Even in progressive circles, a woman's career success tends to threaten loved ones. It's old news that husbands often disapprove of a wife that outshines them. What's new is that daughters can also have a hard time with a conspicuously successful mother. With another critic in the family, women are desperate for recognition. Any employer who can conjure this up stands a real chance of winning the war for female talent.

In a recent interview, Eleanor, a distinguished female academic (Dame of the British Empire, President of an Oxbridge College), told me that when her 27-year-old daughter was around, she “hid her work under the table—just like Jane Austen.” To atone for her over-the-top career (which seems to “diminish” the somewhat more standard achievements of her daughter), she finds herself constantly needing to prove that she is just a regular mum—available for impromptu telephone chats and babysitting duties. While trying to avoid big fat lies, she finds that in conversations with her daughter, various honorary degrees—and splendid reviews of her recent book—conveniently “slip her memory.”

Eleanor understands some of the factors at play. Top of the list is maternal guilt. Due to fierce time pressures in the early stretches of her career, she hadn’t been all that available when her daughter was three and 13. She feels the least she can do is attempt to make up.

Eleanor is not alone. Many accomplished women find it difficult to “strut their stuff” at home—it undermines and threatens wifely and maternal roles. The resulting lack of recognition has surprisingly serious consequences.

In her work on ambition, psychiatrist Anna Fels demonstrates how achievement has two roots: mastery and recognition (see her book, Necessary Dreams). Talented individuals need constant encouragement, appreciation, and support if their abilities and skills are to be fully realized. Apologizing for or hiding one’s “smarts” can unravel ambition in a person’s life.

The data show that many women turn to employers for recognition. In a recent survey, the Center for Work-Life Policy found that recognition trumps compensation and title as motivating factors for female executives. When it comes to what inspires high-achieving women to go to work every day and give it their all, encouragement and appreciation edge out money and power.

Corporate initiatives that pony up meaningful recognition are therefore enormously powerful retention tools for women. GE’s women network does a great job celebrating female achievement, Intel’s “Women Principal Engineer’s Forum” showcases women and propels them upward on the technical track. Merrill Lynch’s “IGrow” and Time Warner’s “Breakthrough Leadership” program help women claim and sustain ambition. And Johnson & Johnson “Crossing the Finish Line” initiative recognizes and expands what talented multicultural women can do.

In addition to these company policies, what can individual women do to rewrite the mother-daughter narrative? My advice here is to do a much better job talking to daughters about “the struggle.”

Many of us have just spent 30 years “dancing backwards in high heels” (to use Linda Hirshman’s words) while working much harder than any man would. We’ve spent a lot of our lives studying for extra credit: being better prepared, better researched and staying later at the office. It’s been the only way to confound gender stereotypes.

We’ve been so concerned with not seeming whiney or bitter in front of our daughters that we haven’t done a very good job walking them through how difficult this “vaulting over the barriers” has been. More insight on this front might well make daughters less grudging – and more celebratory – of mother’s success.

Read all of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's posts.