On being a woman who wants power

We have come to terms with the ambitious woman. She is ubiquitous and largely synonymous with the post-yuppie corporate landscape, though ambition can be found as much in the domestic sphere as the commercial. We don’t, however, like the powerful woman. She is to be avoided, mocked, detested even.

You may think of ambition and power as vaguely synonymous in the amorphic cloud of “the wanting of more”, but they are opposites, in a way. Ambition manifests in achievement and concerns the improvement of one’s own capacities with the attainment of desirable outcomes along the way. Power, on the other hand, is relational because it concerns your capacity to determine outcomes that affect other people.

To make this distinction very concrete in your mind, consider the difference in personal perspective between hearing:

1. “I want to be successful”, and

2. “I want power”

The first sounds ambitious and is likely something that you aspire to as well. The second immedately raises a moral question, and rightly so, but it is this moral question that I want to focus on.

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It is a good place to start with definitions more concrete than the feelings I have described above. Ambition is simply a strong desire for achievement, distinction, or advancement in whatever field is relevant to you. This was an easy one to define, but power is considerably harder. I like the definition used by Max Weber, who describes power in Economy and Society as the probability that an actor within a social relationship will be able to carry out their own will “even against resistance”. Why do I call out that quote specifically? It succinctly conveys the idea that power becomes visible not from the internal perspectives of the individual seeking it, but from circumstances where preferences conflict.

If everybody already agrees with you, you do not have need for significantly potent power.

When power prevails it prevails in a circumstance where A wants X and B wants Y.

I don’t write this for the sake of writing it; I would like to turn to the backing of Bertrand Russell, who argues that the fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

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The very human, overtly negative, response you get to hearing someone say “I want power” is legitimate in that the underlying tone of wanting power is wanting asymmetry. In other words, power means wanting your preferences, judgement, decisions, etc. to have greater causal force than they currently possess. We run into a hugely interesting philosophical idea that Plato developed in his Republic: the people most eager to rule (as a proxy for power acquisition) are exactly those people whom we should distrust as rulers.

While you may not be doing the mental calculus overtly, the brain, upon seeing someone wishing to obtain power, runs a question: if this individual wishes to run an institution, they are implicitly saying that, when reasonable people disagree about what the institution should do, they wish there to be circumstances in which their own judgement prevails. You’ll always be, consciously or unconsciously, thinking: what justifies that claim? This is what compounds the overtly negative response to power as a concept that people want. Do you feel vindicated?

Ah, but while wanting power should make us suspicious, heed that refusing power does not abolish power because somebody else will exercise it.

Wanting power is not inherently bad. Wanting power is not inherently empowering. Power, the way I view it, is a morally ambiguous human capacity whose justification depends partly on its ends, means, and constraints. I take the Nietzscherian view that our desire for agency and self-overcoming cannot ever be separated from power.

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That is a lot on power and nothing on being a woman. Contemporary society can celebrate a woman becoming excellent without necessarily becoming equally comfortable with her wanting to dominate. This returns to the relational definition of power: a woman winning a prize does not alter the authority or social positioning of others (even if others would have rather won the prize above them), whereas becoming controlling (think: taking on a board position, running an institution, determining policy changes) involves judgement that governs other people’s possibilities.

I, as a broad reader of feminist literature amongst many of my other interests, enjoy Simone de Beauvoir’s idea from The Second Sex: ”One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. There is an overlap, but not an analogy, between biological existence as a woman and the socially produced meanings, expectations, and possibilities attached to femininity and womanhood. One of these compositional components of femininity is that women are, and have been historically, disproportionately confined to immanence while men were permitted transcendence and the ability to understand themselves as agents acting upon the world.

Immanence is confined to repetitive activities, and the maintenance of prescribed roles. Transcendence concerns projecting oneself outwards through projects, creation, and action.

