The first time I saw Jacinda Ardern speak, at a press conference shortly after she was elected prime minister of New Zealand at the age of 37, I felt something close to revelation.
This was before Ardern rose to international prominence: before the Christchurch massacre in 2019, when she responded to an act of anti-Muslim terror not with platitudes or distance but with moral clarity and solidarity; and before the COVID-19 pandemic, when she led her country with a model few others were able to replicate—managing to keep New Zealand largely safe and open while the rest of the world shut down.
But even before those defining crises, something about Ardern felt quietly radical. It wasn’t just that she was a woman in power or even that she was a young woman in power. It was that I had never seen a politician who seemed so utterly human—and powerful because she didn’t try to hide it. She wasn’t trying to dominate the room or prove that she belonged. She was just speaking—with clarity and respect. And with that came a sudden possibility: that the model of leadership I’d grown up with might not be the only one.
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.
Ardern, it turns out, also grew up thinking that a career in politics was for a different kind of person—someone more confident, less anxious, and better equipped to withstand the gladiatorial tone of parliamentary debate.
Although she began working in politics in her late teens, first on a local MP’s campaign and later in the office of then prime minister Helen Clark, she assumed her personality made her better suited to working behind the scenes.
But when Ardern was elected leader of the New Zealand Labour Party just 53 days before the 2017 general election, it never occurred to her to change herself to fit the role. “There was no time for me to redesign myself in any way,” she says in Prime Minister, the new documentary about her tenure in theaters on June 13.
Not that she could have, even if she’d wanted to. When we spoke last week—just ahead of the release of Prime Minister and her new memoir, A Different Kind of Power—Ardern pointed out that by the time she became Labour leader, she had already been in the public eye for almost a decade. “People already knew who I was,” she told me, referencing her long-standing presence on breakfast television. Couple that with New Zealanders’ low tolerance for political spin, and pretending to be someone else would have rung false.
Ardern says she made a deliberate decision not to harden or reshape her persona when she entered Parliament at the age of 28. But she also assumed “that would mean I wouldn’t rise,” she says. She had made peace with the idea that authenticity might be incompatible with ambition.
Over time, however, she discovered that the traits she had once thought were a liability were, in fact, a profound asset.
Her emotional intelligence helped her speak with people, not just at them. Her authenticity built trust. Her sensitivity, she discovered, wasn’t a weakness but a filter. “If you’ve made a decision and an affected group feels wronged by it, that actually is the kind of thing you should hear,” she explains. “You should try and depersonalize it, but you should hear it.” Resilience, for her, wasn’t about thick skin; it was about selective permeability. And it was Ardern’s self-awareness—and disinterest in power for its own sake—that finally helped her determine when she’d had enough and it was time to step away.
Ardern’s rise feels emblematic of a generational shift: She is part of a cohort of younger female politicians who no longer feel the need to wrap themselves in the traditional costumes of authority—whether literal or symbolic.
Like Ardern, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks plainly and directly to the people she represents—not in the distant, polished cadence of political speech but like a human being talking to other human beings. She answers questions, admits when she’s wrong, and explains what she’s doing in real time on social media. That openness is a source of her power, not a softening of it. Former prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin projected a similar accessibility—dancing at music festivals, yes, but also speaking with a kind of calm assurance that didn’t require posturing.
In many ways, the old model of dominance as power was a game women were rarely set up to win. From a young age, boys are taught to compete—on the field, in the classroom, in casual boasting. Girls, by contrast, are taught to collaborate. To be warm, approachable, and well-liked. And when you’ve spent your life trying not to intimidate people, power through dominance can feel not just foreign but fundamentally wrong.
And the truth is the old model doesn’t fit most men either. As Ardern puts it, “In the last 30 years, we’ve seen greater diversity in who holds leadership positions. But what we also need to see is a greater diversity in the leadership traits we value.” She points to the recently elected Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and the recently reelected Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, both of whom referenced kindness in their victory-night speeches. Of course, this shift toward a more humane style of leadership has unfolded alongside the rise of strongman figures like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. But Ardern cautions against assuming this is what voters truly want.
“We are seeing a particular style of leadership now, and there’s an assumption that it is what people are seeking,” she says. “But I think we need to be a bit more thoughtful than that. When we dig down into the research around why voters vote in particular ways, there’s many layers to their decision-making—some policy based, some personality based. I don’t think it’s enough to say that just because we see this particular form of leadership, that means that is what voters across the board wish to see.”
As I think of my small but growing pile of T-shirts from failed women presidential candidates, it’s hard to imagine the United States electing a leader like Jacinda Ardern at this moment—not just a woman but a woman who defies traditional models of power. But who, in 2004, would have predicted Barack Obama? Sometimes change arrives when it least feels possible.
Even if we don’t yet have our own Jacinda Ardern, her legacy has already expanded what women imagine is possible. You see it not only in politics but in workplaces where Gen X and millennial women are rejecting command-and-control models of leadership. We’re not trying to sound louder or tougher on Zoom. We’re building cultures that are more collaborative, more human—and more aligned with the world we want to create.
I no longer worry about whether I project gravitas. I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t have to perform professional confidence; I simply have it. And that confidence no longer requires armor. I don’t have to shed the habits I once used to soften myself or pretend to be invulnerable. I trust what I know. And I trust that the way I show up in the world is enough.
Ardern’s legacy isn’t only in the compassion she showed after the Christchurch massacre or the steady hand with which she led her country through COVID. It’s in the cultural shift she helped spark. She proved that power can come from clarity, composure, and compassion. And for a generation of women raised to believe we had to harden ourselves to lead, that revelation was a gift.