This is not because those women do not exist. They do, in growing numbers. Nor is it because marriage and motherhood are not worthy of attention. They are. The problem is that they have become the default lens through which we understand women’s careers. As a result, we have built a narrow picture of what ambition looks like, who it belongs to and how organisations recognise it.
During more than a decade advising organisations on leadership, talent and workplace equity, I noticed the same pattern again and again. Conversations about ambitious women almost always returned to balancing work and family, navigating motherhood or finding supportive partners. Those are important conversations, and organisations should continue to have them, but I rarely recognised myself in them. As a single professional woman, my questions were different. Over time, I began to wonder whether we had built our understanding of women’s ambition around one dominant life path.
There are women who are intentionally building lives that are not organised around finding a husband or becoming a mother. They are not waiting for their “real life” to begin. They are already making decisions about ambition, money, leadership, purpose and contribution. Their careers are not something to fit around a future family. For many, their careers are one of the main ways they express their ambition, independence and values. Yet they remain largely absent from the way organisations, leadership experts and wider conversations about women’s success imagine the professional woman.
This is not an argument against marriage or motherhood. Nor is it a claim that every single woman wants the same things. Many single women hope to become wives or mothers one day. Others do not. The point is simpler than that. A workplace cannot claim to understand women’s ambition if its main model of female ambition assumes marriage or motherhood as the starting point. If we continue to frame every conversation about successful women through those two lenses, we do not simply overlook one group. We narrow our understanding of what female ambition can look like. This Brief asks whether the dominant idea of the professional woman has become too narrow for today’s workforce - and if it has, what organisations may be missing.
The workplace still understands women’s ambition mainly through the lens of marriage and motherhood. That focus has produced valuable research and better workplace support. But it may also have narrowed how organisations understand the professional woman. Across the available studies, solo-living and child-free professional women remain under examined as a distinct workforce group. If our understanding of women’s ambition is built around one main life path, our understanding of today’s workforce may already be out of date.
The strongest finding was not what researchers discovered about single professional women. It was how rarely they had studied them as a distinct workforce group.
Workplace research continues to frame women’s careers mainly through motherhood, caregiving and work-family balance. Organisation studies describe solo-living and child-free professional women as a “significant, yet largely silenced” group.
Leadership researchers identify single women without children as an understudied group within gender inequality research. This does not prove that organisations are overlooking single professional women. It does suggest that the research agenda has focused on a narrow range of women’s lives.
Research suggests that single professional women:
are more likely to downplay ambition in public settings;
lower their stated salary expectations when potential male peers can see them;
avoid some career building behaviours under specific social conditions;
may face an early career leadership penalty in some settings.
These findings suggest that single professional women cannot simply be folded into the broad category of “women”. Their workplace experiences deserve to be studied in their own right.
Research also suggests that:
many workplace policies still centre parenting and caregiving;
single employees are often assumed to be more available for travel and extra work;
relatively few organisations collect workforce data by relationship or parental status.
Taken together, these findings suggest that many organisations still lack a full picture of women’s working lives.
None of these studies proves, on its own, that organisations are systematically overlooking single professional women. Together, however, they point in the same direction: an important part of the workforce remains under-examined in both research and organisational thinking.
The evidence points to a subtle pattern rather than deliberate exclusion. Dominant cultural narratives shape decisions. They influence which questions are asked, whose experiences appear in workplace policies and which career challenges organisations believe women are trying to solve. When one life path becomes the default, others become harder to see.
Organisations that fail to understand the full diversity of women’s ambition are likely to make poorer talent decisions.
This is not simply a question of fairness. It is a question of organisational performance. Every organisation competes for talented people. Organisations spend millions attracting them, developing them and persuading them to stay. Those investments depend on one assumption: that leaders understand the people they are trying to retain.
If one of the workforce’s least understood groups is also a growing one, organisations may be making important talent decisions with an incomplete picture. Leadership programmes may solve the wrong problems. Career pathways may reflect assumptions that do not fit everyone’s working lives. High performing women may feel that their ambitions are being interpreted through experiences that are not their own.
When talented people do not feel understood, they are less likely to see a future for themselves inside an organisation. Engagement falls, retention becomes harder and succession pipelines become narrower. Organisations cannot unlock the full potential of their workforce if they only understand one version of women’s ambition. A better understanding of single professional women gives organisations a more complete understanding of talent itself.
If our understanding of the professional woman has become too narrow, organisations may be making talent decisions based on an incomplete picture of their workforce. Leaders should ask:
Which women are visible in our leadership conversations, and which are absent?
What assumptions about women’s lives are built into our talent strategy?
Do our leadership programmes recognise more than one model of female ambition?
Are we collecting enough data to understand whether relationship status shapes workplace experience?
The question is not whether single professional women exist. It is whether organisations understand their experiences well enough to design for them.
The issue is not marriage or motherhood. The issue is allowing one life path to define women’s ambition. Single professional women are already leading organisations, building businesses, creating wealth and making long term decisions about their futures. Their ambitions deserve to be understood on their own terms, not as an exception to someone else’s story. As the workforce changes, organisations will need a broader understanding of women’s ambition, leadership and working lives.
The Single Woman Economy Brief is a weekly market intelligence publication exploring how demographic change is reshaping consumer markets, workplaces and institutions. Each week, I examine one question through the lens of evidence, commercial strategy and institutional design, looking beyond headlines to understand what organisations should be paying attention to next.
Once a month, the Desk publishes a longer Market Intelligence Edition, taking a deeper look at a single industry. Last month’s edition examined the travel sector and asked what every industry could learn from the first market to recognise the economically independent woman as a primary customer.
Bursztyn, L., Fujiwara, T., & Pallais, A. (2017). “Acting Wife”: Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments. American Economic Review, 107(11), 3288–3319. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20170029
Merluzzi, J., & Phillips, D. J. (2022). Early Career Leadership Advancement: Evidence of Incongruity Penalties toward Young, Single Women Professionals. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221081619
Torres, A., et al. (2024). The Impact of Motherhood on Women’s Career Progression: A Scoping Review of Evidence-Based Interventions. Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14040306
Ashanti Bentil-Dhue | Single Woman Correspondent
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