Female competition and the death of merit
Who holds women back?
I. The narrative about sexism in highly paying fields
The undercurrents of competition between women are invisible to men. A woman may think she’s crazy for seeing them. I’ve since moved from heavily female to male-dominated industries. Like most gender disparity narratives, the story of women’s success in corporate life is incorrect and simplistic, casting women as victims of men. I once believed there were fewer women in the highest-paying technical jobs because of rampant sexism and stereotype threat. But it’s not true. My experience transitioning from recruiting to technical consulting has revealed a more complex reality than the story suggests.
To head the obvious objection off, being a woman in a male-dominated field carries the risk of sexual harassment or otherwise being sponsored by men for reasons other than competence. There are also incidents of actual sexist discrimination that are difficult to prove. But in my experience, women hold each other back more than men do.
The claims we hear don’t allow the possibility that women have also created a mental prison for ourselves and choose to sabotage each other. The subterfuge isn’t a foregone conclusion; it’s the result of women’s self-concept and level of insecurity. Women have agency. Until just five years ago, I was persistently insecure, but that insecurity was directed inward while also absorbing others' projections.
Blaming the disparity on sexism is more palatable than the reality: women are simply less likely to enjoy technical and analytical functions because of average personality inclinations. So, if a formerly feminist woke woman can subvert the story about women in technical roles and corporate life, is it even true? What do we gain by pretending that women don’t enter prestigious fields because of sexism? I suspect it’s that we feel better about not getting where we wanted to go, but as longtime readers know, I don’t tolerate self-deception.
II. Personality inclinations affect tolerance for competition
If the highest-paying industries were dominated by women instead of men, we wouldn’t be seeing this as a problematic disparity. We encourage women to code and major in technical fields because they pay well. Second, this insistence on equal representation is true only for white-collar jobs; women aren’t rushing to break into blue-collar industries that pay well, like plumbing. Third, societies with greater equality between the sexes tend to exhibit a divergence in occupations, where women are more likely to choose professions that align with their personality inclinations.1
If you think gender is entirely a social construction, then you think all women have the raw analytical ability and interest to go into a technical field, but don’t because of men. The professional class silently accepts, and even relishes, that differences in intellect exist even as polite society requires we pretend everyone is equally ‘smart.’ They privately reject the blank slate theory to protect their self-image, while publicly asserting it as a luxury belief and status marker, as a sign of enlightenment.
When women display competence and analytical prowess, they often become targets of bullying and exclusion from women in ancillary positions. Men and women exhibit significant overlap in average traits, but they nevertheless diverge at the extremes of the distribution in both intellect and personality.
Women, on average, tend to be more risk-averse, neurotic, anxious, emotionally open, and attuned to aesthetics.2 This isn’t merely the result of ‘social conditioning.’ All of these inclinations serve to minimize our risk of early death so we can pass our genes on. These tendencies have been observed across cultures. Men tend to be more assertive, risk-tolerant, and open to different ideas.3
This is intuitive; I ask any women reading this to consider whether a group of men or a group of women would be more willing to engage in intellectual debate. Women often prioritize social cohesion over intellectual openness, which is why groups of women, as well as coed groups, tend toward groupthink and valuing emotional vulnerability over logical reasoning. In female-coded environments, open debate is impolite, aggressive, and tantamount to a personal attack.
Jobs requiring analytical rigor, therefore, tend to attract women willing to subject their ideas to scrutiny. In my line of work, I explain my reasoning to my peers and incorporate feedback. There’s an objective measure of success — the system works or not. I have to be comfortable with debate and being incorrect.
III. Hierarchy and its obfuscation among women
Men, on the one hand, are well aware of differences in these aspects and are more comfortable with hierarchy. Women, on the other hand, recognize the implicit hierarchies among themselves but would prefer to pretend that they are nonexistent, even though we do form hierarchies based on beauty and likability.
Women don’t really believe we’re all equal, but the pretense helps suppress competition and assert their moral superiority even as they exclude women who dare to expose the hierarchy as false. From Warriors and Worriers, which includes a wealth of original research and brings together decades of other academic findings on divergent behaviors between the sexes:
…girls and women replied that they thought their closest friends would think poorly of them if they became more successful than their friends. They also added that any greater achievement by one friend might destroy the friendship. Even businesswomen know that they must present themselves as “dead even” to their female coworkers or else risk the end of the friendship.4
That woman who displays competence breaks open the unspoken hierarchy wrapped in pretense among women. Obviously, outperforming other women reveals the unspoken hierarchy as arbitrary, which may be why the professional managerial class denies that meritocracy can exist at all. I know because I have been the woman daring to expose the polite lie. Women often react with covert hostility and resort to reputational damage.
