doing it. Like, we like spending time with our kids, but like, nobody really likes loading the dishwasher. Right. So I think that I wanna make a distinction there because men's parenting time has increased. Gotcha. But the key thing is because both of us, men and women, have increased our parenting time so much, the gender gap in the household is actually wider. And so psychologically we have this tendency to compare today's dads to the dads of the past. And we say they're doing so much. And those dads are saying, I'm doing so much. I read my kid a bedtime story. My dad never read me a bedtime story. I dropped the kid off at school. My dad never did that. Right. And that is actually true. But they are missing the fact that women's time has increased so much more that their wife is actually doing more than her mom did also. Right. And that piece feels a little bit invisible. And so I think that does lead to some of the these misunderstandings. And then when it comes to a household that actually gets to the point of being more egalitarian like your household, what I think is interesting there is that if you were to take that couple and compare them in the data to a couple that had the same earnings split, but the genders were reversed, there you would find it wouldn't be egalitarian. It would be the lower earner who would be the woman in that case who would be taking on so much more. Right. So what I find is that, you know, when, when the, the woman is the breadwinner, that's when it finally does get to be something like 50, 50 in parenting. But in a case where the man is the breadwinner, the wife is doing 80%. Right. So it's. There's sort of these like invisible places where on the margin, it's like, even with, I think a lot of women are at a point where they're like, okay, this feels okay in my household. And yet, yet still, if I were to compare them to a man in a kind of similar earnings division situation, he has that benefit of his female partner just taking on so much more.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

You also write about how we value women's time differently than men's time. Can you unpack that some more for us?

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

Well, I started thinking about this as like a more systemic problem. I mean, we all know, right, that there's so much stuff that women do that is economic production that we tend not to assign value to. Right? But I started thinking about this as this bigger systemic problem when I would start to talk about outsourcing. And right away a lot of people would push back and say, like, well, you have to be really rich to do that. Or that's not, you know, a practical solution. Or like, that just doesn't feel right.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Or it feels, it's like a values thing too. Like, we just don't do that.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

We don't do that. And then I said, well, I started asking people, well, do you take your car to the mechanic to get an oil change or do you do it yourself? Your husband changes the oil. And nobody would say their husband changed the oil. Right. And yet there was this, like, instinctive, you know, we didn't categorize that as outsourcing, even though that's absolutely the same thing. Because I think of outsourcing as it's choosing to hire somebody for something that you theoretically could do yourself. And like, really changing your oil is actually not that complicated.

[Amina Altai]

Right.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

Like, actually everybody could could, you know, spend an hour, two hours reading the books, watching YouTube and could do it themselves. But. But we don't hire our husbands to change the oil. And yet we hire ourselves for all of those female coded domestic tasks. And so that's a place where I almost feel like the same way men are stuck in the 1970s in terms of the amount of cooking and cleaning that they do, that we're a little stuck in the 1970s in terms of this mindset where we haven't updated, that our time is now as valuable outside the house as those husbands of yesteryear when, you know, everybody started deciding we're gonna take our car to the mechanic, you know, to change the oil. That transition has happened for the value of women's time now because of the career opportunities that we have today. And therefore we might be hiring ourselves for too many jobs around the house. And so I don't wanna sound out of touch. I know that there are families where there are real financial constraints where this does, you know, really seem impossible to do. But I do push back a little bit because for lot of the families that say, well, outsourcing isn't financially feasible for us, they are taking the car to the mechanic. They are hiring somebody to clean the gutters. Right. They are outsourcing for those male coded tasks, but it becomes an unaffordable luxury when it's a female coded task instead.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

And that's our show. If any of these conversations resonated with you, and I think they may have, I encourage you to please go back and listen to the full episodes now that hopefully you have some time. Maybe you're off from work with Neha Roosh, Katie Gaddy Tassen, amina Altai, and Dr. Corinne Lowe. Once again, you'll find all the links to those shows in our notes. Coming up on Wednesday, we're going to continue our Best of series of the podcast in 2025 with a look back at some of our most compelling conversations, this time about technology, AI and its impact on work and the future of our finances. As always, thanks for coming here, being with us. Hit that subscribe button or that follow button so that you'll get all of our freshest episodes starting in the new year. I'll see you back here on Wednesday. And I hope your day is so money. If you love to travel, Capital One.

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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[Amina Altai]

Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree, Zoe.

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man.

[Dr. Corrine Lowe]

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

I'm not.

[Katie Gaddy Tassen]

Of course he did.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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[Amina Altai]

He handles the nice list.

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[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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