Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy.
Admittedly, that has been true for a good, long while. Is it late-stage capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, fascism?
Yes.
“How are you doing?” has become such a loaded question. The answer, for many people I speak to, has at least two dimensions: One, how is someone doing on an individual, day-to-day level? And two, how are they feeling about the macro-level chaos that has been unfolding?
While the answers to the first question vary—and in fact, on the micro level, some people are thriving!—the answers to the second have suggested, for years now, that, on the whole, we are not okay.
When I think about the forces behind this not-okayness, there are three primary ways that are mutually reinforcing: existential burnout, good girl conditioning, and hypernormalization.
I want to unpack each of these, to arrive in this context, before we talk about what we can do about the broken systems that created them.
Before we do, it feels important to name some of the ways that our current systems do and don't serve me. I'll tell you a bit more about my experience and my work throughout this piece.
I benefit from unearned advantages like being white, cisgendered, able-bodied, and straight-sized. I'm also partnered in a heterosexual marriage, and I've been able to sustain entrepreneurship since 2020 in part thanks to that privilege. I am culturally Jewish and not Zionist, an eldest daughter, and a mother.
A number of the concepts and ideas I explore throughout this piece have been central to Indigenous teachings and societies for hundreds of years. They are not new. And a number of the thinkers and leaders cited throughout this piece are Black women whose lived experience of patriarchy and colonialism is meaningfully different from my own.
My intention is to tie this wisdom together in a way that helps us to meet this moment together.
A MANIFESTO
Existential Burnout
Raise your hand if you’ve ever flirted with, recovered from, or found yourself deep in the throes of burnout 🙋🏼♀️.
It's no wonder how many of us feel existentially emotionally exhausted right now. Not only has Western society been designed to make us feel this way, but we're also living through polycrisis and trying to keep on keeping on.
As Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski write in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, burnout is emotional exhaustion created by Human Giver Syndrome, a system in which there are two classes of beings: human givers, who are expected to offer their time, attention, affection and bodies, willingly and placidly to the other class of people, the human beings.*
Specifically, they argue, "Human givers must, at all times, be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others... If we had to set out to design a system to induce burnout in half the population, we could not have designed anything more efficient."
This feeling, I’ve found, is especially acute for those of us who care about creating a better future. We feel a need to show up for that future 24/7. And it can be exhausting.
In Real Self-Care, Pooja Lakshmin observes that, in her work as a therapist, her (women) clients who are burnt out rarely recognize that they are burnt out. Instead, they say they just need more hours in the day or will feel better once they get to the other side of a big deliverable. It's a back-and-forth cycle of productivity and relief that we somehow never... win?
This is a reality that I experience, too, both personally and in my work with other women changing the world. At least once a season, I find myself trying to productivity my way out of a to-do list that's entirely disproportionate to the number of hours I have available in the day. And the number one life area that I find high-achieving women in my world want to talk about, work on, hack and optimize?
It's time.
INTRODUCTION
*This builds on work by philosopher Kate Manne.
Good Girl Conditioning
So, we're burnt out. We're also—many of us, especially those of us who currently work or have worked in the impact space—simultaneously trying to be good. The "good girl" conditioning runs oh-so deep (believe me, I feel it too). I see it show up in countless ways, from the pressure we put on ourselves to sacrifice our own well-being in service of our collective future to the seriousness with which we take our responsibility as change agents working inside capitalist organizations and our relationships with our families, friends, and partners.
In her book, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, Elise Loehnen grapples with where "goodness" came from and everything it has cost us.
"In worrying about everything we do not want to be, in suppressing our instincts and impulses out of fear or shame, in attempting to be ‘good,’ we've forgotten how to be. We are so fixated on an authority ‘out there,’ we're missing the miracles inside, all the moments that illuminate our connection to something bigger within ourselves. We are giving away our power and accepting exhaustion, resentment, despair, and disconnection instead. We deny ourselves joy, our rightful inheritance."
I highly recommend this book (though I've found that once you see it, you can't unsee it!). It really helped me see both where this has come from and what we're up against in a different way.
