The Leisure Gap, Princess Treatment, and Other Hard Truths About “Soft Life”

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About This Episode

There is perhaps nobody in the financial education space who knows her way around the National Bureau of Economic Research quite like Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez, author of the forthcoming book, The Ambition Penalty. If Chapter 2 of Rich Girl Nation were sentient, it would probably sound a lot like Stefanie. Today on the show, I’m picking her brain about the current state of what she calls “the ambition penalty.”

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Subscribe to the Money with Katie weekly newsletter
• Stefanie’s forthcoming book, The Ambition Penalty (out May 2026)
• Neoliberal Feminism and Women’s Protest Motivation
• Lean In Messages Increase Attributions of Women’s Responsibility for Gender Inequality
• Now Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap
• “Benevolent sexism undermines and hostile sexism motivates collective action for social change”
• Worse for Women, Bad for All
• Explicit and Implicit Belief-Based Gender Discrimination: A Hiring Experiment
• Dr. Corinne Low’s book, Having It All
• Winning the Bread and Baking It Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production
• The Myth of Mutuality: Decision-Making, Marital Power, and the Persistence of Gender Inequality
• Constructed Criteria: Redefining Merit to Justify Discrimination
• Gender Wage Gap and the Involvement of Partners in Household Work
• Marriage and Work Among Prime-Age Men

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Transcript