Ambitious women know exactly how Hillary Clinton feels when she says it’s impossible to be successful and likable

‘It’s new and painful every time’

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When you’re an ambitious woman, you don’t have the luxury of letting your guard down. Your professional drive becomes your identity, and it invades your home, your thoughts and your relationships. You learn to value rationality over emotion, and your successes in the professional world begin to shape and define you, muffling successes in the social arena.

Hillary Clinton was no stranger to this — in fact, she might be the poster woman for it — and during her first post-election interview, Nick Kristof of the New York Times asked her to address the way that duality often hinders women who would otherwise be running for office, or aspiring to higher up positions within their companies.

“I think young women who might want to run for office are concerned about the research that some social scientists have pointed to that women can be perceived as either as likable or as competent leaders, but not as both,” he said, asking her for comment.

“Yeah, be ready,” she said, “It is a not a new phenomenon but it feels new and painful every time it happens to you.”

If, traditionally, women are seen as warm, motherly-caregivers, the ‘ambitious woman’ exists in stark contrast to this. When ambitious women leave the office, we don’t leave the ambition behind. We are forceful, because it’s been beaten into us time and time again, it’s the only way to have our voices heard among the others.

Ambitious women are ‘unlikable’ because the restrictions placed on us by our own colleagues have given us no other choice. Women everywhere know the feeling of attempting, and failing, to silence a man in a meeting when his voice come in, booming over ours. We’re not cold — we’ve been hardened.