Power On New Terms

For more than a decade, the data told a steady story: working women want to be promoted just as much as men do. Then last year, for the first time in the eleven-year history of Lean In's Women in the Workplace, the largest study of women in corporate America, women were less likely than men to say they wanted the next job up. The ladder they had been climbing was coming apart.

The reversal stopped me. Fifteen years of reporting on women at work had pointed the other way, so when a data point said women were becoming less ambitious, I read it as a referendum on the rung itself: these women took a hard look at what was directly above them and decided the climb just wasn't worth it.

I've spent the past six months finding out whether I was right. Through my series, Leadership On New Terms, I sat down with more than a dozen senior leaders who stepped off the corporate ladder in pursuit of something different, in search of the moment each stopped negotiating for a better title and started negotiating for control.

They were as ambitious as anyone I have ever interviewed. What had changed was where they aimed that ambition: each had stopped chasing the title and started renegotiating the conditions of the work itself: what they were responsible for, how fast they moved, what counted as success, who got the credit, who carried the risk, and when they could leave.

We treat positional power, titles and a seat at the table and the size of the team reporting to you, as the whole game. But the power that actually determines the trajectory of your career is structural: the authority to set the terms under which the work happens.

The ladder I had been tracking for over a decade measures only the first kind. The framework I am now developing, Power On New Terms, focuses on the second. And as I reflected back on years of interviews with powerful executives across industries, I realized something: the best ones were always working out those terms for themselves. They just didn't have a name for it.

The name is structural power.

What these executives chose — to stop climbing and start setting terms — the rest of us will soon have little choice about. AI is taking apart positional power itself, thinning the layers of management and erasing the rungs people used to climb. Fractional work is on the rise and an increasing share of executives are choosing to create their own businesses before the decision gets made for them.

Structural power runs on six terms: scope, pace, evaluation, visibility, risk and exit. Here is how each one hands a leader more control and more purpose, and why women are reaching for these terms first.

Scope: Owning the Outcome

Scope is the gap between what you are responsible for and what you actually control, and women are almost always handed more of the first.

They do roughly 200 more hours of non-promotable work a year than men, the economists Linda Babcock and Lise Vesterlund found. And a newer kind of invisible labor is piling on top of that. In their research on what they call the Care Tax, Deepa Purushothaman and Harvard Business School's Colleen Ammerman surveyed more than 350 women in management and found them becoming "the emotional infrastructure of modern work," the steadying, absorbing labor that holds teams together and shows up in no performance review.

Handed responsibility without the control to match, more women are taking the scope the company won't give them and building it elsewhere. Many are doing it by building “portfolio careers” and expanding their work beyond what any single institution would permit. Tracking the exact growth is tricky, but 5.6 million independent workers earned $100,000 or more last year, double the number that did so in 2020.

South Asian Trailblazers Founder Simi Shah, is a part of that trend. Today, she runs three interconnected businesses under one roof: a podcast and content operation, an executive advisory practice, and an events business that produces everything from intimate industry dinners to large-scale gatherings.

“What makes me incredibly good at what I do today is that I work across so many things,” says Shah.

Pace: Deciding How the Work Gets Done

Pace is how fast and how hard the work happens. Since the pandemic, where the work happens has become a third, often unsaid, factor in how pace gets judged.

Flexibility stigma, the unfounded assumption that people who work flexibly are less committed, lands almost entirely on women. The latest Women in the Workplace report measured its toll: only 1 in 3 women who work mostly remotely have been promoted in the last two years, against more than half of those who work mostly on-site. Men are promoted at about the same rate wherever they work.

An increasing share of women are refusing that trade and claiming flexibility as a term they set themselves. Neha Ruch rose through advertising to run brand at the tech company Zola, then left the ladder entirely to build The Power Pause, her platform redefining career breaks and flexible work for ambitious women. Flexibility, as she defines it, starts from life and works backward.

"Flexibility in the end is deciding how you do your work the best while also maintaining other priorities in your life," says Ruch.

Evaluation: Defining What Counts

Evaluation is how success gets defined and measured, and the same work often gets measured differently depending on who did it.

Negative criticism of personality — the "watch your tone," "abrasive" variety — was found in a 2014 study to appear in 75% of women’s critical performance reviews and just 2% of men's. That gap is not only in language. Research out of MIT Sloan proved that women earned higher performance ratings than men yet scored 8.3% lower on "potential," which left them 14% less likely to be promoted. And the bias holds even when a woman's success is beyond dispute: in classic experiments, women who clearly succeeded in male-typed roles were rated less likable and more personally derogated than identically successful men, with measurable costs to their evaluations and rewards.

This reality is leading many senior-level women to ensure that the roles they accept allow them to be evaluated on terms that they define from the start. Paige Thomas spent 30 years in retail, including merchandising leadership roles at Kohl's, executive vice president at Nordstrom, and president and CEO of Saks OFF 5TH. That track record would suggest she'd be judged by the usual retail scorecard: comparable-store sales, gross margins, and sell-through.

Instead, she treats every role as what she calls a "current assignment," a frame she credits to a Nordstrom mentor that keeps her sense of her own value from ever being tied to a single title. She defines that value by the thing underneath the title, her read on the customer, which is what lets her move across categories and keep getting hired at the top.

