On Jealousy, Competition,
and Learning to Root for
Other Women.

The first time I felt genuinely jealous of another woman, I was twenty-six, sitting in a coffee shop, watching a friend announce on Instagram that she’d just been made a deputy editor at a magazine I’d applied to twice. I liked the post within thirty seconds. I typed a congratulations that was warm and specific and completely sincere on the surface. And then I put my phone face-down on the table and sat very still with a feeling I did not yet have a name for.

It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t even dislike. It was something quieter and more corrosive — a kind of ache that whispered: why her and not you? And then, almost immediately, the shame of having had the thought at all. Because women who support other women aren’t supposed to feel this. Women who call themselves feminist, who believe in collective progress, who genuinely want good things for the people around them — they’re not supposed to sit in coffee shops with their phones face-down feeling like the wind has been knocked out of them by someone else’s good news.

“I had confused supporting women in theory with actually being comfortable with their success in practice. They are not the same thing.”

— Layla Hassan

This is the essay I couldn’t write for a long time because I was too embarrassed by its premise. Jealousy feels like a confession of smallness. But I’ve come to believe that sitting with it quietly — performing a generosity you don’t quite feel and never interrogating why — is far more corrosive to women collectively than naming it honestly. So here is me, naming it honestly.

What Nobody Tells You About Female Competition

We are given two stories about women and competition. In the first, women are naturally collaborative — warm, communal, instinctively supportive — and any competitiveness is a distortion imposed by a patriarchal system that pits us against each other for scarce resources. In the second, women are ruthlessly competitive — catty, backstabbing, the kind of politics that makes workplaces toxic — and men are more straightforward, more meritocratic, easier.

Both stories are nonsense, and both do damage. The first sets up a standard of sisterhood so pure and unconditional that any ambivalent feeling becomes evidence of moral failure. The second is misogyny with a thin sociological veneer. The truth, as with most truths, is considerably more complicated and considerably less flattering to everyone involved.

What I have found — in my own life, and in the frank conversations I’ve had with women I trust enough to be honest with — is this: we are socialised to compete intensely and to hide that we are competing. Men are often socialised to compete openly and shake hands afterwards. Women are socialised to perform warmth while keeping score. The score-keeping is not a personal failing. The hiding of it is where the poison enters.

I grew up the eldest daughter in a Lebanese family in South London, which meant I understood very early that achievement was both expected and conditional. My parents were proud of me in direct proportion to how I performed — at school, at university, eventually in my career. Love was never in doubt, but approval was always something I was working towards. This is not a complaint. It is context. It made me hungry in ways that served me and hungry in ways that turned inward, measuring my progress not against my own goals but against the women around me.

The Friend I Was Most Jealous Of

Her name is Dina, and she has been one of my closest friends since we met at a journalism conference in 2019. We came up at roughly the same time, covered similar beats, had coffee to swap notes and commiserate about the same indignities. We were rooting for each other, genuinely — and also, I now understand, using each other as reference points in a private race neither of us had explicitly agreed to run.

When Dina got the deputy editor role, it wasn’t the first time I’d felt that particular ache around her. She’d published a long-read in a magazine I’d pitched the year before. She’d been asked to speak on a panel I’d hoped to be invited to. Each time, I liked the posts, sent the messages, and said nothing about the curdling sensation underneath. I told myself this was just being a good friend. What I was actually doing was refusing to examine something that had useful information in it.

The conversation that changed things happened about three months after the announcement, on a walk in Brockwell Park on a grey October afternoon. Dina — who is more emotionally fluent than I am, and always has been — said something I’ve thought about almost every week since. She said: “I always feel like you’re slightly somewhere else when good things happen to me. And I do the same with you, and I hate it. Can we just talk about it?”

“She named the thing I had spent three years carefully not naming. And the relief of it was almost physical.”

— Layla Hassan

We sat on a bench and talked for two hours. About the jobs we both wanted and hadn’t got. About the bylines that stung. About the specific, particular pain of watching someone you love succeed at something you’d wanted for yourself — a pain that has no socially acceptable name and therefore no socially acceptable outlet, so it just sits there, radioactive, leaking into everything. By the end of it, something had shifted between us that I didn’t have the vocabulary for at the time. It felt like we had both put down something heavy we’d been carrying for years without admitting it was there.

