In 2000, when I was 27, I received a posh fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and work at the Wall Street Journal while doing research for a book project on angel investing. It was an incredible opportunity for a 20-something by any objective standard, and I knew it would help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My girlfriends, however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my boyfriend at the time to live abroad for a year. My relatives asked whether I was worried that I'd never get married. And when I attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took me aside to remind me that "there aren't many guys like that out there."



I was then in the throes of working 90-hour weeks covering the 2000 presidential campaign while settling the estate of my grandmother, my rock and my biggest backer, who had died the year before. But I'd never felt as lonely as I did at that moment in that backyard. I wondered why I should feel guilty simply for daring to say yes to a momentous professional opportunity.

As my aunt likes to say, women still operate from a position of scarcity rather than a position of abundance. But we should not have to live with the paralyzing fear that this one will "get away." Men don't. Instead, they see windows of opportunity and encourage ambitious young men to walk through them. All too often, we encourage young women to look down the road well before they are there, and to look down, instead of up, along the way. But lowered eyes and folded arms do not lead to excellence.

The reality is that many young women (and, for that matter, older women) still see ambition as a dirty word. It's a word they whisper conspiratorially to the like-minded, not proudly shout out loud. And this is a problem for all of us, because we need their drive and aspirations in a world where women account for less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 20 percent of Congress, and 15 percent of major firms' board members and still make up a scare minority at most gatherings where real power is centered. At the leading venture capital firms doling out dollars to the next generation of inspired start-ups, women account for precious few of the investors. And they're embarrassingly absent from nearly every "top-whatever" list that is published.

Numerically speaking, half the population cannot be a minority. Yet when it comes to women, the numbers plainly show that the mathematically impossible is the socially acceptable. And the urgency to change that must not wane, because without it women have no power to change their world.

It matters whether women sit at the table. No one speaks up for you when you are standing outside with your nose pressed up against the glass. You cannot window-shop for power. But we still listen with a touch of suspicion when women share their desires to achieve the extraordinary. When a young women starts talking about her career aspirations, the next question on the script seems to be whether she's thought about starting a family.