It's hard to think of a quote that better sums up the many impossible contradictions that women and feminine-energy beings face today than this one from America Ferrara's monologue in the Barbie Movie:
"Always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault."
That's a very hard place to start from when we need systemic change.
Hypernormalization
What further complicates this—and further alarms me—is the normalization of (gestures around) all of this.
Last year, for a brief moment, a few different articles on hypernormalization made the rounds. If you're unfamiliar or could use a reminder, I'll pull this description from an article in The Guardian: "Hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership (emphasis mine) and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction—give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.”
This disconnect? It’s crazy-making. It’s also strategic. As world-builder, experience designer and futurist Tracee Worley observed in a recent workshop on Seeing the Future through Feminist Sci-Fi, the normalization of things that are definitely not normal is a part of the dystopian patriarchal power playbook.
Not only are we experiencing hypernormalization at the macro level; we're also witnessing gaslighting and regression on an individual level, especially as it pertains to the status and progress of women in society.
As Rene Huey-Lipton wrote recently, the most dangerous number in the gender wars isn't the number of men who are regressing. It's the women who believe we're currently winning.
To be clear, we’re not. Women in the United States today have fewer reproductive rights than we did in 1975. The gender wage gap has widened for the past two years in a row, and it remains particularly acute for Black and Hispanic women. Hiring for women in C-suite roles has stalled since 2022, and corporate board appointments show early signs of regression.
And yet, Talker Research surveyed 2,000 women and found that nearly three in five Gen Z women believe that pay gaps, healthcare gaps, and leadership gaps will close in their lifetime.
"Gen Z women's optimism might be the most dangerous number... not because hope is wrong, but because hope aimed at the wrong target is a beautiful way to waste the most energized, aware, structurally-conscious generation of women we have ever produced," Lipton writes.
So, the way I read this, we're both weirdly hopeful that things will get better and also disconnected from the reality that they are, on the whole, getting worse.
It's overwhelming to think about just how bad things have gotten, and most of the people in my world don't want to sit in that despair. We don't want to deny it, either. We want to do something about it. But what?
We are not separate from each other or these systems. Which means the way we show up, both individually and collectively, creates the future we inherit.
This moment is a collective action problem.
A collective action problem exists when the vast majority of people want something—when it is clearly in most people’s best interest—and yet it doesn't happen because no one has taken on the task of mobilizing the majority.
For example, most of us want to solve the climate crisis. Not just activists and scientists. Most humans, across most countries, across most political affiliations, want to protect this planet for future generations. The polls are unambiguous on this.
So… why aren't we?
Because collective action problems don't get solved by wanting. They get solved by mobilization. And right now, the people who benefit from inaction are far better mobilized than the people who want change.
I've spent almost two decades at the intersection of sustainability, government affairs, and corporate strategy: inside Fortune 200 companies, as a management consultant, in the halls of the UN climate negotiations and the World Economic Forum. I've sat in rooms where major global decisions were being made and watched, over and over again, as the quality of leadership determined… everything.
The reason we haven't done things like address climate change; create parental leave, child care policies, and universal health care in the United States; or solve world hunger yet isn't that people don't care. It's that the majority hasn't been mobilized.
And the mobilization we need starts with leadership.
PART I
The leadership that created the problems that so many of us are working to address cannot solve it.
Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy.
We cannot use the same operating system, values or principles that created this mess to fix this mess.
I'd be remiss not to cite Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, and shaper of intersectional feminism Audre Lorde here: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
So, what will?
We know what this mobilization looks like. We've known since the first century.
Back then, a woman named Thekla was sentenced to death in a Roman arena for refusing to live the life the patriarchy had assigned her. She was stripped of everything and marched in to die alone.
She was not alone for long.
The women watching—strangers, spectators—looked at each other and understood, all at once, what was happening. What had been happening.
They grabbed whatever they had. Rose petals. Cardamom. They threw it into the arena together to help her save herself.
She did.
First she got quiet enough to notice what she actually wanted. Then, she allowed herself to be seen in that desire.
And when she did? The people around her rallied to support her.
