Women, Competition, and How to Uncompete

While I was writing my book, Uncompete, many people asked me if it was true that women naturally compete with other women more often than men compete with other men. First off, I want to acknowledge here that gender is on a spectrum and that reducing it to binaries is exclusionary. However, the available research on this subject, to date, does work in binaries. And the evidence about how competition affects men and women is mixed. There is some data to suggest that men are more competitive and other evidence to suggest that women are just as competitive as men. But what is definitively true is that men everywhere benefit from engaging in competition more than women do, especially in the workplace. For many women, being in work environments that are hypercompetitive, winner- take- all, and biased fosters highly competitive behaviors that are individualistic and even toxic to themselves and others. Think The Devil Wears Prada.

I’ve been researching and studying gender inequality in the workplace for more than a decade, so this isn’t a surprise to me. Not only have I witnessed and experienced it; I’ve also participated in these competition‑at‑all- costs games. When workplace environments don’t support women, the competition to get ahead can get particularly unhealthy. 

Women and nonbinary people of every demographic, across industries, across salary bands— every woman I know— has experienced vicious, winner- take- all competition with another woman. For women of color, the toxicity comes from white women as much as from other women of color. Competition in the workplace exacerbates entrenched gender and racial biases. 

There’s an additional challenge for women when we navigate tokenism in male- dominated environments: Because there are so few women around and so few spots shown as available for advancement, women believe that they must operate like lone wolves to get ahead. In these situations, women will often align with men rather than help and collaborate with other women. UC Hastings law professor Joan C. Williams theorizes that this behavior is not a personal attack on women’s behavior; instead, it’s understanding that if men have all the power, then women would align themselves with whoever has the power— men over other women. 

Taking an intersectional approach, this theory also explains why some women of color often eschew same- racial- group relationships to build professional relationships with white women. I’ve often tried to forge work friendships with fellow South Asian women but faced dogged resistance. 

In the moment, it’s painful and feels personal. But it makes sense— if you’ve been conditioned to believe in scarcity and that individual, not collective, proximity to power is your only way to ascend, you’re left in what feels like a no‑win situation where you must compete to get ahead. Although it’s an understandable impulse, it’s also a troubling one. When we compete with the very people who we’d stand to benefit most from being in solidarity with, only the people with existing power win.

I see this dynamic among immigrants, like myself. Often, the pressure to keep outdoing ourselves and each other is fueled by seeing our communities walk such a narrow tightrope of what’s acceptable in a new country. For too many of us, being in competition with one another is the only way we feel like we can validate the sacrifices our families made to immigrate to a new country and navigate the challenges and racism they inevitably faced. I know this goes far beyond immigrant communities— the idea that if we don’t constantly keep proving ourselves, we’ll become obsolete. The hard truth is that the cost of constantly operating like this becomes too much to bear. 

I want to acknowledge that because competition is the only water most of us have been taught to swim in— the approach most easily available— the idea of choosing a different way feels so risky. The journey to uncompete takes deep reflection and commitment. Intentionality before action. Long before we choose to take any action or even resist the norms we’ve been conditioned to believe, to uncompete requires us to reframe long- held beliefs about the need for competition and ask ourselves why we may even want to choose a different way. Only once we begin to decolonize our minds can we make true change. 

Excerpted from “UNCOMPETE: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success,” by Ruchika T. Malhotra. Reprinted by permission of Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Ruchika Tulshyan.