Reese Witherspoon wants to crush the stigma that ambitious women are selfish.
“What the heck is wrong with being ambitious?” she wrote in a new essay for Glamour after reading various articles and studies that claimed women with ambitious traits were viewed as “selfish” and “less worthy of being hired.”
“I have been ambitious all my life. In fact, I vividly remember telling my third-grade teacher that I wanted to be the first female president of the United States. Ambition is simply a drive inside of you—it’s having a curiosity or a new idea and the desire to pursue it,” she wrote.
Witherspoon has proven that ambitious women are the most successful. In 2012, she started her own production company — Pacific Standard — in order to create more roles for women. Some of her producing credits include “Gone Girl,” “Wild” and “Big Little Lies,” which was nominated for 16 Emmys.
“I can tell that I’m considered a player now because of the respect I get from studio heads,” she wrote, noting in the article that every studio but one passed on “Gone Girl” before it became a best-selling book. “They call me back quicker and give me thoughtful responses when I pitch ideas. It has been quite a shift for me.”
She calls out some of the women who have made big changes in the industry over the years like Felicity Jones, Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot, Ava DuVernay, writer Jennifer Lee, directors Nancy Meyers and her daughter Hallie Meyers-Shyer.
But there are still challenges.
“Women made up just 29 percent of protagonists in last year’s highest-grossing films—that’s a new high, but come on … it’s not even a third,” she wrote. “The stakes are also much higher for stories about women. There is a lot of pressure to generate a huge profit. When any movie with a group of women starring in it doesn’t make heaps of money, the studio take away is that those types of films ‘aren’t working.’ But the truth is not every movie works.”
She also pointed out that having a good support system around her has helped her make her dreams come true and praised her husband of six years, Jim Toth.
Her advice? “Run away from a man who can’t handle your ambition. Run. So many men think ambition is awesome and sexy!”
At the end of the essay, she declares that if we encouraged more women to be ambitious, the world will change.