The story of Thekla was buried in the fourth century, along with Mary Magdalene's gospel, because a story about women collectively protecting each other from state violence, and winning, is exactly what an empire cannot afford for people to know.**
So... we have a collective action problem. But we also have a solution.
We've known how to do this together for hundreds of years. And moments like this, when people mobilize to support each other? They aren't separate from systems change. They ARE systems change.
Feminine leadership is the leadership many of us have been longing for, and we see glimmers of it... everywhere. It’s alive on Season 5 of The Bear, evident in Jacinda Ardern's leadership of New Zealand through the COVID-19 pandemic, central to the functioning of our more-than-human kin like elephants, fungi and forests. (More on this later.)
It's the way that many of us who identify with feminine energy show up naturally. And the best part is?
We can start leading this way right now.
Here's the thing about this kind of leadership, though.
It starts with being attuned enough to know what we want, brave enough to trust it, and open enough to ask for help and practice it together.
Here’s how we get there.
**This comes from Acts of Paul and Thekla, first century, excavated by feminist theologian Meggan Watterson in The Girl Who Baptized Herself and described in the We Can Do Hard Things podcast on What to Do with Rage.
Your desires are information about the future.
I believe that the future is speaking through us in the form of our desires.
Our intuition knows that these systems cannot hold, and that another way is not only possible, but on its way. And our desires are powerful: They point the way to what wants to be brought to life.
But it's hard to get in conversation with our feelings and inner knowing when we're trapped in the grind of hustle culture.
How do we fix that to usher in this new era?
PART II
Next, we begin to listen.
First, we must rest.
As Tricia Hersey writes in Rest Is Resistance, "Dreaming is the way we move toward liberation because it is a direct disturbance to the collective reality of life under capitalism.
"When you are exhausted, you lack clarity and the ability to see deeply. Your intuition and imagination are stifled by a culture of overworking and disconnection. You must be open to go deep into the cracks to examine and to understand. It may take years to fully crack open and it will be a lifetime of practice, care, and creativity. It's your life, body, and community; therefore, it is yours to hold, protect, love, and care for. Exhaustion will not save us and will only lead us further into the clutches of grind culture."
It is easy to forget that the world we live in today was once someone's dream; our reality is not a given, but a manifestation of that dream.
As adrienne maree brown reminds us in Emergent Strategy, "We are living in the ancestral imagination of others." That means that the future could (and will!) be a product of our imaginations.
Nature does not rush, and it's also not summer all the time. In the natural world, things like composting and lying fallow are part of the process of regneration and rebirth. And as my friend and collaborator Rebecca Magee, founder of Sister Seasons, loves to remind us, "We are nature, too."
Because here's the thing: We know what we want. Especially when we get quiet enough to tune in. I'm reminded of an early coaching conversation I had with someone who is now a dear friend and collaborator of mine.
In that conversation, I asked her very directly what her dream was. At first, she responded to me and told me that that was the problem. She "wasn't feeling ambitious about... anything."
But as our conversation went on, she proceeded to tell me exactly what she felt ambitious about. Her dream, really, was to build a company with her partner, move to Hawaii, live on the beach, and work 20 hours a week.
Sounds pretty ambitious—and clear—to me.
Fellow coach and founder of Ladies Get Paid, Claire Wasserman, wrote recently about something shocking she found when analyzing over 100 transcripts of coaching conversations she had had. Specifically, she was surprised to find how many women she's coached who have said they were "confused"... but they actually know exactly what it is they want next.
"Later in the same session, they would describe it with total specificity and zero hesitation. They knew. They'd known all along. The answer was never missing. The safety to trust it was," Wasserman writes.
This tracks with my own experience, too.
We have to rewire our nervous systems to trust our bodies' intelligence.
Our bodies are speaking to us every minute of every day. And yet so many of us remain completely disconnected from this conversation.
Frankly, I didn't even realize there was a body connected to my head until I was in yoga teacher training in my mid-20s. All of a sudden, I realized that a lot was happening from the neck down. I just hadn't been paying attention.
I know that I'm not the only person who has had this experience. I also know that getting back into my body to inhabit and deepen the healing work I've been doing for the past 20 years has been transformational.