The woman who wants power is turning this on its head. The woman who wants power, openly, even craves it, is claiming herself as a subject capable of imposing projects upon the world rather than accepting herself as an object within other people’s projects. The modern woman, having lived through the #girlboss and #metoo (whatever your opinions on the movements), can have extraordinary access to achievement and professional identity while still encountering subtler expectations about how explicitly they should desire authority.

A woman can be competent. Some would argue that a woman must be competent more so than the equivalent man. I am not making that argument, as I don’t see the statistics reflecting such a point with certainty, but I am claiming that we, as society, encourage female competence. Competence and power, then, are separate variables: competence concerns whether your judgement is good and power concerns whether your judgement has consequences. Modern meritocratic institutions train people to believe in a relatively linear model of advancement:

but real institutions don’t work according to linear chains because authority is distributed across many different networks and institutional alliances. Becoming technically excellent, therefore, is neither necessary nor sufficient to become powerful. Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between economic capital (material resources), social capital (resources available through relationships and networks), cultural capital (socially valued knowledge), and symbolic capital (legitimacy or prestige that makes other forms of capital socially authoritative) provides a clear philosophical illustration.

You can possess enormous cultural capital (a degree, years of experience, great intelligence, etc.) without possessing the economic, social, or symbolic capital necessary to determine institutional outcomes.

Bourdieu also argues that we all possess durable dispositions produced by one’s social conditions which make certain behaviours and ambitions feel natural, while others feel unthinkable: he calls this habitus. Women cannot formally have access to power while still having acquired dispositions that make claiming power psychologically uncomfortable.

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Many high-achieving women attempt to acquire authority indirectly by becoming so objectively competent that nobody could possibly deny their competence. This is not power as power involves the much more socially risky act of claiming authority before universal recognition has arrived.

Women like these, like myself sometimes, are optimising for indispensability. Indispensability is becoming so competent that an institution becomes heavily dependent on your labour. It is distinguished from authority by the latter being a recognised capacity to determine what other people do, or what the institution does.

TRAP 1: becoming the person who knows everything and fixes everything and organises everything and executes everything can create enormous organisational value without increasing the person’s control over what all that labour is ultimately directly toward. If everyone depends on your labour, but somebody else decides what your labour is used for, you are not powerful, merely indispensable.

TRAP 2: power only becomes consequential when resistance exists, which means that true power is not leadership in the traditional sense whereby leadership means inspiring people who already agree with you. Scarce resources guarantee conflict, so exercising power inevitably means producing outcomes that some people did not prefer. The psychological requirement here is that the ability to exercise power requires the ability to tolerate another person’s disappointment without automatically interpreting their disappointment as evidence that you acted wrongly.

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Men can fall into these traps with equal fallibility as women can, but women run up against Role Congruity Theory. This argues that prejudice toward female leaders can arise from incongruity between stereotypical expectations attached to the female gender role and those attached to leadership roles. If leadership is stereotypically associated with agentic traits (such as assertiveness, independence, dominance) while women are expected to display communal traits (such as warmth, sympathy, nurture), a woman can be evaluated negatively either because she appears insufficiently agentic to lead or because demonstrating the necessary agency makes her appear insufficiently communal as a woman. Women’s success in traditionally male domains creates negative interpersonal evaluations when their success appears to violate prescriptive gender norms.

The social price of identical power-seeking behaviour can vary according to who performs it and the context in which it occurs.

Foucault adds on to the relational definition of power by arguing that norms and surveillance can produce individuals who begin regulating themselves. Think to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon applied to power: the possibility of being watched encourages people to monitor their own behaviour without requiring constant direct coercion. Visibility, to quote Foucault directly, is a trap.

TRAP 3: the most efficient norm is the one that no longer needs to be explicitly imposed because the individual anticipates judgement and modifies herself accordingly.

After enough experience of the social expectations surrounding femininity, nobody necessarily needs to say “do not be too demanding” because a woman can learn to soften her requests herself.

