The word is power.
We Tell Our Selves is about collectively changing the narratives and perceptions around women’s identities and power — fortifying the work for equity, justice, and freedom.
After years of research and large-scale cognitive and social sciences studies, we’ve launched Power Frame Project. Visit the website to learn more about the newest narrative framing technique, and sign up for one of our upcoming webinars.
We’re all in the habit of centering harm.
But new cognitive science says that centering power—the benefits and existence of women’s power—pushes people to value women more and fight harder for equity and justice. If we want more power for women of all identities, we need to change our language, our brains, and ultimately our cultures to reflect that women’s power is real, growing, diverse, and necessary.
Cognitive reality is all about the headlines.
Repeated information is our reality. Human brains love being right, so they look for reality confirmation and try to reject the conflicts. It’s all comfort and habit, and it’s very efficient, but it means that a big part of us (our brains) naturally resists believing that things can change. Or that things should. Even if things are bad—bad for women, bad for everyone.
If instead we got together and said:
Women are democracy, science, culture, business, society, history, and more. Women can and do overcome racist, heteronormative, ableist patriarchies. Women are builders and leaders, hold power, exercise power, and are powerful.
And said over and over as loud as we can:
That women of every identity build and exercise all kinds of power in all different sectors and make progress all over the world to the benefit of everyone. And anything that stands in the way is an aberration. We would build a reality that accurately perceives women’s power as vital, pervasive, and completely normal.
The world would expect women’s power.
Our minds would positively correlate women’s identities with power. More people would naturally and vigorously reject a world that failed to reflect women’s power.
We Tell Our Selves was started by women’s rights and human rights advocate Dorothy Thomas on the idea that many of the narrative framing techniques we’ve been using for generations to talk about gender, race, and power, might not be up for the task anymore. Dorothy’s idea was that by starting the story of women’s power with the obstacles, disparities, and deficits women face, we’ve been inadvertently reiterating the dominant narrative of gender and power, and even reinforcing negative stereotypes of women’s relationship to power.
Much of what she had experienced, thought, and read, led her to believe that leading with the reality and value of women’s power — power framing — is the antidote.
Partnering with Anne and Quinn Delaney, Danielle Walker, and others along the way, We Tell Our Selves embarked on an ambitions program of research, experimentation, and even machine learning.
In the past year, we have enough evidence to say that Dorothy’s hypothesis was true, and we’re sharing it through our new initiative, Power Frame Project.
Join one of our Power Frame Project webinars to learn how to power frame yourself.