Introducing Fast Company’s Ambition Diaries

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BY Kathleen Davis

“I was so fed up with my job.”

“Something was telling me, I'm not going to find another job and that that is okay. That's when the dreaming was happening. After your job let you go and you were following this voice, that empowered me to dream as well. And to find what it is that I actually want to do.”

That’s Francesca Polanco, a 30-year-old from Miami, talking to her mother Damita about her corporate job. Her mother had built her identity around her success and status, climbing the traditional career ladder as well—but had been laid off after 30 years on the job.

Francesca and Damita are two of the 14 women from across the country whose stories make up Fast Company’s Ambition Diaries.

[Francesca and Damita. Photo Credit: Melody Timothee]

At the beginning of the year, Fast Company, with support from journalism nonprofit The Economic Hardship Reporting Project , set out to find out what it’s really like to be a woman working in the U.S. right now, and how things have changed over the previous generations. Seven reporters from across the country spoke to mothers and daughters about core issues like unpaid labor, discrimination, pay gap, career advancement, work-life balance, and how the pandemic has changed our relationship to work.

The 14 mothers and daughters profiled in Ambition Diaries range in age from 27 to 81, and live across the country from the Northeast to the South, Midwest, and West Coast. They are Black, Latinx, white, Guatemala, Malaysian, Jewish, and LGBTQ. They work in education, healthcare, tech, HR, the arts, retail and sales, and more. They are single, married, partnered, divorced. They are working class, middle class, upper-middle class and in some cases have moved between each.?

When we set out on this project, the news of the pandemic’s impact on women’s workforce participation was ringing throughout the business world: According to the National Women’s Law Center , more than 5.4 million women left or lost their jobs in the first year of the pandemic, setting women’s progress in the labor force back by a generation. And while some of those jobs have been recovered, women’s labor force participation is continuing to decline, and there are still one million fewer women at work than there were pre-pandemic. Then in June, just after many of these conversations had been recorded, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that banning abortion “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.” Women’s workforce participation pre-Roe in the early 1970s was 20% lower than it is now.

Amid this climate, it’s easy to feel discouraged. It can seem as if we are moving backward, and in some significant ways we are. But what the statistics we read and report on every day don’t reveal is the way these issues play out in individual lives, across families.That’s what we aimed to capture in the stories in Ambition Diaries. These conversations, while wide-ranging, still don’t touch on every important issue facing women today. But our hope is that these conversations can offer a rare window into the human impact of these historic economic shifts.?

Kelly and Bianca. Photo Credit: Allison Zaucha

Below, you’ll find glimpses into the intimate conversations between those seven mothers and daughters—their tough family and personal decisions, their stories of discrimination, and dreams delayed, discarded, and discovered.

This multimedia experience will continue for the next four weeks in a special mini-series on Fast Company’s The New Way Work podcast where we’ll dive deeper into topics around economic mobility, discrimination, work-life balance, and the recalibration of ambition in a post-pandemic world.?

Damita turned losing her job into a career second act, moving from traditional markers of success in the corporate world to purpose-driven work—inspired, she said, by her daughter’s bravery. Months later, Francesca too left her corporate job in pursuit of something more meaningful. Now, she holds this new outlook on ambition for her own children too:?

“I want to be that example. And I also want to show him how to choose himself. I just want to change the trajectory of my lineage.”?

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