Think about the language that is used around female ambition. Words like impact, empowerment, service, giving back, lifting others come up frequently in the #girlboss vision. While not inherently bad, the ubiquity of such words means that a woman’s explicit desires for power require an immediate altruistic justification. Requiring female ambition to appear completely selfless creates an unrealistic purified account of why anyone pursues power.

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The argument so far might be mistaken for the claim that women acquiring power is inherently a good thing. It isn’t. Women can exercise power badly. Women can be tyrannical, narcissistic, corrupt, vindictive, incompetent, exploitative, self-serving, and cruel. They have, with gradients for biological differences, the same human capacity as men. Any argument to the contrary would undermine the premise of this essay: if women are full moral agents capable of legitimately possessing power, they must also be full moral agents capable of abusing it.

I reject the feminist-adjacent argument made by some that female power is necessarily more benevolent. This argument is buried under paternalism as it leans on the traditionally feminine conception of women as inherently more nurturing, peaceful, empathetically, or morally pure. The argument ostensibly liberated women from the expectation that they must be endlessly communal, only to occasionally resurrect the exact same stereotype as the justification for why they should lead.

The argument for women having access to power is that sex is an arbitrary criterion by which to decide who should be permitted to acquire it. This requires separating representation (who gets access to power) from governance (what happens when somebody has access to power). Putting a woman at the top of an institution changes the first but may not change the second.

Women are human before they are symbols of female leadership

The popular discussion of representation is intellectually unsatisfying. We treat who possesses power and how power operates as though they are the same question but power is not an object passed between people. Power operates through social, institutional, cultural channels, and therefore you can change the identity of the person at the top without changing the technology of power underneath them. A woman can, therefore, break the glass ceiling and then govern perfectly happily from the floor above it.

Breaking the glass ceiling is not reduced to irrelevance by this, but this does mean that access to a hierarchy and transformation of a hierarchy are different political projects. And, perhaps more importantly, women should not have to promise the latter in order to deserve the former. Women are required to explain that she wants power because she will:

• transform the organisation,

• empower other women,

• create a kinder workplace,

...or otherwise use her authority for some explicitly communal purpose. We rarely require every individual man’s claim to authority to rest upon the proposition that men, as a class, exercise power benevolently. Why should a woman’s?

If we take female agency as an existential prior, we must permit a woman to compete for power without womanhood functioning as either evidence for or against what she will do with it. Any alternative to this returns us to the same gender expectations discussed in Role Congruity Theory: we tell women they may become agentic enough to acquire power, but then demand that they prove they will exercise that power according to stereotypically communal ends.

In other words: You may stop behaving like our stereotype of a woman in order to become powerful, provided you promise to behave like our stereotype of a woman once you get there.

This returns us to Plato’s original problem: “if the people who most want power are precisely those we should distrust with it, but refusing power just leaves someone else to exercise it, what do we actually do?” We cannot turn to the imaginary formulation of the benevolent dictator because, as put most succinctly by James Madison in the Federalist papers, '“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” We cannot design better angels, but we can design institutions around the premise that mobody is one.

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So, after all of this, what do I, as a woman, mean when I say “I want power”? I mean that I want greater causal force over my own life and the world around me. I want to be dominant. This, with the beautiful circularity of a grander essay than this, returns us to the distinction of achievement asking how good can I become?; ambition asking how far do I want to go?; power asking how much capacity do I want to shape what happens beyond myself?

A woman can possess extraordinary achievement without power, extraordinary ambition without authority, and, importantly, extraordinary power without competence. There is no automatic progression between the three.

Wanting power is not virtuous Women should not, as a blanket principle, want more of it. However, there is no moral virtue in pretending not to want power when you do. My desire for it will contain some mixture of:

• autonomy

• conviction

• ego

• competitiveness

• status

• recognition

My responsibility is not to purify those motives until I can tell myself a flattering story about them.

Wanting power should make me suspicious of myself, but should not necessarily ashamed of myself. And it certainly should not make me feel less of a woman.