It's impossible to trust our intuition when we can't even hear it. And it's hard to pay attention when we don't feel safe or when our "fight, flight, freeze or fawn" response has been activated.
But the most meaningful and profound shifts I've made in my own life have been a direct response to moving things through my body. And I've also found that doing this work in community is what really makes new patterns stick.
We are sacred mirrors for each other, and there's something about both co-regulation and having our magic reflected back to us that makes it possible to form new pathways, step into our next levels, and stay there.
Our bodies are a portal to the human experience. They are wired for connection to other humans.
And we were never meant to do this work alone.
We are on the verge of birthing a new economy.
Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy.
My contribution is building the containers where we can practice showing up for this future together.
I'm also deeply inspired by Jennifer Armbrust's Proposals for a Feminine Economy. In it, she asks, “If capitalism is an economy that values masculine traits, what could another economy look like?”
A feminine economy, she concludes, could value things like abundance consciousness, mindfulness, gratitude, integrity, asking questions, care, sustainability, interdependence, ease and embodiment.
And Tracee Worley of Radical Futures (referenced above) is doing incredible work to help us imagine a matriarchal future, leading workshops and creating artifacts that bring this possibility to life.
Girls Club Collective is a community where women changing the world practice relational leadership in real time—on real opportunities, with real stakes. Where we learn to trust our inner knowing. Where we experience what it feels like to be witnessed in a room of other leaders that want us to win. Where the economy we're trying to build gets embodied, one conversation at a time.
The leadership that got us here won't get us where we're going.
Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy.
Feminine leadership is intuitive. It is collective. It is long-term. It is heart-centered and nature-informed. It is compassionate, curious and creative. It is seasonal, cyclical and spiralic. It values we over I. It does not claim to have all the answers.
And it is powerful AF.
This type of leadership is not only not new; it also inspired the early U.S. women's rights movement.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy—the oldest continuous, participatory democracy in the world, which the modern United States government was inspired by—is organized around matrilineal authority. Family lineage is passed down through the women in the clan, and Clan Mothers oversee political and spiritual well-being, economy and governance. These Clan Mothers are the ones who appoint a chief to represent the people and "hold the absolute, undeniable right to remove her chief if he acts in his self-interest rather than for the peace and well-being of the people."***
One of my favorite examples of feminine leadership in practice in recent(ish) history happened 50 years ago. In 1975, 90% of women in Iceland went on strike to demonstrate their power. Not from one workplace. From everything. For one day, the entire country ground to a halt.
Within five years, Iceland elected the world's first woman president.
That is what mobilization looks like.
We're seeing examples of this today, too. In 2020, Jacinda Ardern led New Zealand through a global pandemic—broadcasting updates from her couch after her daughter's bedtime, calling herself a mother first and a prime minister second. New Zealand had one of the lowest per-capita COVID death rates in the world.
Her message to her country was simple: "Be strong. Be kind."
That is what it looks like when the most connected person in the room leads.
And I know what's possible for us when we embody this energy, because I've seen it firsthand.
Inside a Big Four accounting firm, a leader in my world changed how she led after experiencing it within GCC. She replaced control with trust. Command with relationship. Pressure with psychological safety, celebration and fun.
People didn't disengage. They asked to join her team.
That is what relational intelligence looks like in practice. Leading through connection rather than hierarchy.
And when one person leads that way? It multiplies. Others feel it.
Men have known that mutual support is a competitive edge for centuries, as evidenced by "the boys club," the broligarchy, golf culture... I could go on.
We know it, too. In a 2023 study conducted by Chief, more than 80% of women at and above management level said that intentional forums of networking, like networking events and professional networking groups, helped them to achieve their career goals.
But as the women in my ecosystem will tell you, it's not just "networking" that unlocks wildest-dream possibilities.
It's reciprocity. It's relationships. It's how we show up, and how we lead.
And if we're actually ready to live into a better future, it's time for us to embody it.
Knowing that isn't enough, though. We have to do something with it. Here's what the research tells us about why.
Dr. Renée Lertzman, who has spent her career studying how people process hard truths about our world, has found that "the single biggest determinant of whether a hard truth changes anything is not the truth itself. It's the conditions we're in when we receive it. Specifically, the relational conditions."
