I’m turning 40 this summer, which according to the data, means my career is stalled out. The latest gender wage gap report from Glassdoor, published March 2026, shows how women’s earnings growth flatlines in their mid-30s while men’s earnings continue climb for another decade.
Given that statistically, this is as good as it’s gonna get for me and my fellow soon-to-be 40-somethings+, I thought I’d take a look back and see how much things have changed since we started our careers — or haven’t.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the gender wage gap widened again in 2025, such that women were paid 18.6% less than men on average — about 81 cents on the dollar.
Meanwhile, Black women were paid just 68.3% as much as white men, an annual earnings gap of roughly $20,500 for full-time workers. And Hispanic women were paid just 64.5% as much as white men, an annual earnings gap of more than $23,000.
So…how much better is this than when, we ladies of maxed out career growth, started our professional lives? To quote the US Bureau of Labor Statistics “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2005” report: “Women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings of $585, or 81 percent of the $722 median for their male counterparts.”
That’s right, for all of our greater education, greater negotiation and greater ambition, we millennial women (and older) have hit our max professional potential only to experience the same gender pay gaps as when we started (and bonus: fewer reproductive rights than our mothers)
This is the reality that inspired me to research and write my book, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up — and Then Pushes Them Down (which is out next month and available for preorder now). It is a statistical deep dive into the ways inequality — across gender and it’s many intersections with race, sexuality, ability and other aspects of identity — are effectively reproduced, even as women have become more “empowered” than ever.
Of course, the story of workplace inequality and the way it persists generation after generation is situated within a much larger story of inequality in the United States. And this week I sat down with Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs to talk about it.
Her New York Times bestselling book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us is not only a guide to the reproduction of this inequality — it is a roadmap for disrupting it. Here are some highlights from our conversation (edited for clarity):
Stefanie: I’ve heard you say that you need to contextualize patriarchy to defeat it. So let’s start with the very purposeful inclusion of the word “American” in “American Patriarchy.”
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs: I’m not saying that the U.S. is the only place where patriarchy exists when I say “American Patriarchy.” It exists across the world. But what I am saying is that it operates differently in each of the places where we see it. And so in order for us to really dismantle it, we do need to be very specific about thinking about how the leaders of each of these different places chose patriarchy and how they used it in their context.
So in the United States, I often talk about the Founding Fathers and how they are saying in the United States that men get to own land. Men get to vote. Women do not get to do these things. They’re creating a binary that doesn’t include most people.
So it’s not only about men ruling over women. It’s also that we’re creating a gender binary where we’re excluding anybody who’s non-binary. We’re also excluding people who at the time were enslaved, so they’re not including Black people. They’re excluding Indigenous people. They’re excluding poor people, because many of the Founding Fathers wanted it to be the case that only people who owned land could vote in the United States.
So all of this is important in our understanding of who gets to be a man or woman in the U.S. That’s what I mean when I say “American Patriarchy” — deciding who’s fully human and who is fully entitled to rights and their full humanity.
Stefanie: In your book you’re drawing the throughline from the founding of this system — of deciding who’s fully human and who’s fully entitled to rights and their full humanity — through to now. A lot of times when I talk about patriarchy in the context of the United States, there is a lot of denial or an illusion that these barriers that you’re talking about, the explicit exclusion of women of people of color of Indigenous folks from having voting rights or access to be able to own land if they want to — that’s gone. How is there so much denial of that, and mainstream buy-in to that denial?
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs: Part of the reason that this patriarchy in the United States has been upheld, is because of this narrative that we’ve made so much progress. This is no longer the issue: “We’re no longer even dealing with patriarchy. We’re no longer even dealing with racism.”
And the way I like to tell people about it is, let’s all return to the system that was founded and what they were doing when they wrote The Constitution about 10 years after the Declaration of Independence and how every law, every institution, everything that organizes our nation comes from this vision of who gets to be considered human in the United States.
I also make sure to tell people that The United States is relatively young when we’re looking at other nations. 250 years is not a lot of time by any means. And so we can’t talk about any of this history as if it’s ancient history. It’s actually very recent history. And so that’s why we so clearly still see traces of that vision— that original social order — in everything that we’re witnessing today.
The other part of it is that progress in the United States has never happened in this linear fashion. It’s never been, Okay, now women get the right to vote, and now it’s guaranteed forever that women are going to get the right to vote. And then Black people had the right to vote. And then we got better. It’s actually always been a tug of war.