"While I've spent 30 years in retail, I'm not a retailer," says Thomas, who was recently appointed chief commercial officer of Rent the Runway. "I am an expert in consumer behavior."

Visibility: Claiming the Credit

Visibility is who sees the work and who gets the credit for it, and women's contributions have a way of being credited elsewhere.

In a Harvard Business Review study of 270 women managers at Fortune 500 companies, women reported that their ideas often went unacknowledged until a man repeated them. Sponsors are the people who carry your name into rooms you are not in, and only 31% of entry-level women have one, against 45% of men, in Women in the Workplace 2025, so women's work goes unrepresented exactly where decisions get made.

For three decades, Sarah Creal built beauty brands that carried other people's names. She spent five years as Bobbi Brown's head of product development and marketing, created the Tom Ford line with Charlotte Tilbury, and built Victoria Beckham Beauty from a blank page. Every one of those brands carried a name that was not her own. When she finally built her own company, she almost did not put her name on it, until her ex-husband made it a condition of his investment, arguing that without her name no one would see the experience she was bringing.

She chose to become the visible builder of her own brand.

"When you use your own name, it means that you're willing to give up your name," says Creal, co-founder and CEO of Sarah Creal Beauty. "I'm building a legacy brand and my name will go on in this context."

Risk: Choosing What You Carry

Risk is the distance between what you are accountable for and what you have the authority to change. The wider that gap, the more of the downside you personally absorb, and women are handed the widest gaps.

The glass cliff describes how women and people of color are likelier than white men to be put in charge of failing or in-crisis organizations, handed accountability for an outcome that was set in motion long before they arrived. That is the most extreme version. The ordinary version is built into the architecture of a job: the mandate without the budget, the target without the headcount, the outcome without the levers. Women also tend to see risk coming first, which is what a career of carrying it teaches: in a 2026 Chief and Harris Poll survey of more than 1,000 senior women leaders, 71% said they are the first in their organizations to spot emerging AI risks, and 80% are active players in their company's AI strategy.

Erin Grau is a co-founder of Charter, a future-of-work media company acquired last year by The San Francisco Standard, where she is now chief operating and AI officer. Earlier in her career, at a high-growth, venture-backed startup, she watched that gap open in real time, keeping full accountability for outcomes as her control over the inputs shrank.

"I would never accept ownership over outcomes without controlling the inputs or the levers,” she said. “When you get more senior… you're more out of touch with the work that's being done on the ground … it's really important that you … have responsibility and authority over both the outcomes and goals and the work that's driving your business forward."

Exit: The Power of Being Able to Walk Away

Exit is when and how you can leave, and the power that option gives you while you stay. For many women the exit is forced, often with little support from the employer as they leave to build the next chapter of their careers.

Right now the forces pushing them out are intensifying on two fronts. Women are more likely than men to hold the jobs generative AI is disrupting: in the US, 33.7% of women work in roles being disrupted by the technology, against 25.5% of men. At the same time, the diversity commitments companies made in 2020 are coming undone. Diversity headcount across the Russell 3000 has fallen roughly 15% from its 2022 peak, the labor-data firm Revelio Labs found, and the cuts have landed hardest on the women, and especially the Black women, who held those roles.

Channing Martin was IPG's global chief diversity and social impact officer until she was laid off last December. She built her career on a clean equation: work harder, perform better, climb higher, and watch your power grow. The job, as she understood it, was to learn the systems, dismantle the ones that excluded people, and build better ones in their place. The layoff broke the equation.

"I had to come to the realization and the acceptance that I wasn't as powerful as I thought I was. And that these corporate systems and structures aren't designed to do what I want to do. And that's okay. I could either spend the rest of my career fighting against them and not building wealth for others, or I could build them myself," says Martin.

Who Drew the Blueprint

For most of the last century, men were the blueprint for the workplace, and so they became the blueprint for ambition too. Getting ahead in corporate America meant the things the blueprint rewarded: a bigger title and more people reporting to you. Structural power never made the scorecard, because the people who drew it already had it.

For fifteen years I reported on the barriers women faced, and I kept arriving at the same conclusion: personal ambition was never the problem. The barriers were structural, sitting in who gets sponsored, who gets promoted, and whose life the company is built to accommodate. What I understand now is that the blueprint was the barrier. Ambition was measured by how fast someone climbed a structure built by the people who drew it.

Recent research shows that the more narcissistic a CEO is — measured by the size of their photo in the annual report, the size of their signature, and their pay relative to the next executive down — the more likely they are to resist remote work, driven by their hunger to protect power and status. Power like that needs a stage, and the office is one. The mandate to return is, underneath, a defense of their positional power.

The women renegotiating the six terms understood early what the blueprint's defenders are now learning: positional power has to be performed to exist, while structural power simply holds. Scope, pace, evaluation, visibility, risk, and exit keep their value in any room, or none. The blueprint is being redrawn either way. The only open question is who holds the pen.

Leadership On New Terms is an interview series with the senior leaders renegotiating the terms of work as AI rewrites the work itself. Read the interviews with Simi Shah, Neha Ruch, Sarah Creal, Erin Grau, and Channing Martin, or subscribe to get each one. If you are renegotiating your own terms, I would like to hear about it: caroline@onnewtermsmedia.com.