What Jealousy Is Actually Telling You

Here is what I’ve learned about jealousy, in the years since that conversation: it is almost never about the other person. It is a bright arrow pointing at something you want and haven’t yet given yourself permission to fully want.

When I felt that ache about Dina’s role, I told myself it was about the magazine, the prestige, the validation. When I actually sat with it — in a therapist’s office, later, doing the uncomfortable work of following the feeling to its source — what I found was more specific and more vulnerable: I wanted to be taken seriously as a thinker, not just as a competent journalist who met her deadlines. I wanted someone to look at my work and decide it was worth championing. The magazine was just a symbol for a need I hadn’t named yet.

Jealousy, looked at properly, is not a character flaw. It is diagnostic. The women who trigger it are not your competition — they are your compass. They are showing you something you want, and the only reason it stings is because you’ve decided it belongs to a finite supply, and they’ve taken yours.

• When you feel jealous, ask: what specifically do I want that this represents? Not the title, not the platform — the underlying need. Recognition? Creative freedom? Financial security? Name the real thing.
• Notice whether the jealousy is accompanied by contempt. If you find yourself looking for reasons their success was undeserved, that is your ego protecting you from the more vulnerable feeling underneath.
• Ask yourself whether you have actively created conditions in which you could get what you want, or whether you’ve been waiting for someone to notice you deserve it. These are very different strategies with very different outcomes.
• Consider whether you’re competing with people at your level rather than the version of yourself you want to become. The former exhausts you. The latter energises you.

On the Myth of Infinite Sisterhood

I want to push back gently on something I hear often in conversations about women supporting women, because I think it causes harm even in its most well-intentioned forms. The idea that we can — or should — feel nothing but warmth and celebration at every other woman’s success is not a description of human psychology. It is an aspiration dressed up as a baseline, and when we can’t meet it, we conclude that we’re bad feminists rather than just people.

Real solidarity is not the absence of complicated feelings. It is the decision to act well regardless of them. You can feel a flash of envy when a colleague gets promoted and still advocate genuinely for her in the next meeting. You can wish something had happened to you and still show up for the person it happened to with real warmth. The feeling is not the behaviour. You get to choose the behaviour.

What I have found, in practice, is that the more honestly I acknowledge the complicated feeling to myself — not to perform it publicly, not to burden the other person with it, but just to name it internally — the less power it has over my behaviour. The jealousy I tried to suppress used to leak out in small ways: a slightly too-long pause before I congratulated someone, a slightly too-careful way of phrasing my admiration, a subtle withdrawal from the friendship when things were going well for them. Once I started naming it, it stopped leaking. I could feel it and still choose.

What Rooting for Other Women Actually Looks Like

It does not look like erasing your own ambition. It does not look like suppressing your competitive instincts until they have nowhere to go but inward. It does not look like a performance of enthusiasm you don’t quite feel.

In the three years since Dina and I had that conversation in Brockwell Park, I have watched her become someone I am straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly proud of — not because I stopped having needs of my own, but because I stopped treating her success as evidence about mine. We talk about the work honestly now. We tell each other when we’re struggling. We have stopped using each other as benchmarks and started using each other as mirrors — which is a different thing entirely.

Last year, she recommended me for a column that changed the shape of my career. She didn’t do it because she’d resolved all her complicated feelings about competition — she did it because she’d decided, as I had, that what she built was worth more if she built it alongside people she cared about. That is what actual sisterhood looks like: not the absence of ambition, but the decision to direct it outward rather than inward. Not the erasure of complicated feelings, but the refusal to let them govern your actions.

I still feel jealous sometimes. I feel it quickly and specifically and I’ve learned to treat it the way a good navigator treats a warning light — as information, not condemnation. Then I like the post, send the message, and mean it. The envy was never about her. It was always about me. And me, it turns out, I can actually do something about.

“The table is not fixed in size. You can build it larger. But first you have to stop treating every seat someone else takes as a seat you’ve lost.”

— Layla Hassan