Hey,

Motherhood is often said to change a woman’s priorities.
But often, the ambition stays exactly where it was.

What changes is everything around it: childcare, schedules, money, sick days, school breaks, backup plans. So, in #Edition92, we’re looking at the hidden cost motherhood can attach to ambition and why saying yes can suddenly require far more than simply wanting the opportunity.

Inside this Edition:
👉 Motherhood Didn’t Change Her Ambition – It Changed the Math.
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Maybe she doesn’t want less.
Maybe wanting more has just started costing more.

Before motherhood, saying yes to an opportunity was mostly a question of whether you wanted it or not. A last-minute flight? Book it. A late-night deadline? Stay. A new role in another city? Figure it out.

After motherhood, wanting it is only the first question.
Who will pick up the child?
Who covers the sick day?
Can you afford the childcare?
What happens during the school break?
Who absorbs the extra work at home?

That’s the ambition tax.

The extra coordination, money and mental arithmetic motherhood can attach to almost every professional decision. A promotion can mean longer hours. Travel can mean more backup plans. Starting a business can mean taking financial risk when someone else depends on your income. Flexibility can come with the fear of looking less committed.

Ambition may not have changed.
But the cost of acting on it did.

And the numbers support this too…
In 2025, 73.9% of U.S. mothers with children under 18 were in the labour force, compared with 93.7% of fathers  Even among couples where both parents work full time, Pew Research Center finds mothers are still more likely to carry more of the day-to-day parenting – and to say balancing work and family is difficult.

When a mother turns down the conference, stops volunteering for the 7 p.m. meeting or decides the promotion can wait, we can read that as diminished ambition. But often, it is ambition operating under a different set of constraints.

She may still want the bigger role, without wanting a job that treats unpredictability as prestige. She may want to build the company, and still make bedtime. She may want the promotion, and also want to leave at 5. 

None of those things cancel each other out.

And when work becomes more flexible, some of the penalty appears to shrink. A 2025 NBER study found that as work-from-home opportunities expanded, the employment gap between mothers and other women narrowed in fields where remote work became more feasible.

We don’t have an ambition problem. We have an ambition-cost problem.

Motherhood never made women less ambitious. We simply built professional ambition around the assumption that somebody else would handle the children. And when that “somebody else” became her, we called the choices that followed a loss of ambition.

💬 Ideas for the week when wanting more starts requiring more.

📺 WATCH: Workin’ Moms
A sharp comedy about four women trying to hold onto careers, relationships and a sense of self while motherhood keeps rewriting the rules. It’s funny, messy and painfully accurate about the gap between wanting it all and actually having the infrastructure to hold it all.

📖 READ: The Fifth Trimester by Lauren Smith Brody
A book about returning to work after having a baby — and the strange expectation that professional life should simply resume as before. It explores childcare, identity, flexibility and the invisible recalculations that begin once ambition has to coexist with care.

🎧 LISTEN: The Double Shift
A podcast about what happens when paid work and care work collide. Hosted by journalist Katherine Goldstein, it looks at childcare, career penalties and the systems that still expect mothers to absorb both. Smart, political and very much in the world of this edition.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

💊 South Korea moves to approve abortion pills for the first time: The government plans to allow medication abortion up to nine weeks from early 2027, bringing abortion pills formally into the healthcare system after years of legal uncertainty.
🩺 A new study finds a simpler way to reduce IUD insertion pain: A randomized JAMA trial of 370 patients found intrauterine mepivacaine significantly lowered pain during IUD placement and improved tolerability.
🌡️ The FDA is finally looking harder at testosterone use in menopause: The FDA held a dedicated workshop on testosterone therapy for menopausal women, focusing on its growing off-label use and major gaps around long-term safety and benefits.
🏀 WNBA players came back from the World Cup break breaking records: Jackie Young tied the league record with 22 points in a single quarter, while Atlanta’s Angel Reese logged her 30th double-double of the season and Rhyne Howard set a new single-season three-point record.
💡 A woman scientist’s food-tech breakthrough just raised $10M: MicroLub, built around University of Leeds professor Anwesha Sarkar’s fat-mimicking technology, raised $10 million to expand a system that can cut fat and calories while preserving texture.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

Before Samantha Murrell (@samtheadventurer86) built Mothers’ Hood, she had spent two decades building a corporate career. Motherhood didn’t erase that ambition. It made her notice how poorly the working world was designed to hold it.

She later began working with women navigating what she calls the “motherhood-ambition collision”: the tension between wanting a meaningful, challenging career and living inside systems that still assume someone else is handling the care work. Through Mothers’ Hood, she now works at the intersection of motherhood, leadership and identity, while creating more honest conversations around what becoming a mother can do to a woman’s sense of self. ✨ Know more at Mothers’ Hood.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