Why Competitive Women Are Sometimes Seen as Threats |
Women evolved to value equality in close alliances, making status gaps tricky to navigate.
Women are especially sensitive to competition when status gaps threaten relational equality.
Women do not dislike competitive women overall; their reactions depend on context.
Women dislike competitive women who compete against them or their friends but not toward their rivals.
Why Competitive Women Are Sometimes Seen as Threats
The media often portrays competitive, ambitious women as villains, and this pattern appears again and again in popular movies and TV shows. Consider one of the most iconic depictions of a powerful woman in The Devil Wears Prada: its formidable editor, Miranda Priestly, who is feared and disliked by most in the film simply for being authoritative and unapologetically ambitious. The stereotype is embedded in the title itself, where a successful woman is framed as cold and devilish for being open about her ambitions.
Similar villainization occurs in dynamics that appear outside fiction. Consider the phenomenon “tall poppy syndrome,” where women who are successful or stand out are often socially “cut down,” particularly by their close friends.
Traditional explanations of the above illustrations point to the double bind: Women who display confidence and competitiveness, traits often needed in order to succeed, violate expectations that women be warm and modest. Decades of research show that women who behave assertively are penalized socially, whereas men showing the same behavior are not. This dynamic is echoed in popular culture; for example, Taylor Swift’s “The Man” highlights the harsher judgment of ambitious women.
In line with this perspective, part of understanding why women villainize ambitious women can be understood from the “queen bee” theory. The term queen bee was coined to describe the perception that some women in male-dominated leadership roles distance themselves from other women and, at times, limit their advancement to protect their hard-won position. While “worker bees,” which are junior women, may distance themselves from senior women and even penalize them. For example, junior women tend to rate female leaders as less warm and likable, reducing their support for them. Together, these perspectives suggest that conflict among women often reflects structural scarcity and conflicting role expectations.
However, gender roles alone cannot explain when and why women themselves sometimes react negatively to competitive female peers and at other times they don’t. For example, research on women in law firms finds that when women are tokens in male-dominated workplaces, they are more likely to distance themselves from other women. But in firms with more women, female lawyers show stronger identification with and support for one another.
These patterns suggest that women’s responses to competitive female peers are context-dependent, emerging most strongly under conditions of scarcity and hierarchy rather than abundance.
Consistent with this, research shows that backlash toward competitive women depends less on competition itself and more on who that competition affects. Across four studies, it was found that women were more likely than men to disfavor competitiveness in same-sex co-worker friends, primarily when that competition is directed at themselves or their other close friends. When competitiveness is aimed at rivals, it is often accepted. As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
In other words, women do not dislike competitive women in general; rather, they are sensitive to the target of that competitiveness. Competition that threatens one’s own standing or that of close allies can strain relational bonds, whereas competition that is directed outward does not carry the same interpersonal cost and might even be beneficial.
From this perspective, ambition itself is not the problem. Proximity is. Competitive behavior, by its nature, signals differentiation, an attempt to stand out or move ahead, and in close, interdependent relationships, this signal of separation can be experienced as relational threat, especially for women. This sensitivity to standing out likely reflects deep-rooted dynamics in human social evolution.
Why Proximity Matters in Female Friendships
Throughout human history, women have relied heavily on close cooperative alliances for support, protection, and shared resources. Strong female friendships have long been crucial for child-rearing, emotional resilience, survival during hardship, and social stability.
Within such interdependent networks, large status differences could threaten trust, reciprocity, and mutual support. Over time, these likely shaped social norms emphasizing equality, fairness, modesty, and the importance of not outshining close friends.
This is apparent in female friendships, where they often monitor and enforce egalitarian balance, whereas male friendships tend to tolerate larger status differences.
When status disparities cannot be reconciled, relationships may fracture through emotional distancing, social exclusion, gossip, or dissolution as a way to level the women back down to equality. The queen-bee pattern reflects this same leveling dynamic: Junior women distance themselves from high-status senior women who violate egalitarian expectations, thereby restoring perceived balance within the social hierarchy.
The Hidden Emotional Labor of Success
This perspective helps explain something many high-achieving women recognize intuitively: Success often requires careful social management. Achievement, thus, needs to be softened before it becomes monitored. For example, women may downplay themselves through modesty, saying things like, “I just got lucky.” These responses are less reflective of insecurity than of social strategies for protecting relationships in environments where standing out can carry interpersonal costs.
Similar dynamics appear in professional hierarchies. Research on women surgeons shows that they often face pressure to minimize status differences and to emphasize similarity with women nurses to maintain harmony—a phenomenon researchers call the status-leveling burden.
Notably, this pattern appears most strongly when success threatens close relational bonds. When competition is directed outward or framed as prosocial, women can compete openly without the same social penalty.
Implications for Work
In workplaces, these dynamics shape mentorship, collaboration, and promotion networks. Highly driven women may sometimes find themselves socially isolated because visible inequality within close peer groups can strain relational equilibrium. Research shows that tensions among women are strongest in environments where leadership roles are scarce, forcing women into direct competition with one another.
In such contexts, ambition can feel zero-sum: One woman’s rise implies another’s loss. Ultimately, backlash against competitive women is not simply about ambition or gender norms. It reflects how women navigate status differences within close social networks that have historically depended on cooperation and equality.
Understanding this shifts the conversation. Rather than framing tensions among women as personal failings or “queen bee” behavior, it highlights how structural scarcity and relational equality shape women’s responses to one another. When environments reduce zero-sum competition (e.g., through greater representation, shared advancement, and abundant opportunities), ambition and connection can coexist without social penalty.