The Room With Too Few Chairs
Author’s Note
This essay is for women who have been undermined by another woman at work and then replayed the moment afterward, trying to decide whether they misread it or took it too personally. I am not writing to debate whether women compete at work. They do. I am writing to name what sits underneath that competition, why it repeats so predictably, and what changes when you can finally see the pattern clearly.
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 she owned the work.
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. It was a takeover. And I knew how quickly organizations treat a takeover as the official version of events.
After the meeting, I confronted her.
She said she wasn’t going to slow down her progress to wait for me.
At the time, I heard aggression and felt steamrolled. Later, I heard the logic underneath it.
Too Few Seats Changes People
We often explain competition between women as insecurity, personality, ambition, or unresolved history.
But the driver is usually simpler than that.
In many workplaces, legitimacy feels fragile and seats at the table feel limited. Authority is conditional. There are only a few visible roles women are allowed to occupy, and everyone knows it.²³
In those conditions, women are not only competing to advance. They are competing to keep their seat.²³ You see it in who gets invited into the room, who gets copied, who gets credit, and who gets treated as interchangeable.
And once you see that, it stops feeling confusing. It starts feeling predictable.
When the system quietly indicates there may only be room for one, colleagues start being treated as threats. Legitimacy becomes a resource to secure, defend, and sometimes seize.
We Learned Selection Before We Learned Strategy
Most women learn these dynamics early.
They learn them through selection, praise, and social reinforcement: who is chosen, who is admired, who is permitted to be visible without being punished for it.
Then popular culture reinforces it. Millennial women were raised on narratives where women’s power was individual, conditional, and often framed in contrast to other women.⁴
Those lessons follow women into work, where selection turns into sponsorship, and sponsorship turns into survival.
By the time many women enter professional environments, the rule already feels familiar: you are invited to the table, not entitled to it, and invitations can be withdrawn.
Workplaces rarely correct that lesson. They turn it into practice.
What It Looks Like in Real Time
This is how the pattern shows up.
Women talk over other women not because they lack awareness, but because silence feels risky. In rooms where women are easily overlooked, the fear is not “I won’t be liked.” The fear is “I won’t be counted.” So some women stay louder than their peers, not out of habit, but out of calculation, and sometimes survival.
They seize authority because waiting can feel like erasure. They have seen what happens when you pause, defer, or try to be gracious. The meeting moves on. The decision gets made. The record reflects someone else led it.
And they position themselves as the more palatable alternative, the go-to, the one who gets it done no matter the cost. They deliver fast, clean outcomes that leadership can say yes to. Not necessarily because they are better, but because they understand how legitimacy is often assigned: to the person who keeps the machine running and makes leadership feel safe. Credibility is not awarded once. It is reassigned in real time.
Sometimes women become the go-to by building trust, delivering consistently, and making the work easier for everyone around them. Sometimes they become the go-to by taking oxygen, overriding peers, and inserting themselves where they were not invited. From the outside, the difference is easy to miss.²³
This doesn’t always present as aggression. Sometimes it presents as helpfulness:
“Let me take that.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“What she means is…”
“We’ve already decided…”
Over time, the effect is the same: one woman becomes the interpreter, the gatekeeper, the default voice. Another woman becomes optional.
When there are only a few chairs, collaboration can feel like surrender. Letting someone else speak can feel like giving up your seat. Stepping back can feel permanent.²³
Some women become highly skilled at this. They read incentives accurately. They understand that visibility, decisiveness, and proximity to power are treated as leadership. And they move quickly to claim that ground, even when it undermines a peer.
It keeps happening because it works.
The “One of the Guys” Strategy
In many organizations, leadership still functions as a masculinity contest: dominance, long hours, certainty, toughness, and individual wins.¹
In cultures like this, women learn quickly that competence is not the only standard. The standard is also whether you are perceived as safe within the existing hierarchy. So some women do what high performers always do. They adapt.
They downplay their gender identity. They distance from other women. They avoid being associated with “women’s issues.” They keep their language tight, their emotions contained, their posture controlled.¹ Not because they are ashamed of being women, but because they are trying to reduce the penalties that come with it.
