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.

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