The Power of Stories About Power
By Mariana Ribeiro, Co-Founder @ CLARICE
Women are about to inherit $124 trillion worldwide. In the coming decades, nearly 70% of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history will pass into women’s hands, a shift driven by longer life expectancy and changing inheritance patterns across generations. In the United States alone, $47 trillion is expected to transfer to younger generations of women over the next two decades. McKinsey projects a $30 trillion wealth management opportunity by 2030. While this presents an immediate opportunity, including for philanthropy, whether this transfer of resources will also become a transfer of power remains an open question.
Here’s the tension: even as women’s economic power surges, the cultural narratives defining who gets to lead (and how) remain locked in place. Power is still imagined as confrontational, hierarchical, and individualistic. Women gaining resources doesn’t automatically mean women gaining legitimacy to exercise authority on their own terms. In practice, women who step into any kind of leadership face a double bind: conform to dominant archetypes and be seen as aggressive, or reject them and be seen as unserious.
Geopolitically, we are living through a defining inflection point, and these political shifts are reshaping how power and leadership are imagined. Democratic backsliding, rising authoritarianism, and the resurgence of nationalist frameworks are reinforcing male-coded archetypes: the strongman, the lone visionary, the decisive executive. Culturally, digital platforms have become vast distribution networks for regressive worldviews, spreading narratives that portray women’s rights as excessive and reimpose old scripts about where women “naturally” belong. A recent Guardian article offers a sobering data point: a global survey found that Gen Z men are significantly more likely than older generations to hold traditional views on gender roles. Our report found that 4 in 10 people cannot name a single woman in a position of power, and among those aged 18 to 24, that figure rises to nearly half.
The forces working against gender equality are not fragmented or underfunded. Efforts to advance gender equality cannot afford to be either. This moment demands a response at the level of culture itself: shifting the stories, symbols, and social norms that determine what power looks like when women hold it. Women’s growing economic influence creates the conditions for transformation, but only if we build the cultural infrastructure to support it. That means moving beyond one-off campaigns (moments of visibility that spike and fade), and toward an enduring capacity to move consistent messages through research, media, narrative, and community, over time and at scale.
For philanthropy, this points to an uncomfortable gap. The field continues to fall short on what matters most: sustained investment and implementation. At a time when anti-gender narratives are becoming more visible and coordinated, support for gender equality and women-led organisations remains fragmented and underfunded. What gets funded are visibility moments, not the sustained narrative infrastructure needed to shift how power is understood at a cultural level.
Real change requires consistency over time, relevance across contexts, and a presence in the spaces where people actually form their worldviews: entertainment, popular culture, social platforms. One example of this approach is CLARICE, a Brazil-based centre for intelligence and imagination, which combines research on how women’s power is imagined and exercised with efforts to translate those insights into broader cultural narratives.
Our new study, The Imaginary of Power of Brazilian Women, integrated in-depth interviews with 60 Brazilian women leaders across sectors. The interviews with female philanthropists were particularly revealing. Across conversations, several distinct orientations emerged, ones that diverge sharply from conventional models of power:
- Activist philanthropy. Rather than maintaining distance from the causes they fund, these female philanthropists described deep personal engagement with communities and territories. Giving is understood as one of the tools among many, rather than the defining act itself. The interviewees also described their relationship with grantees as oriented toward care, continuity and collaboration.
- Philanthropy as risk capital. Women described philanthropic funding as a tool for experimentation, a way to test solutions and assume risks. One interviewee calls her approach ‘oxygenated philanthropy’, describing her institute as a laboratory for co-creation with local partners and explicitly rejecting rigid frameworks that constrain innovation.
- Questioning wealth accumulation itself. One philanthropist described an ongoing conflict with her family office: she wants to allocate capital toward philanthropy and impact investments, which typically offer lower returns, and faces persistent internal resistance. Behind this is a harder question she is pushing her own family members and peers to confront: how much wealth accumulation is actually enough?
- Giving during their lifetimes. Another notable pattern among Brazilian women philanthropists is the decision to donate significant portions of wealth during their lifetimes, rather than through inheritance or estate planning.
- Legitimacy earned, not assumed. One of the interviewees described philanthropic power as something that must be recognised by others rather than asserted by mere possession of wealth. For her, that legitimacy is built through consistency over time, and crucially, through physical presence in the communities she works with and a genuinely horizontal listening practice before decisions are made. Authority, in this framing, flows from trust, not from resources.
Taken together, these orientations suggest that women philanthropists in Brazil are already practising a different kind of power: one that is relational, risk-tolerant, and oriented toward systemic change rather than individual legacy. This trend extends well beyond Brazil. Globally, women philanthropists are increasingly associated with trust-based giving models, longer funding horizons, fewer restrictions, and deeper, longer-term relationships with grantees.
The question for the field is whether the infrastructure around them is capable of recognising and reinforcing that practice. Investing in the cultural systems that shape how power is understood and distributed is the condition for ensuring that the coming wealth transfer becomes a shift of models of power. That means treating cultural research as core infrastructure, building spaces where insights can circulate across networks and sectors, and being deliberate about capital allocation: prioritising women-led organisations, commissioning locally grounded research, and funding the kind of long-term systems change that campaigns alone cannot achieve.
Women’s economic power is surging. The question is whether the stories we tell about power will evolve fast enough to meet this moment, or whether old paradigms will simply absorb new resources, reproduce the same constraints, and reinforce the overlapping crises we are already facing.