IV. Vignettes of intrasexual competition
When I was in diversity recruiting at Google, there were objective quotas, but they varied in importance depending on how much the female managers liked you. I was part of the first diversity recruiting team for engineers, which targeted women from predominantly Indian and white backgrounds.
Recruiting became an affirmative action mechanism for these two groups – I know this because I created an interview coaching program specifically for women. It was nearly impossible to meet my quota because I was given veterans for software engineering positions. Few veterans major in computer science, a field attracting many children of PMC. I very likely got that pool because I wasn’t on the same level as my manager in terms of socializing, such as going out drinking with her and the other women. Every other woman on the team did make her quota because their pool was white and Indian women, who tend to have the correct class origin and degrees. I was pushed out after returning from medical leave for my mental health, and my quota wasn’t adjusted to account.
My first truly technically oriented job was as a product manager in 2019, and I was finally on a solid career path with a high salary ceiling. However, I was still insecure, despite being a high performer, almost immediately. Another woman was also hired with a similar background to mine. There was only one position available when I was interviewing, and I declined the offer due to the travel requirements. So instead, they hired her to do the traveling and paid her more, and still hired me because they didn’t want to let me go. They placed us in an impossible situation, but we still had control over our actions. I was running from another job in which my labor was exploited by a female director preying on my insecure desire to please.
She was surprised to find me in her second week, and I was similarly annoyed that I had to compete for resources and regard, and that no one had told me there would be a second PM. We were handed two parts of the same product, but I was more naturally capable and a better networker. She came for me by telling my manager that I said x when I had said y, or withholding information, even as we shared the development team (a ridiculous model). I think she knew that product management came more naturally to me, so she left four months after we started.
In my first technical consulting job, three women scapegoated me for not meeting arbitrary deadlines set before I even started, despite the client being satisfied with my work. The project manager, client manager, and practice lead all destroyed my reputation from within, and my male manager simply refused to or couldn’t see it, despite my having documented it in excruciating detail.
My manager even asked all my teammates whether I should be demoted. All my teammates said no, and at least one man had to say that I shouldn’t be demoted twice. That was humiliating and taught me that men often are unwilling to see what’s truly happening underneath female behavioral dynamics. I was being told I sucked by multiple women, and I started believing it. Meanwhile, all my strongest allies were men.
V. Covert competition kills merit
I share these stories about my working life to illustrate the differences between female- and male-dominated environments, as most people don’t transition from one to the other in a matter of a decade. Most perspectives you read on being a woman at work are from high-level, wealthy women or from women in female-dominated fields (journalism, academia). My experience has shown me that the totalizing framework of sexism prevents recognition of intrasexual competition as a factor in women’s success.
Women haven’t evolved with a high tolerance for open competition or risk, which affects how far we get. That’s not something men force on me; I’ve failed to negotiate multiple offers with female recruiters and female hiring managers. I’ve shown that you can, in fact, rise from the bottom to the top of corporate life through mastery and perseverance. This is a post-feminist mode of living. You can find a third way.
The current professional environment is particularly challenging for women without hard skills; most women I know who are struggling to find a job are in functions that don’t require analytical skills. In a society flooded with elite aspirants and a shortage of high-status jobs, this means even fiercer competition. Therefore, I see intrasexual female competition intensifying before things improve, which will lead to a further erosion of meritocracy. I’ve never been in a better position because I have, for the first time, men and highly performing analytical women in my corner. Find those people and hang on for dear life; your ability to climb depends on finding them.
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A phenomenon known as the ‘gender equality paradox’, whereby women feel freer to study and work on what they enjoy rather than what would bring them financial gain. This would explain why you see more Indian-origin women in engineering than American-raised.
For more, see Warriors and Worriers, where Benenson ties cross-cultural research with her own studies.
Also: Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, Allik, “Why Can’t a Man be More Like a Woman?: Sex Differences in Big 5 Personality Traits Across Cultures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008.
Costa, Terracciano, and McCrae, “Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001.
Benenson, 161.
Your writing gets spicier and spicier with each piece of the female aggression puzzle. Your link between the erosion of meritocracy (whatever there was of it) and the lack of women with hard skills and intrasexual competition is intriguing. Excited for more!
I saw this in spades throughout my career. Once, in particular, a young woman who was on my team, expressed frustration that she'd always thought it was men who'd hold her back but the men were always helping. It was the older women who constantly talked shit, refused to share information, blocked her from meetings, and all sorts of bullshit. The only way it looks like men have it better is because I don't accept their bullshit whereas this young woman didn't have the temperament to be an 'asshole' like me.