She calls those conditions a container.
Get the container right, and we can take in what would otherwise be unbearable—and do something with it. Get it wrong, and even the most urgent, life-changing information doesn't get integrated. We push it away.
This is not personal weakness; it’s neuroscience. And we don't change in isolation; we change by being witnessed, through co-regulation, and by practicing living into who we want to become.
That means the work of changing the world isn't just about having better information or better arguments. It's about building—and participating in—better containers.
Girls Club Collective is one of those containers where we can hold hard truths and alchemize them into possibility. The Threshold—our embodied relational leadership cohort—is another.
What we build together, in community, in practice, is the how.
In January 2020, I had an experience on a retreat in Bali that I couldn't explain rationally but couldn't unfeel either.
After spending a few days embodying masculine and feminine energies—practicing them, trying them on—something became clear to me:
I felt this possibility in my body before I knew it in my head. I didn't know exactly what to do with that information yet.
So I built toward it. Girls Club Collective—a community of women changing the world who don’t want to do it alone—has been operating as a relational leadership lab for five years. I've coached hundreds of women on the front lines of systems change. I gave a TEDx talk about this framework in July 2026.
The argument in this essay isn't theoretical. It's the operating manual for something we're already building.
When I talk about feminine energy, I'm not talking about the gender binary. I'm talking about feminine principles that exist within nature. There are countless examples.
Elephants are one example of matriarchal society. In an elephant herd, it's the oldest female elephants that retain the knowledge about which paths are safe, where water was found during the last drought and which herds are friends (and which are foes).
In the plant world, trees are connected through their root networks so that when one tree in a forest that's connected to the network is not getting enough sunshine or nutrients to sustain its life, the other trees are able to, via their roots, send the nutrients to the tree that needs them to protect the overall good of the forest.
Fungi operate this way, too.
Beneath every forest floor is a vast underground network of mycelium—thread-like fungal structures that connect trees, plants, and soil across acres of land. Scientists call it the "Wood Wide Web," and ecologist Suzanne Simard spent decades exploring it. It’s how trees share carbon, nitrogen, and water with each other.
A forest is not a collection of individuals competing for sunlight. It is a relationship. A web of mutual care holding the whole system together.
You don't need me to tell you how many things are broken right now. All you have to do is turn on the news to feel like Mountainhead, HBO's satirical dark comedy film about tech billionaires, generative AI, social media, climate change and global conflict, has become reality.
But there are also an astonishing number of thinkers and leaders alive on this planet today who are ushering in something different. People who are rejecting good girl conditioning, refusing to accept this as normal, and keeping themselves in the equation of a better future.
This viral post from feminist, founder, creator, writer, and mother Nergiz De Baere explains the possibility of matriarchy more beautifully and succinctly than anything I've seen.
PART III
*** As Mohawk Bear Clan Mother Louise McDonald Herne, also known as Mommabear, says in a Rematriated Voices conversation with Michelle Shenandoah, Wolf Clan, Oneida Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy: "Never in the history of this hemisphere have mothers or women signed that [right] away."
Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy.
As Martha Beck reflected on We Can Do Hard Things, "If I don't show up free, it is impossible for me on an energetic level to help others be free."
For us to give others permission to embody the future that we want, we must first start by showing up and embodying that future.
And we start by doing it together, one moment at a time.
As adrienne maree brown reminds us in Emergent Strategy, "Small is all."
Feminine leadership is how we create a new economy. And the way we learn to lead this way is the same way we learn anything that matters: in relationship, in practice, in community—together.
If you're ready to start?
You're in the right place.
This essay is the beginning of a conversation I'd love to keep having with you. It's the "why" behind the embodied relational leadership framework I've been creating.
Embodied relational leadership IS feminine leadership in practice.
It's what I'll be teaching and holding space for you to practice and experience this fall, through our upcoming public workshop and inside The Threshold.
CONCLUSION
Girls Club Collective is where we practice this together. If you're ready to show up for a better future and don't want to do it alone, we're currently enrolling for our next cohorts.