Leadership Quote by Margaret Atwood

Power, Atwood points out, is still gendered at the level of reflex. A man with authority is read as the natural outcome of talent, temperament, destiny: a "born leader". The phrase is doing quiet ideological work, laundering privilege into biology. Leadership becomes something you are, not something you practice, inherit, or are permitted to attempt. That is the trapdoor: if male power is assumed to be innate, it doesn’t need to be justified.

Set against that, "anomaly" is a cold word. It frames a powerful woman as a statistical glitch, a freak exception that proves the rule rather than challenges it. The subtext isn’t simply that women face bias; it’s that they are forced to carry narrative weight. A powerful man can be mediocre and still be legible as leadership. A powerful woman is asked to explain herself, represent her gender, and endure the suspicion that her power is either accidental or illegitimate.

Atwood’s intent is diagnostic and satirically precise: she’s naming the asymmetry in the stories we tell about authority. Coming from a novelist who has spent decades dramatizing systems that aestheticize control and punish deviation, the line lands as cultural criticism disguised as common sense. It also gestures to a contemporary context of boardrooms, politics, and celebrity feminism where women’s success is praised as "inspiring" - another way of marking it as unusual. The quote works because it’s less a slogan than a mirror: it catches the reader mid-assumption.