Teenage Ambition Knows No Gender, Landmark Danish Study Finds

Ask a psychologist to define ambition and you will probably hear a familiar story: a relentless climb up the career ladder, a hunger for money, status and prestige. But ask a fifteen-year-old and the answer may surprise you. In one of the first studies to explore how adolescents themselves understand ambition, researchers in Denmark and the United Kingdom have found that teenage boys and girls share a remarkably similar, strikingly broad definition of ambition — one that has little to do with wealth, power or promotion, and everything to do with the distance between who you are and who you want to become. When ambition was measured on the teenagers’ own terms, the long-reported gender gap in ambition essentially vanished.

The new research, published open access in Trends in Psychology, was led by Sabrina Spangsdorf of the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Exeter, together with Michelle K. Ryan and Renata Bongiorno of the University of Exeter and Teri A. Kirby of Purdue University. The team set out to resolve a puzzle that has dogged the ambition literature for decades. Study after study reports that men are more ambitious than women, yet qualitative work with young adults suggests something is wrong with the yardstick itself: conventional measures of ambition rest on stereotypically masculine notions of success, built around linear career progression, income and rank. If the ruler is biased, the measurements will be too.

The researchers began with a deceptively simple question: what does ambition actually mean to teenagers who are still in school and have never set foot in a corporate office? To find out, they ran semi-structured written interviews with 30 Danish high school students aged 14 to 18, 47 percent of them girls. The interviews were conducted individually through a real-time document-sharing platform, a design chosen to prevent students from influencing one another and to reduce the power imbalance that can arise in face-to-face interviews with adult researchers. The word ‘ambition’ was deliberately kept out of the information sheet so that students would arrive at the topic without preconceived expectations, and all questions were phrased in a non-gendered way so that gender would not be made salient.

Using a template analysis of the transcripts, the team distilled a definition of adolescent ambition that is strikingly free of context. Ambition, the students said, means having one or more goals that you are highly motivated to pursue, that require hard work, and that lie a meaningful distance from your starting point. Crucially, the goal can be anything at all. ‘Ambition is ambition, no matter what your goal is,’ one 16-year-old girl explained. ‘I think ambition is very often the same thing. You can be ambitious about different types of goals,’ an 18-year-old boy agreed. What mattered was not the destination but the difficulty of the journey: ‘If it is too easy to reach the goal, it’s not ambitious enough,’ another girl said. The greater the distance between starting point and goal, the more ambitious the pursuit.

Success featured prominently in the students’ accounts, but in a distinctly modern form. The teenagers distinguished between objective success — the wealth, grades and career milestones society deems valuable — and subjective success defined by the individual, as well as an ‘other-referent’ success measured by comparison with peers. ‘The media plays a huge role in how we see success. Society says success is about having an important job or making a lot of money, but it’s really up to the individual,’ one girl observed. Girls tended to list a wider variety of success markers, from education and good health to family, friendship and happiness, while boys more often explicitly separated societal success from individual success. Both genders, however, rejected the idea that ambition must chase externally imposed standards. Equally revealing was the students’ treatment of competition, long treated as a proxy for ambition in economic and psychological research. The adolescents saw competition as a situational motivational tool, not a prerequisite: ‘You can be ambitious without competing, and competitive without being ambitious,’ one girl put it.

The interviews also surfaced four behavioural traits that students considered necessary for ambition to be expressed at all: self-efficacy, the belief in one’s own ability to reach a goal; self-esteem; grit, the perseverance to stick with long-term goals despite adversity; and the process of goal-setting itself. ‘You believe in your abilities and yourself,’ one boy said. ‘Ambitious people also make a plan how to reach that goal. The goal is always a long-term goal. If you don’t make a plan, you’re not really ambitious,’ a girl explained. Interestingly, when asked directly, 93 percent of the girls described themselves as highly ambitious, compared with only 44 percent of the boys — a gap that begged to be tested at scale.

That test came in a second study: a cross-sectional survey of 643 Danish high school students, 49.6 percent of them girls, recruited through six schools via anonymous online questionnaires. Ambition was measured using six new items built directly from the students’ own definition — for example, ‘I set high goals,’ ‘I push myself to set goals that are difficult to reach,’ and ‘I see myself as ambitious.’ The four behavioural traits were assessed with established instruments, including the General Perceived Self-Efficacy Scale, the Basic Self-Esteem scale, the Grit scale for children and adults, and the Goal Setting Formative Questionnaire. Notably, the students who piloted the measures found the new ambition items clearer than the classic Duckworth Ambition Scale, reinforcing the value of ground-up measurement.

The statistical results were decisive. An independent-samples t-test found no significant difference in ambition between boys (mean 3.59) and girls (mean 3.50) on the adolescent-derived measure, with an effect indistinguishable from zero. Structural equation modelling then confirmed strong, positive relationships between ambition and each of the four behavioural traits, with goal-setting showing the largest path coefficient (β = 0.75), followed by self-efficacy (β = 0.56), self-esteem (β = 0.39) and grit (β = 0.37). Together, the four traits explained a remarkable 71 percent of the variance in ambition. Gender did not moderate any of these relationships, and the measurement model showed configural, metric and scalar invariance across genders, meaning the comparisons were statistically sound. Small gender differences did appear in self-efficacy, grit and self-esteem — with boys scoring slightly higher — but these were generally small and did not translate into differences in ambition itself.

The implications ripple outward in several directions. For researchers, the findings suggest that decades of reported gender gaps in ambition may partly be artefacts of definitions that privilege masculine-coded goals: elite universities, high grades, management positions, promotion and pay. If ambition is instead understood as a self-defined drive toward a personally meaningful, difficult goal, boys and girls stand on remarkably equal ground. The results echo earlier qualitative work by Harman and Sealy, who redefined ambition as ‘an internal drive towards a subjective form of success,’ and by Sools and colleagues, who found that people embrace a positive, growth-oriented version of ambition while distancing themselves from the money-and-status version. The Danish teenagers, it turns out, had already arrived at the same consensus.

For teachers and career counsellors, the practical message may be the most useful part of the study. If ambition depends less on the specific goal than on goal-setting skills, grit, self-efficacy and self-esteem, then ambition can be cultivated rather than merely detected — and it can be cultivated in every student, regardless of gender. The authors caution that their sample was drawn from schools in a single Danish region, that too few non-binary students participated to draw conclusions, and that correlational data cannot establish whether the behavioural traits cause ambition or the other way around. Cross-cultural replication, particularly in collectivist societies where gender stereotypes take different forms, is a clear priority. But the core finding stands as a challenge to a field long accustomed to measuring drive by the size of a salary or the height of a corner office: teenagers define ambition by the stretch of the journey, not the label of the destination — and on that measure, boys and girls are running the same race.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in the conceptualisation of ambition among adolescents

Article Title: Do Boys and Girls Differ in their Perception of Ambition? Exploring the Conceptualisation of Adolescent Ambition

Article References: Do Boys and Girls Differ in their Perception of Ambition? Exploring the Conceptualisation of Adolescent Ambition. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00522-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00522-x

Keywords: ambition, adolescents, gender differences, goal-setting, grit, self-efficacy, self-esteem, gender stereotypes, motivation, psychology, Denmark, structural equation modelling