We’re in the middle of a generational power shift. Here’s how women are redefining it

We have spent the past decade and a half reporting on and writing about women and work, women and work-life balance, women and confidence, girls and confidence—all critical to the power equation. Initially driven by our own struggle to balance home and work, kids and career, we started to write about workplaces, focusing on changes needed to make them work for women.

At every rung of our rise, women have stalled. And summoning power—calling out what we need to make our version work instead of folding ourselves into an unfit system—is the next frontier.

We need respect and compensation for the power we already have and wield in the world, including the kind that hasn’t been historically seen as power at all.

We’ve both been part of the power hierarchy in a multitude of ways over the years. Yet we’ve still struggled to fit ourselves into prescribed male molds in order to progress in our professional lives. We’ve experienced, as younger women, the sort of treatment that would certainly shock us now: we’ve been told to stop being so emotional, to calm down, to change our hair, our clothes, our wrinkles, our voices, our style—basically ourselves. We’ve brushed off inappropriate and unwelcome invitations from superiors; we’ve sat through questionable, cringe-worthy talks with other senior journalists.

Courtesy of Harper Business

For those who have always had it, power is intoxicating, but for many of the rest of us, today’s power is toxic—not only for women and others who don’t have it, but for men, too. The zero-sum nature of the predominant brand of power encourages narcissism, a lack of empathy, and emotional repression. We won’t name names, but we know you can.

We are up against centuries of entrenched privilege, but it’s not just that we’re trying to take something men have always had, which would be a struggle in itself—nobody likes to lose. No, we are doing something far more disruptive. We are trying to change the very understanding of what it means to have power—who should have it, what the point of it is, and how to use it.

The good news, because there is some, requires a big step back. We’re feeling heightened friction because of our progress. Indeed, we are in the late stages of a power transfer (however agonizingly slow it feels to us) and we’re experiencing a collision of sensibilities as more women, more confidently, speak out and move into leadership positions. Mismatched expectations and misaligned views are having it out on power’s cutting edge; it’s a battle as much about values, stereotypes, and a bunch of other human proclivities as it is about power itself. It’s about what kind of world we want.

Women just don’t see power, or use it, the way men do. That fact, the central premise of our book, feels surprisingly intuitive—but it has profound consequences. More specifically, we tend to think “power to,” while they think “power over.” This is no tomayto/ tomahto situation. The different mindset has affected our ability to rise, but what we’re all witnessing now is an open clash between old and new, between two different concepts of power. A “reprogramming” of the power code is under way. The new version has been mostly deployed surreptitiously, but deployed it has been, and it will continue to be, even more unabashedly, because no amount of molding us to the man-made version seems to dislodge our instincts to use power differently.

We’ve taken a hard look at power, the way it has been, the way it is, and the way it can be. We now see the outline of new power emerging everywhere we look. Once you see things in a new way, you can’t unsee it.

Adapted from the book THE POWER CODE: More Joy, Less Ego, Maximum Impact for Women (and Everyone). Copyright © 2023 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. Reprinted with permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

"I’m so confident with the music. I’m proud and happy, so I’ve already won in that sense—that’s what I have to keep reminding myself of."

—Leigh-Anne Pinnock, former singer in Little Mix, on her first solo album