How Jacinda Ardern Changed the Look of Leadership
In my 20s, I believed that to hold power, you had to project 'gravitas.' Not just certainty, but a kind of impermeable seriousness. You didn't smile too much. You didn't laugh to put people at ease. You spoke as though everything you thought was self-evidently right, and you carried yourself like you were the only person who could save the room, the meeting, the country.
The politicians I saw on TV projected that certainty with force—aggressive in debate, unflinching in tone, never showing doubt. In the professional world, the men and women who held power negotiated with the same posture of strategic dominance. I admired them, and in some ways wanted to be them. But I also felt like in becoming them, I would have to give up some essential part of myself: my openness, my reflex to make others comfortable, the little ways I softened sharp edges in conversation.
And then there was Jacinda. A woman just a couple of years older than me, with indisputable power, standing at a press conference with a kind of presence I'd never seen. It was liberating to watch. It felt like permission.
I'm not the only one who felt this way. In the years since, Ardern has become an icon for a particular kind of Millennial and Gen X woman—emotionally attuned, politically engaged, and skeptical of institutional performance. The women I know admire her for her compassion, her humor, her realness. 'She [showed] me that not only would motherhood not mean the end of your personal goals, but that showing up for your family at the same time as standing up for what's right is possible and important,' reflects Rhiannon, an operational strategist in her early 40s. 'She just seems like a genuinely good person,' says my friend Julia, who works in government. Ardern's decision to bring her baby to the UN General Assembly, and the visibility of her partner Clarke Gayford adjusting his schedule around hers, quietly challenged the idea that women—especially mothers—must shape their ambitions around someone else's.
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