Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed a story we never actually agreed to believe: that women are natural rivals, that female friendship is a temporary truce waiting to collapse the moment beauty, attention, money, or love enters the picture. It shows up everywhere, not just in boardrooms. It shows up in how two women size each other up at a party before either has said a word. It shows up in the instinct to note who’s thinner, who got engaged first, who the group photo flatters least. It shows up in comment sections, in friend groups, in the quiet calculation so many women learn to make before they even understand why. The truth underneath all of it is not that women are wired for rivalry. It is that we were handed a world that kept insisting there wasn’t enough to go around, and after enough repetition, we started believing it.
Start with beauty, because it is one of the oldest and most effective delivery systems for this idea. For generations, women have been taught that desirability operates on a scarcity model, that there is a finite amount of attention, romantic interest, and approval available, and every attractive woman in the room is quietly subtracting from your share of it. This is why so many women can recall the specific, hot flash of dread at watching a beautiful woman walk into a space they’re already in, a feeling that has nothing to do with that woman and everything to do with a scoreboard none of us built but all of us were handed. The scarcity was never real. Admiration is not a pie. But the belief that it was real shaped how an untold number of women have treated each other at parties, in classrooms, in office kitchens, for as long as most of us can remember.
The same script runs through friendship itself. Popular culture has spent decades selling us the story of the female frenemy, the best friend who is secretly your competitor, the group of women whose closeness is always one success away from curdling. Films and television have profited enormously from this narrative, because conflict between women reliably outperforms depictions of women simply, uneventfully, supporting one another. We rarely stop to ask why that particular story was so profitable to tell, or who benefited from an entire generation of women half-expecting betrayal from their closest friends the moment one of them got the guy, the job, or the good news first.
Romantic life carries its own version of the same scarcity logic, often the most quietly corrosive one. Women are frequently taught, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to view other women as competition for a limited pool of desirable partners, as though love operated like a chair in a game of musical chairs rather than something that simply is or isn’t a fit between two specific people. This framing has convinced women to withhold warmth from each other in dating contexts, to feel a flicker of relief when a friend’s relationship struggles, to experience another woman’s engagement as a small, uncomfortable referendum on their own life’s timeline. None of that reflects anything true about scarcity in love. It reflects a story about scarcity that we were taught to apply to it anyway.
Even in the spaces most explicitly built around women supporting women, wellness communities, online sisterhoods, beauty and lifestyle platforms, the scarcity logic quietly persists in a subtler form: the race to be the most healed, the most self-aware, the most impressively transformed. Social media has given this an entirely new engine. Comparison, once limited to the people physically around you, now runs twenty-four hours a day against a curated, global set of other women’s highlight reels, and the scarcity story adapts accordingly. It is no longer just about the one job or the one man. It is about visibility itself, attention itself, treated as though only a handful of women can be seen, celebrated, or admired at any given time.
Workplaces are simply one visible arena where this same dynamic gets studied and measured, not its origin. Researchers have found that when women hold only a token number of senior positions, they are more likely to distance themselves from other women altogether, while in environments with stronger representation, that same instinct reverses into genuine support. That finding matters far beyond any single office. It suggests the entire pattern, in friendship, in beauty, in romance, in professional life, follows the same underlying rule: scarcity manufactures rivalry, and abundance dissolves it, almost automatically, regardless of which arena we’re standing in.
What makes this worth naming clearly is what it frees us from having to believe about ourselves and each other. If competition among women were simply innate, there would be little to do about it beyond managing our worst instincts. But if it is, as the evidence increasingly suggests, a learned response to manufactured scarcity, then the response is not self-suppression. It is recognizing the story for what it is the moment it activates, in whichever setting it shows up, a party, a group chat, a comment section, a hiring panel, and choosing not to complete the script we were handed.
None of this requires women to pretend envy, insecurity, or disappointment never happen. It asks something more honest: that we stop mistaking those feelings for evidence of scarcity, and start recognizing them as the residue of a story too many of us inherited before we ever had the chance to question it. Competition was never the answer, not because women lack the capacity to compete, but because so much of what we were taught to compete over was never actually finite in the first place. Beauty does not run out. Love is not rationed. Attention is not a fixed pie divided among rivals. The moment enough of us stop behaving as though it is, the story simply loses its power, whether it’s playing out in a boardroom, a group chat, a comment section, or a room full of women who were taught, wrongly, to see each other as the competition all along.
