The Room With Too Few Chairs
Author’s Note
This essay is for women who have felt the particular strain of competition at work. Not just any competition. Competition with other women.
It’s a unique tension. As women, our numbers are already limited. The challenges are already shared. And the person who understands your position most closely can also feel like your adversary.
Women compete at work. We all know this. What matters is understanding what drives that competition, why it repeats so reliably, and what becomes visible once the design comes into view.
If you’ve replayed a moment at work, trying to decide whether you misread it or overreacted, this is for you.
The Meeting Where My Seat Moved
I was leading the meeting. It was my project, and I was interviewing a vendor.
A peer joined to observe. That was the agreement. No decisions. No authority.
Halfway through, she began speaking over me. She redirected questions to herself, engaged the vendor directly, then started giving direction as if the project belonged to her.
The vendor followed her lead. By the end of the meeting, they were looking to her for approvals and looking past me for context.
I felt embarrassed and angry, but I understood what was happening. Authority was shifting in real time. I had seen this before. I knew how quickly organizations treat a takeover as the official transfer of leadership.
After the meeting, I confronted her.
She was defensive and said she wasn’t going to slow down her progress to wait for me.
At the time, it landed as aggression. With distance, it read as something else. A response shaped by the room we were both trying to stay seated in.
Too Few Seats Changes People
Competition between women often gets written off as insecurity, ambition, or drama.
That framing is comfortable. It keeps attention on individual behavior and away from the conditions that shape it.
In many workplaces, legitimacy is conditional. By legitimacy, I mean who the room treats as the rightful owner of the work, whose voice carries without insistence, whose decisions stick, whose presence is assumed rather than questioned, and who gets selected when advancement decisions are made.
Authority can shift. Visibility can disappear. Seats at the table are limited, especially at senior levels where women are still treated as provisional occupants.²³
Under those conditions, competition is not surprising. It is practical.
When there are only a few visible roles for women, every invitation, every promotion, every stretch assignment carries weight. You see it in who gets pulled into meetings, who gets copied, who gets asked to speak, and whose work gets treated as interchangeable.
Once that pattern comes into focus, it is hard to ignore.
When the environment suggests there may only be room for one, proximity to authority starts to matter more than collaboration. Legitimacy begins to feel unstable, something that has to be actively held onto.
We Learned Selection Before We Learned Strategy
This lesson takes shape long before most women enter the workplace.
It develops through selection and praise. Who gets chosen. Who gets rewarded for standing out. Who gets penalized for it.
Popular culture reinforced this lesson for years, particularly for millennial women. Success was framed as singular and competitive. One woman advances. Others fade into the background.⁴
Those lessons carry directly into professional environments, where selection becomes sponsorship and sponsorship becomes survival. By the time many women reach leadership tracks, the rule already feels familiar. Access is granted, not assumed, and it can be taken away.
Workplaces rarely interrupt this pattern. They reinforce it through how opportunity and recognition are distributed. Over time, these dynamics harden into office politics.
What It Looks Like in Real Time
In rooms where women are easily overlooked, silence carries risk. Staying audible becomes a way to remain present. The pressure is about staying relevant.
Authority gets claimed early. Someone answers before the question is finished. They restate the issue, propose a direction, and keep talking as the conversation moves forward. The meeting doesn’t pause to clarify ownership. No one says, “Wait.” Notes get taken. Action items get assigned.
By the time the meeting ends, the person who spoke first and most decisively is treated as the lead, even when the work did not originate with them.
Legitimacy gravitates toward momentum. Direction spoken aloud. Decisions articulated with certainty. Work that moves forward without friction. These behaviors get read as leadership because they keep things moving and reduce discomfort.
The same actions appear again and again:
stepping in quickly
speaking on behalf of the group
clarifying decisions before they are formally made
moving work forward without checking ownership
The system rewards these behaviors, so they repeat.
Over time, aligning with what gets rewarded becomes self-protection. People learn which tone gets approved, which pace gets praised, and which posture keeps them in the room. Difference things out. Familiar styles get repeated. The same people keep getting the floor, the credit, and the authority.
When there are only a few chairs, collaboration feels costly. Letting someone else take the lead in a moment can feel like standing up from your chair and watching it get taken.
These patterns persist because they work. They are noticed. They are rewarded. They are remembered as leadership.
What Rivalry Quietly Breaks
This kind of competition breaks how work actually gets done.
