Young Women Aren’t Opting Out. They’re Opting for Better.

You’ve seen the headlines about young women and work: They’re opting out, going trad, quietly quitting. Gen Z women are—supposedly—turning their backs on ambition.

It’s a compelling story. It’s also completely wrong.

Young women are now among the most ambitious groups we’ve ever studied. In our 2025 Women in the Workplace report, 92% of women under 30 wanted to be promoted—more than men (86%) and women overall (80%), and neck and neck with young men. That’s not a generation checking out.

Our latest research deepens this story: We interviewed 150 people in the U.S. workforce and found that young women are the most ambitious segment—much more so than the young men we spoke to.

Yet far fewer young women than young men said they want to be a senior leader or a top executive.

This sounds like a contradiction, but it’s actually a message we should pay attention to. Young women deeply value professional success—which, for many of them, means work that’s fulfilling and meaningful—but they are skeptical about the highest leadership roles, and our research points to why:

1. More than any other group, young women say they want to be paid fairly for the burden of leadership—and that’s not surprising when you consider that women still earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn.
2. Young women feel workplaces don’t really want women in leadership. More young women interviewees said this than any other group. That’s not so surprising when you remember that young women often see men in their cohort getting promoted ahead of them. Our research shows that for every 100 men promoted out of entry level, only 93 women are promoted—despite women entering the workforce more qualified than their male peers. This is the broken rung: the first step on the career ladder, where women fall behind and can never fully catch up.
3. All employees—young women too—are concerned that leadership means sacrificing work-life balance. Notably, every group we interviewed—men and women of all ages—raised this as a top barrier to seeking leadership. This tells us something important: this isn’t especially a young woman’s concern—it’s a human problem that companies have the power to fix.

Yet young women haven’t written off leadership. In our study, more young women said, “Maybe, under the right circumstances” to leadership roles, rather than giving a definite no. That means the door isn’t closed; it’s just not been opened wide enough.

Companies that don’t recognize this—that don’t mend the broken rung and create a real path forward for young women—aren’t just being unfair. They’re leaving some of their most motivated, ambitious people behind.

And if you’re a young woman reading this: the values driving your ambition—meaningful work, fair pay, and bringing others up with you—are the values that make workplaces better. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s not ambition. It’s ambition with a higher purpose.