For decades, women were often portrayed as competitors, particularly in workplaces and industries where leadership opportunities were limited. One woman’s success could be framed as another’s loss, reinforcing the idea that there was only room for a few women at the top. But that narrative is beginning to shift. Across industries and communities, women are increasingly choosing collaboration over rivalry and using their influence to help other women move forward. The more interesting question now is what happens when that support moves beyond encouragement and becomes action.
When Competition Started Losing Its Grip
Women who might once have been portrayed as rivals are increasingly challenging that narrative themselves. When Beyoncé attended the Los Angeles premiere of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour concert film in 2023, Swift publicly celebrated her presence, describing Beyoncé as a major influence on her career. Weeks later, Swift returned the gesture by attending the London premiere of Beyoncé’s Renaissance concert film. The exchange was particularly striking because both women were coming off enormously successful stadium tours and could easily have been positioned as competitors.
Instead, they showed up for each other. In an industry where successful women are routinely compared by sales, awards, records, and cultural influence, the moment offered a different picture of ambition: two women could occupy enormous spaces at the same time and still publicly celebrate each other’s success.
That principle extends beyond entertainment. Professional networks such as Chief have created spaces where women in leadership can exchange advice, build relationships, and connect one another with opportunities. Here, support is less visible than a red-carpet appearance but potentially more consequential. A recommendation, introduction, or conversation behind closed doors can influence who gets considered for the next opportunity.
Social media may have made women supporting women more visible, but visibility is only one form of support. The deeper shift happens when encouragement becomes something another woman can use.
When Support Becomes Action
Across Africa, women supporting women can take forms far more tangible than a social media post. Sometimes it begins with one woman using what she knows to help another survive a difficult system.
Teresa Njoroge from Kenya had built a successful career in banking and finance before her life changed dramatically. She was falsely accused and convicted in connection with a financial crime and served a prison sentence at Langata Women Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi between 2009 and 2011, accompanied by her infant daughter. She was later exonerated.
Inside prison, Njoroge encountered women whose circumstances were very different from the professional life she had known. She saw how poverty, limited education, and a lack of economic opportunity could feed a cycle in which women left prison only to struggle to rebuild their lives, increasing the risk of returning to the criminal justice system.
She began with what she had. Njoroge taught other inmates how to read and write, helped them learn budgeting, and showed them how to develop business proposals. What might have seemed like small acts of instruction became a way of giving women practical tools they could use beyond the prison walls.
After her release, Njoroge continued thinking about the women she had met in prison. In 2013, she returned to the Kenya Prisons Service with her toddler and met with its Director of Rehabilitation and Welfare. That work eventually developed into Clean Start, an organization focused on helping incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women rebuild their lives.
FINALToday, that work extends beyond mentorship. Clean Start has provided entrepreneurship, education, character development, and life-skills training, while helping women develop livelihoods after prison. Its programs have included vocational training in areas such as beauty and hairdressing, culinary work, fashion and textiles, and renewable energy businesses, with participants connected to jobs or supported in starting their own enterprises.
The organization has also created a powerful form of employment and representation: 80% of Clean Start’s staff are women who were formerly imprisoned.
Njoroge’s story gives “women supporting women” a different meaning. It is not simply encouragement from one successful woman to another. She took what she learned from being inside the system, turned it into practical skills, and built an organization around helping other women navigate the same difficult transition she had experienced.
That is the kind of support that does more than open a door. It helps build a path through it.
Making Room at the Table
Personal acts of support matter, but workplace structures can determine how far that support travels. Women in the Workplace 2024, published by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, points to the importance of mentorship and sponsorship in helping women navigate career advancement, particularly as they move toward leadership.
Mentorship can provide guidance, but sponsorship goes a step further. A sponsor uses her own credibility and influence on someone else’s behalf, advocating for her in conversations and spaces she may not yet have access to.
That distinction matters. A woman does not always need someone to give her a place at the table. Sometimes she needs someone already sitting there to say her name when the opportunity comes up.
That is when support becomes more than encouragement. It becomes access.
The Difference Between Competing and Comparing
Competition is not necessarily harmful. It can push women to sharpen their skills, pursue excellence, and challenge one another to grow. The problem begins when competition turns into comparison, and another woman’s achievement starts to feel like evidence of your own failure.
Supporting another woman does not require abandoning ambition. Two women can pursue the same opportunity, celebrate each other’s achievements, and still want to win. One may ultimately get the promotion, contract, award, or opportunity the other wanted, but that does not require resentment or hostility between them.
That distinction matters. Competition is about pursuing something you want. Comparison is about measuring your worth against what someone else has achieved. The two can easily become intertwined, but they do not have to be.
Sisterhood is not the absence of competition. It is the recognition that another woman’s success does not automatically diminish your own.
What Real Sisterhood Feels Like
True sisterhood is rarely defined by grand gestures. More often, it appears in what one woman is willing to do with what she already has, whether that is knowledge, experience, influence, or access.
So, is sisterhood replacing competition? Probably not, and it doesn’t need to. What appears to be changing is the assumption that women must see one another primarily as rivals. Ambition and support can exist in the same room.
Perhaps that is the more meaningful shift. From showing up to celebrate another woman’s success to sharing skills inside a prison, speaking someone’s name in a room she has not yet entered, or turning personal experience into a pathway for others, sisterhood becomes powerful when it moves from sentiment to action.
Success does not become smaller when another woman is helped forward. In the best examples of women supporting women, it becomes something that can travel from one woman to the next.
Diana Murua is a journalist and freelance writer, passionate about telling powerful stories and highlighting people making a meaningful impact in the world.