So the way I summarize American history is often by saying that we have one group of people who really wanted to protect the original social order, the notion that the only people who should be recognized fully in the United States are white men with property — so elite white men. And that everybody else should be submissive to this group of people —that the women in their lives should solely reproduce their power through children and everybody else is not human, but can have some of the benefits of American patriarchy if they assimilate closely enough and if they’re willing to protect the social order.
But what we’re starting to see now is more people are seeing that they were not themselves included in this definition of human. And even if they were included, they were also being hurt by it.
Nobody is left unscathed by this hierarchy or this notion that in order to be human you have to dominate other people.
It’s the reason why, when we speak very proudly about we’re not being tricked by this any longer and we know that there’s other ways of living and we know that we could eventually access a real democracy if we’re all included in it, you’re going to see those who are holding on desperately to that original social order responding so aggressively. It’s what we’re witnessing right now. It’s this continuation of the tug of war.
Stefanie: One of the things you talk about is how these systems that work to control us are very arbitrary. They are not preordained. They are not inevitable. They are not natural. And I write about this a lot, but there is this tension between the fact that it is so arbitrary and so fragile that it constantly needs to be reinforced and remade, and yet it is so stubborn and still so effectively reproduces inequality along the same lines — racial lines, gender lines, class lines.
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs: That’s exactly why it’s so rigid is because it’s so fragile. So if we’re looking specifically at these moments where I’m saying we have to see the leaders who chose it and why they chose it — we look at the Founding Fathers, we see that they won the Revolutionary War and they’re the underdogs. Nobody was expecting this to happen.
And then those 10 years after the Revolutionary War, they are very concerned because the revolutionary spirit is spreading across this new nation where you’re seeing rebellions, you’re seeing slave revolts, you’re seeing Shays’ Rebellion, for example, where poor farmers are asking to be treated more fairly in their nation.
It’s that rebellion and several others that lead them to say, “We need to write the Constitution,” because we didn’t respond fast enough in terms of being able to put an end to that rebellion. They become very concerned that they are going to lose power in the nation that they fought to win.
And so all of it actually comes from a lot of fear and insecurities, and a need to control the people that they did not see as people. That is the inspiration for the Constitutional Convention.
In order to establish something that isn’t natural — to make people act a certain way where you need to control them — you have to make it for them the seemingly only option to follow.
And the way you do that is by erasing the possibilities of other ways of living. This is where so much erasure of Indigenous cultures becomes very important for the Founding fathers.
You also make punishment a constant threat to those who can see that we can actually live differently. And then you give enough power to a few people. So some exceptions to say, Hey, if you play your part, then you will also benefit from this made up hierarchy.
But one of the things they didn’t really fully think about is that those who they were completely excluding were able then to see very clearly that it was all made up. And so an example of that is Black women during times of slavery being told you are not a human and your children are not human beings. Your children, in fact, are somebody else’s property and we can remove them from you whenever we want to. This is what the law states.
So it’s not that Black women look at that law and say, oh must be true because the law says it. No, instead, it’s this immediate awareness of how made up it is and how wrong it is. And so that’s where the power of not being considered in this made up world comes. Because then you say, I can always see beyond what they are offering me. And in fact, I have no other choice but to help build a nation and a world where I am seen and where my children are seen in their full humanity.
And that’s where we see these incredible moments of progress, because people said, Hey, this is made up and I understand that you’re going to try to punish me. But at this point, you’ve excluded me so severely that I will confront this and I will confront these consequences and I will expose them for what they are.
And so that’s kind of the mindset that we start to have to have which is: This is made up. It is not divine. It is not the natural order. In fact, we have seen them use religion to justify it, to say actually, this is God, Father God. We’re going to erase the women that contributed to any religious documents. The strategy becomes very clear. And what is underneath all of that is severe insecurity and fear.
As I was writing, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I saw across the United States, this shock from so many people of how did this happen in the United States? I think, of course this happened here. What are we confused by? Why are we not paying enough attention?
And then I realized, wow, American patriarchy, those who maintain it, have been so good at hiding it and making it seem natural so that we can’t question it.
The other strategy has been to really highlight patriarchies in other places. Americans love to talk about patriarchies. Like Oh, women, they are so oppressed over there. And I’m not minimizing the pain of patriarchies across the world, they’re all bad.
But we are distracted in the U.S. because we’re told you should be so thankful.
When mothers are dying in the United States when they go into hospitals to give birth.
