WOMEN & POWER - KATTY KAY ON HER NEW BOOK - THE POWER CODE

The Power Code, the new book from?KATTY KAY?and Claire Shipman, offers a groundbreaking, provocative take on women and our relationship with power. Their conclusion: power today is not working, for women, men, or the world.?

For years, the narrative about?women and power?was simply that women needed more experience, more ambition, more something, and then, finally, they’d be ready for power.

The problem, more or less, was with women. But looking to answer the maddening question of why women still don’t have anything close to an equal share of the world’s power, despite the fact that multiple studies show all organizations are better off with more women running things, they’ve unearthed some radical things about power itself.?

It turns out we don’t need to remake women; we need to remake power.

Katty Kay explained in a recent conversation.?

SURPRISING FINDINGS IN?THE POWER CODE

After we wrote?The Confidence Code, Claire Shipman and I had conversations with women about their views on assuming power and leadership. Those conversations were quite revealing and led to years of research into the topic.?

This research showed shows no matter how you define power, women are looking at it and saying, no thanks. The cost of getting it is too high. The compromises we have to make in the rest of our lives are just overwhelming if we want to get to those higher positions of power.?

And actually, when we see power in action, when we look at people who have power, we frankly find it pretty unappealing. There's a lot of egos jostling, there's a lot of mansplaining that goes on at the top, there's a lot of behavior that I think often women don’t find particularly motivating for them.?

Women look at the cost of getting there. They look at what it looks like when you have it, and it's kind of a turnoff, which perhaps is not surprising because power structures have been built by and for men over the centuries and they weren't molded by women.

ORGANIZATIONS FARE BETTER WHEN WOMEN HAVE POSITIONS OF POWER

We do know from our research that when you do have women in positions of power, organizations perform better. There is just so much evidence for this now. Dozens of international studies – one recently from the International Monetary Fund showed that organizations with more women in positions of leadership are outperforming their competitors by every measure of profitability.

Our goal with?The Power Code?was to look at those two problems together. We need more women in positions of power, but women don't want power. How can we solve this problem??

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