AOC just said the thing
Have you seen the clip yet?! Someone asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) if she's running in 2028, and her answer has been all over the internet (or at least my algorithm) for a reason. Here's what she said:
"They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country."
As soon as I heard that, i was like OMG YAS!!!!! THIS. This is it. This is what my clients articulate to me regularly. And what I've been trying to say about my own ambition for years.
She named the thing. The title was never the point. It's all about what that title gets you: leverage, impact, the chance to make a difference.
and guess what? the research sees us and AOC.
There's a whole body of work on something called motivation to lead (aka why you want to be a leader), and for years the dominant finding was that women score lower on it than men. 🙄
Cue a thousand think pieces about how we just don't want it badly enough. And why this is our fault. Again. (btw, I just binged the tv show, "All Her Fault", and omg, what a cultural commentary on the responsibilities placed on women. But ayway, I digress...)
But a 2025 study basically said, hold on a second. The researchers argued the existing framework was missing a dimension. The original three covered leading because you genuinely enjoy it, leading out of a sense of duty, and leading even when there's nothing personally in it for you. So they added a fourth: prosocial motivation to lead. That's the drive to take on leadership in order to help others, contribute to a cause, or change something structural.
Guess what they found?
Women scored significantly higher when it comes to prosocial motivation to lead than men did. (let me feign my shock for a sec) They also scored higher on non-calculative motivation, which is wanting to lead for reasons that aren't about personal payoff.
Let me type this one more time for the readers in the back.
For decades, researchers were measuring the kind of motivation that sounds like I want this for me and concluding women weren't ambitious enough. The moment someone bothered to measure the kind that sounds like I want this so i can do something, guess who was out in front.
THE LADIES!!!!!!!!!
This is being a Painted Wolf.
In my book, Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women, I talk about the histories of women leading their countries during COVID. And a striking number of them describe getting into politics for one reason: something specific was broken and the people in charge weren't fixing it fast enough.
Finland's former Prime Minister Sanna Marin put it like this: "I'm in politics because I thought that the older generation wasn't doing enough about the big issues of the future. I needed to act. I couldn't just think, it's somebody else's job."
Iceland's former Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir started her political career protesting a hydroelectric plant and has said she joined her party because of that fight.
The research has names for these two patterns. Personalized leaders pursue power for the sake of power. They want the seat, they want to keep the seat, and protecting the seat becomes its own problem layered on top of every other problem they're trying to solve. Socialized leaders pursue power because it's the tool they need to fix something. To my knowledge, no research has directly compared men and women on personalized versus socialized leadership. But based on the motivation to lead findings, I'm confident in saying women are more likely to display and value socialized leadership compared to men.
Every woman I coach has some version of this story. Myself included. My graduate school advisor once interpretted my ambition as “you want to be famous" and then followed it up with a long lecture about why this is bad. Yes, there's a lot to unpack there (and weekly shout out to my therapist, Hilary!) , but relevant to this newsletter is that I never wanted to be famous. I wanted (and still want) to have an impact. To make a difference. To leave the world a little better than how I found it.
And I'd bet everything that you know exactly what I mean by that.
You know precisely what you're capable of. And you've been watching people mistake that for something so much smaller for a really long time.
You have ideas that could actually change things. Let's get them heard. This Week's Thing is for you.
xoxo
Kelsey
This Week's Thing:
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A Girl's Gotta Cite Her Sources
Ocasio-Cortez, A. (2026, May 8). In conversation with David Axelrod. University of Chicago Institute of Politics speaker series.
Boerner, S., Schwarzmaier, M., & Tagos, I. (2025). Female motivation to lead: the impact of same-sex role models and female leadership strength awareness. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1544411
Marin, S., as quoted in Medeiros, K. (2023). Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women.
Jakobsdóttir, K., as quoted in Medeiros, K. (2023). Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women.