When mothers experience extreme burnout here because we don’t have community around us that honors our role.
When women and girls see these horrific results of the Epstein files and everyone again, is just shocked. This is normalized here.
And we have been distracted by saying, Oh, but just look over there for a little bit.
And just be grateful that you’re not one of the women over there.
When in reality, women across the world have been saying for centuries, you will not defeat us. You will not silence us. So this is a global movement against patriarchy. But we also need to make sure we are not tricked in our own nations.
Stefanie: Yes. There are so many of these tactics I see come up again and again. At least you don’t live over there. Or at least it’s not 200 years ago. At least it’s better than it used to be. And it’s always a shifting of the goalpost so that we’re not talking about who gets to be fully human and who doesn’t right now.
The other thing I was that erasure winds up doing is, it frames progress as something the benevolent overlords have enabled, instead of the resistance.
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs: Yes, one of my favorite things to say is we didn’t have these wins for this side by those who were in power waking up one day and suddenly saying, You know, I’m going to give people their rights today. Today is the day I just feel so excited to include more people in humanity.
No, at all. That’s not the story of the United States. The story has been they did not want to give people their rights and people demanded it and bled for it and did whatever they could to grab it and claim it.
And so this is where we see contemporarily, book bans, right? This is one of the strategies of erasure. Making sure we take down the statues of those who have fought, painting over the words Black Lives Matter, because all of those are evidence of what it took for people to claim this.
Because if as a collective, all these people in the United States who were not part of the progress are like, Oh, look how far we’ve come. And you should be so grateful because look at the progress of the United States. Well, then we’re also erasing the people who had to fight for us to get there. All of that has been strategic.
There have been many strategies used so that you don’t know where to start. But the reality is there is no way we get these wins without fighting for them, so we just have to study how people have fought. Start right now, every single day, in everything that you do you ask the question: Am I replicating a hierarchy? Or am I building something new?
We think we’re waiting for this moment for our whole nation to change this system. But the reality is you can always live outside of it. And people have always been living outside of it. So there’s always this notion of like, we’re waiting for the country to be ready. That’s actually not the transformative mindset that we need people to have. We need us to have the mindset of: That’s made up. And we are living differently each and every day.
And we have access to that if we look at how Black people, for instance, throughout American history have created their own communities and nations within this larger nation that didn’t see us as human beings. There’s these really beautiful moments of resistance. How the Black Panthers create their own ways where they’re feeding children and they’re bringing educators, they’re seeing each other’s needs and helping with child care when it’s not yet available on a national level. All of these things are how we create that new world.
For more from Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs, you can follow her on Instagram here and grab her books, “Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us” and “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” here
And if you’re looking for some more conversations to add to your queue, here are some of the podcasts and lives I’ve recorded in anticipation of my upcoming book launch for THE AMBITION PENALTY: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up—and Then Pushes Them Down
Playing with Fire (with Shannon Watts) Confronting Gender Equality Myths
The F Word Podcast (with Priya Malani) : Who The Ambition Penalty Really Hurts
Money with Katie Podcast (with Katie Gatti Tassin) : The Leisure Gap, Princess Treatment, and Other Hard Truths About “Soft Life”
The Nuance Needed Podcast (with Amanda E. White, LPC): The Female Ambition Penalty
The Pain Gap Podcast (with Anushay Hossain): The Pay Gap Is The Pain Gap: The Hidden Cost of Being an Ambitious Woman
The Brown Way to Money Podcast (with Alejandra Rojas) : These Myths About Women and Money Keep You Struggling And They Are False
American Political Freakshow (with Nina Burleigh): Substack Live
The Bossed Up Podcast (with Emilie Aries): The Women’s Ambition Gap is a Myth
The Mommy Has Questions Podcast (with Among Other Things): Are Women Punished for Being Ambitious?: Why wanting more costs women everything — and how the system makes sure of it
The Can’t Hustle Any Harder Podcast (with Rachael Wonderlin) : Tradwife Culture, Gendered Labor and The Ambition Penalty
The Not Like a Regular Mom Podcast: It’s Not Empowerment: The “Ambition Penalty” and the Exploitation of Women in the Workplace, in Relationships, and at Home with Stefanie O'Connell
The Life Management System Podcast (with Courtney Cecil ): Why high-performing women still get overlooked (The Ambition Penalty at work)
As always, preordering your copy and sharing it with those you think would be served by it, is the best way to spread the word and support this work. One month to go!
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