| I just watched Scoop on Netflix and while the show based on crime reporter Jigna Vora is about many things, the one question it left me with was about social attitudes to ambitious women. Why is a trait so desirable in men such a loaded word for women? That, and the other gender news that I’ve been tracking for you, dear reader. The Big Story Dear ladies, your ambition is showing (gasp) She puts her career before her only child. “I’m sorry kid. I really want to come. But something’s come up at work.” The disappointed 10-year-old shoots back: “You’re working every day. You don’t like to do anything else.” That’s the script for when Jagruti Phatak, single mom and investigative journalist, tells her son she can’t take him for the movie they had planned to watch. The TV series is Scoop on Netflix and it is based on the true story of crime reporter Jigna Vora. Jagruti’s ambitions are pretty straightforward and include (though not necessarily in this order): To become the first woman in her family to buy an apartment, to give her son a good education and to keep getting the scoops that keep her byline on page 1. There is much to take away from the show—the relationship between journalists and their sources, the cutthroat race for page 1, trial by media—but there is no escape from the underlying message of what ambition means for women, particularly in a field like crime reporting that is dominated by men. Morality tale on the Ambitious Woman  (Source: Netflix) “It was a conscious decision to comment on the very judgmental way we look at women in the workplace,” Hansal Mehta, the creator and director of Scoop tells me on the phone. “Everybody rushed to judge her [Jigna Vora] because of her gender. And she was judged not just by men but also by women.” Jagruti/Jigna’s rise to deputy bureau chief in just seven years and her ability to land scoops leads to speculation much of which stems from jealousy. After all if a woman is doing well in her career, there must be (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) some reason other than her talent and hard work. “Was Jagruti’s ambition the cause for her downfall?” asks the Netflix promo. Can you imagine the same question being framed if she was a man? The assumption was she had used unconventional means to get what she wanted, explains Mehta. “There were insinuations about her relationship with cops, with her sources and even her editor,” he says “It happens in every industry. It happens in my business and in corporates as well.” Double standards Ambition has been a pretty loaded term for women. Back in 2004, psychologist Anna Fels wrote in the Harvard Business Review that for men, ambition was considered a necessary and desirable trait whereas for women it was associated with egotism, self-aggrandisement and manipulation. Even Barack Obama weighed in, telling a journalist in 2016: “When men are ambitious, it’s just taken for granted...when women are ambitious—why?” “It’s like an unconscious bias where women are asked to order the lunch or pour the tea,” says Preeti Reddy, erstwhile chairwoman and CEO, Kantar Insights, South Asia. “Women still can’t openly say they are ambitious or working hard for a promotion because they feel they will be judged for it, by women as well as men.” But biases against women persist all over the world. A newly released UN Report on gender social norms finds that nine out of 10 people, men as well as women, hold these biases. For instance, in 80 countries, half the people believe that men make better political leaders; 40% say they are better business executives than women and a worrying 25% believe it is justified for a man to beat his wife. The UN study comes on the heels of another report that finds that gender bias and discrimination have held women back in the workplace for generations. Researchers of this study, a summary of which was published in Fast Company, identified 30 common personality traits women say are used against them at work. Age is the most persistent with women being told either they are too young to lead or too old. Men did not face the same bias; a young man is hungry and ambitious; an older man is mature and experienced. Women are criticized so often that they assume what they are hearing as truths and work even harder to make improvements. The problem doesn’t lie with women but with attitudes to them, that they are “never quite right”, If they have kids, there’s an assumption that they won’t be able to commit to the job. If they are childless, there’s the assumption that it’s ok to dump even more work on them. Weigh in: Is it ok for a woman to be ambitious? Does society judge ambitious women differently from ambitious men? Write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com | 