Trust thins out first. People stop sharing context. Information gets held back. Work is documented instead of discussed. Updates get copied widely to protect credit rather than move the work forward. These behaviors make sense in environments where ownership and legitimacy can shift quickly.²³
Execution slows next. Decisions take longer because people check and recheck who will get credit. Meetings stretch as alignment gets managed instead of assumed. Energy goes into managing perception rather than solving the problem in front of the team.
Shared leverage disappears. When women are divided, issues stay small and personal. They get labeled as conflict or communication problems instead of indicators that the structure is failing. Leadership can address the symptoms without touching the conditions that created them.²³
There’s also a quieter loss, and perhaps the most important one. Women stop seeing colleagues as potential allies. Attention narrows to self-protection. Ambition becomes about staying viable rather than building something bigger, together.
This is how systems stay exactly as they are. Pressure stays sideways. No one above it has to respond. Everyone below it stays busy holding their place.
Collaboration Is Leverage
Recognition is the turning point.
Scarcity trains competition, and limited access produces predictable behavior.
Once you can see that pattern, you can interrupt it.
The room was built small on purpose. Too few chairs. Too much pressure. Constant motion. Women circling for a seat at the table, aware that stopping means losing ground. That design produces rivalry.
Collaboration breaks that design.
When women share context early, authority stops drifting. When ownership gets named out loud, credit stops slipping. When alignment happens before public moments, legitimacy becomes harder to reassign. When women move together, the system loses at its favorite game: isolation.
Women who reach the highest levels rarely do it alone. They exchange information before it becomes currency. They sponsor deliberately. They protect each other’s visibility. One woman’s success increases the surface area for others to stand.
That is power compounding in real time.
Once you recognize the pattern, the pressure shifts.
The behavior stops feeling personal.
The competition stops feeling inevitable.
Agency returns when women stop competing for the same single seat and start expanding the room itself.
That is how we change the game.
A Personal Note on What I See Differently Now
When she said she wasn’t going to slow down her progress to wait for me, I heard it as an insult. A threat. I remember how competitive we were with each other, how closely we tracked pace, visibility, and momentum, even when no one explicitly told us to.
With time, my understanding of that moment changed.
I see now how much energy we spent protecting our individual footing instead of building shared ground. How often we measured progress against each other instead of alongside each other. How narrow the room felt, even though neither of us created that narrowness.
I sometimes think about what might have been possible if we had recognized the design earlier. If collaboration had felt safer than competition. If we had treated each other as leverage instead of risk.
That reflection stays with me, not as regret, but as instruction. It shapes how I lead now. It shapes what I name out loud. It shapes the rooms I try to build so fewer women feel they have to choose between standing together and staying seated.
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Name ownership before meetings begin. Say who leads, who decides, and who contributes.
Watch how authority moves in real time. Intervene when ownership drifts.
Protect credit as actively as you protect deadlines.
Stop rewarding speed when it overrides clarity.
Say who did the work out loud, in the room.
Create space for more than one woman at a time.
Expand the room deliberately, one decision at a time.
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If rivalry is showing up between women in your organization, that is not a cultural anomaly. It is a design outcome.
Look at how many visible seats actually exist. Look at how often legitimacy gets reassigned quietly. Look at who is treated as permanent and who is treated as provisional.
If women are competing sideways, the room is too small.
Expand it deliberately. Fund cohorts, not exceptions. Promote groups, not lone standouts. Make collaboration structurally safer than competition.
Protect ownership, not just outcomes. Make it harder to take over work than to build it. Make it easier to share credit than to absorb it.
Behavior follows design. If you want different behavior, change the room.
References
Veldman, J., & Vial, A. (2025, November 5). “When Work Becomes a Masculinity Contest, Women Step Back from Their Gender Identity.” SPSP Character & Context Blog.
Kiner, M. (2020, April 14). “It’s Time to Break the Cycle of Female Rivalry.” Harvard Business Review (HBR.org).
Leibtag, F. (2024, January 24). “Beyond Mean Girls: Breaking The Cycle Of Female Rivalry In The Workplace.” Forbes (Forbes Communications Council).
Rahilly, L. (2025, August 21). “Author Talks: How Pop Culture Pitted Millennial Women Against Each Other at Work.” McKinsey & Company.
Hanley-Dafoe, R. (2025, March 12). “The Power of Women Collaborating Versus Competing.” Psychology Today.
