Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry

by Susan Shapiro Barash

She doesn’t speak of helping or advising her offspring, but of “working harder” on them, as though her work, not theirs, would determine the quality of their lives.

boasting about her children says less about her feelings for them than about her own need for glory.

implies a world in which every woman has to prove herself to someone. The daughter-in-law can’t be loved simply because she’s a kind person or because she makes Mira’s son happy. She has to prove herself through producing “great” kids and through her impressive career, giving Mira material she can use in competition with her friends.

stay quiet so they don’t get jealous and don’t gang up on me for wanting things that they consider outside my reach. Or worse yet, if one of the women at work hears that my son got a job after school, she’ll send her son down there to try to take it away. I feel like my plans for my children can be taken from me by jealous women.

My village was the opposite, boast up, and they would make ot dangerous for one another bur they couldn't stop

I expected her to be on my side, but she’s too worried about herself. She would never try to help me. Instead she checks me out—my clothes, my hair, my sons. I might get as far as she has gone and she wouldn’t like that.

Having done well, she seems to stand as a living reproach to others who have not achieved the same things, and as a threat to women who have accomplished more.

being like me is supportive; being more successful than I am is a betrayal.

Whatever the more successful woman’s motivations, whether she is gloating over her triumphs, simply enjoying them, or both, the less successful woman feels as though she has been denigrated, maybe even insulted. From her point of view, the resentment is justified: How dare she rub my nose in her success?

from the more successful woman’s point of view, the less successful woman is being a foul-weather friend, supportive when things are ...

There is no question that Andrea has won, because we really can’t share Jack—it won’t work. But I won’t let up, I won’t stop trying to win him back. He was mine first, and I don’t trust her motives one bit.

daughters-in-law also resent their mothers-in-law and envy the closeness that a husband shares with his mother.

Not the closeness, maybe we just resent the hostility

Just as women competing over a man lose focus on the man himself, so do women competing over their offspring end up shifting their attention from the children, who are supposedly so important, to the female rivals who absorb more of their emotional lives.

And, once again, women lose out on the potential support and assistance they might get from other women in the same boat. If mothers can’t turn to each other for help, to whom can they turn?

vision. Everything I have in my career I earned the hard way. I don’t need these young women who look better and sexier threatening my security.

Because this office is filled with women, it becomes even harder to compete and to win.

Older women feared the younger, prettier women who came into their offices; younger women felt that the older, more established women resented them and held them back. Women bosses felt undermined by their female employees; female employees felt singled out unfairly by their women bosses. And women of all ages and levels felt that other women, whether underlings, supervisors, or CEOs, competed with them at every turn, judging them not only on their work performance but also on their looks, style of dress, marital/dating status, children’s success (or lack thereof), and general demeanor.

she’s heavy, and she is mean to anyone who is thin.

Then the women who are married make the single women jealous, and the one who has a baby is the luckiest of all. We’re all wishing we could be her. But she’s depressed after having a baby. So all of us resent that she has a one-year-old baby and she’s depressed? How dare she be that way!

Lawyers talked about firms in which only one woman could make partner, setting up fierce competition among the female associates. Women in finance told me about competing for clients. Women in academia complained about competing for tenure.

many of the women in my interviews had once expected to find help from female colleagues, virtually all of them reported bad experiences.

The women are more passive-aggressive, while the men just say it like it is…

The women can be very catty and unkind. It astonishes me that at a board level, I will do better with the men than with the women. I find that men on the boards are more interested in the facts and figures and more focused on the business at hand.

These women do not cut me any slack and I have to prove myself. They are hanging me until I prove myself worthy…. Unlike mine, their power doesn’t come from any personal achievement, and so there is a resentment and a jealousy toward me. It is almost as if my position at this nonprofit reflects on their own lives and what they haven’t done for themselves.

The Taboo Against Ambitious Women To some extent, I see women’s rivalry on the job as yet another symptom of how women are set up to compete for insufficient resources. If only a few positions are earmarked for working women, we will naturally compete with each other for those prizes.

what about the women who envy coworkers with whom they’re not in direct competition? Why do so many women refuse to mentor younger colleagues,

resenting women’s supervision and reading female authority as bitchiness rather than strength? Why are so many female bosses harder on their women employees than on the men, as I also heard repeatedly, so that women supervisors treat male employees with respect while approaching women workers with contempt?

began to think that too many women have bought in to the notion that a woman’s place is always at the bottom, never at the top. As a result, they feel threatened by any woman who dares to break the mold. Even when women are not directly in competition with one another, they seem to resent a woman who does well.