This is where the “one of the guys” posture becomes useful.
It communicates: I will not complicate your leadership model. I will not ask you to change. I will meet you on your terms.
Sometimes that posture is simply survival. Sometimes it becomes positioning. When legitimacy is scarce, it can be tempting to protect your seat by making sure you are not grouped with other women, especially women who are outspoken, ambitious, or challenging to the culture.
And in its most damaging form, it turns into this: proving you belong by demonstrating that another woman does not.¹
That is why this dynamic persists. In masculinity contest cultures, distancing is often rewarded as professionalism and alignment, even when it erodes trust.¹
What Rivalry Quietly Breaks
The cost of this constant competition is not just emotional. It is structural.
First, it turns trust into a scarce resource. Women become cautious with information. They stop sharing context. They document more than they collaborate. Not because they are petty, but because they are protecting themselves in an environment where credit and legitimacy can shift quickly.²³
Second, it fractures execution. Work slows down because decisions require more guarding. Teams spend energy managing optics instead of solving problems.
Third, it isolates women from the only thing that reliably changes systems: shared leverage. When women are divided, problems remain “interpersonal.” Leadership can dismiss them as personality conflict, rather than confronting the conditions that created them.²³
And there is a quieter cost that rarely gets named. Rivalry trains women to interpret other women as obstacles instead of allies. It narrows ambition into individual survival.
This is why systems remain stable even when they claim to value inclusion. When pressure stays lateral, nothing above it has to move.
If you want to preserve the status quo, this design works perfectly. It keeps women busy proving legitimacy one seat at a time.²³
Collaboration Is Not Kindness. It Is Leverage
The shift begins when rivalry is interpreted correctly.
Scarcity does what scarcity always does. It turns colleagues into competitors.
Once you see that, you can respond without internalizing it, and without recreating it.
Collaboration is not about being generous. It is about becoming harder to displace. It looks like shared context, shared visibility, shared credit, and private alignment before public meetings.
Evidence and observation consistently show that women who reach the highest levels of success are rarely doing so alone. They share information, sponsor one another, and build momentum collectively. Another woman’s success does not reduce their own. It expands what becomes possible.⁵
This is not sentiment. It is how influence compounds.
The Problem Was Never Women. It Was the Chairs
Competition among women becomes disorienting only when we pretend it is personal. It can feel like musical chairs: two capable women running the same loop for one chair.
Once you see it for what it often is, women fighting to keep a seat in a room that never built enough chairs, the confusion lifts.²³
You stop asking what you did wrong.
You stop competing back.
And you start questioning why legitimacy is so scarce in the first place.
That is the moment agency returns.
Personal Note
When she said she would not slow down her progress to wait for me, I initially heard it as an insult, a threat.
In retrospect, I hear the fear underneath it: fear of replacement, fear of losing legitimacy, fear of being left behind in a system where credibility is still unevenly distributed.
That does not excuse what she did. But it clarified it. And clarity changes how you lead. It changes what you absorb. It changes what you confront. It changes what you refuse to normalize.
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Intervene when ownership is overridden in real time, especially in front of third parties.
Make decision rights explicit before meetings with vendors, partners, or customers, then enforce them.
If someone is interrupted, return the floor to them immediately and without apology.²
If you only ever sponsor one woman at a time, you are manufacturing scarcity.²³ Sponsor in pairs: nominate two women for visibility, stretch, or leadership at the same time so nobody is framed as “the alternative.”²³
Treat “builds other leaders” as a performance requirement, not a personality trait.²
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If women in your organization are competing sideways, that is not a confidence issue. It means legitimacy is scarce, advancement is conditional, and safety is individualized.²³
If you want less rivalry, stop rewarding lone-wolf legitimacy. Stop building one chair and calling it inclusion.
Fund cohorts. Promote cohorts. Publicly back cohorts.
If you keep elevating exceptions, do not be surprised when everyone competes to become one.
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.
