Recently, my lifelong friend sent me a TikTok video of a dance we learned in Jr. High, to a song called ‘Boom, I got your Boyfriend.’  It’s was stuck in my head for a week, a great reminder of why TikTok is not part of my life.  On about day 4, I had a ‘holy shit’ moment.  When we learned this dance, at cheer camp in 1993, I was 13, and she was 12.  We were pre-sexual, pre-pubescent, KIDS.  And the theme of this dance was a little dance off, about having STOLEN A BOYFRIEND.  If you think gender bias and sexism isn’t insidious AF, then let this be a lesson to you.  Not only was it about having taken something from another woman, but about rubbing it in, to a cute little tune, and shaking your ass at the other woman to prove you were, in fact, better and deserving of her boyfriend.  Just in case you forgot – we were in junior high.

I spoke at a conference for women in wealth management recently. While my panel topic was behavioral finance, a question came up about what to do if you’re struggling with your boss – who is also a woman. I paraphrased the question to ask, ‘What do you do if the woman ahead of you burned the ladder behind her on her way up?’ I not only know these women, I think I have accidentally been one of them. My response at this conference still weighs heavy in my mind. My response was ‘We can’t change that woman. But we can change the way WE do things now. We can lift others up, we can encourage and inspire them, we can mentor them. Just don’t burn the ladder behind YOU.’ I feel great about that response, and another panelist added a brilliant follow up. Blaming women of the prior generation for their competitive behavior is truly unfair – they were set up. Women have competed with one another for resources for centuries. Literal centuries – let that sink in. Women have needed men for safety. They’ve needed men for societal acceptance. They’ve needed to secure what they have at the expense of other women. There is ancestral bias here.

Treating other women as competition has impacted our lives in such heavy, harmful ways.  Even as a woman on a leadership team with two other women, I have found myself more biased toward their opinions, more emotional in my reactions, more charged.  Subconsciously, I was taught well that these people are the competition.  They’re the enemy.  I need to defeat them in order to succeed.  

It’s not true even a little.  Life is not a zero sum game. No one has to lose for me to win. But thinking this way is blocking the success of so many women.

This competitive sport we play against other women foments our own willpower to ‘do’ money our own way.  We want to know what other women are doing, and maybe we want to copy their success. But asking them for help feels impossible. Instead we default to judging them to make ourselves feel better.  I don’t think there’s even a conscious awareness of this, but there’s a Jr. High girl inside of us. That girl continues to hijack our brains and tell us old stories.  Even if we want to be like other women, we are compelled to judge them and try and do something different, even if what someone else is doing is obviously successful.  

I’m calling it out. I’m going to say it to everyone I know. If we keep competing against one another, we all fail. We have to be better, personally and professionally.

I have had the great good fortune to go through the past 2 decades of life with 3 incredibly close friends. We are all in finance related careers and leadership level positions, but that’s honestly where our similarities are strongest. We’re all over the political spectrum of opinions. Two of us have kids, two of us do not. Our personalities are complementary, but not the same! Some of us (me) can’t shut up, and some are quiet, reserved and thoughtful. We travel together, we celebrate together, we lean on one another. And each of these relationships is so important to me that I (and they as well) am willing to work on them just as I work on my marriage. The relationships need time, they need energy. They need grace and forgiveness and confrontation and resolution. We can’t just show up and talk about sports. We commit to our relationships, and when something is wrong, we dig in and we fix it. If we envy one another, we translate it into admiration. If we are angry at one another, it reminds us of our passionate commitment to these friendships. We talk about money, careers, successes and failures ALL THE TIME.

Without these women and their stories, I’m not sure who I would be. I’m not sure my marriage to my husband would work if I expected him to fill any of the needs in my soul that these women fill. And I have learned from each of our various backgrounds with money, seen how we all approach things differently, from investment philosophy to groceries. None of us is right, and none of us is wrong. We all learn from one another. We can ALL win. If more women could do this, could be open to the absolute vulnerability of sharing with other women, I think we could change the whole world.