The System Was Never Built for Us
What Women Need to Know About Patriarchy, Power, and Why We Sometimes Work Against Each Other
Let me start with the structural reality most corporate conversations about women’s advancement skip entirely: the modern workplace wasn't built with women in mind.
That isn’t rhetorical. The assumptions that shape how careers advance, how leadership is recognized, who gets access to power, and who gets sponsored for the next level largely formed when women were excluded from professional life altogether. The system didn’t evolve neutrally. It was built by and for a particular group - and it still reflects that.
Understanding this isn’t about blaming any individual. Because until women clearly understand the structure they operate within, it's hard to stop reproducing it.
What Patriarchy Looks Like at Work
Patriarchy in the workplace is not limited to overt discrimination or hostile behavior. It also lives in the norms, assumptions, and informal rules that shape everyday professional life: whose leadership style is described as “confident” versus “aggressive,” whose ideas get built on versus dismissed, who gets invited to the informal conversations where real decisions happen, and whose discomfort gets centered when something goes wrong.
The data is unambiguous about outcomes. According to the 2024 Women in the Workplace report, the largest ongoing study of its kind, based on data from 281 companies employing over 10 million people, women hold 29% of C-suite roles, up from 17% in 2015. That is real progress. But women of color hold just 7% of C-suite roles. White men hold 56% of C-suite positions—far exceeding their share of the overall workforce. And at the first critical step up to manager, for every 100 men promoted, only 81 women are promoted. For Black women, that number falls to 54. For Latinas, 65.
McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. (2024). Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th Anniversary Report. McKinsey.com.
These are not random outcomes. They are the predictable result of systems that were built to produce them. Progress is real—and at the current rate, McKinsey estimates it will take 22 more years for white women to reach parity in corporate leadership. For women of color, 48 years.
McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. (2024). Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th Anniversary Report.The
The Scarcity Trap: Why Women Sometimes Work Against Each Other
Here is the harder part: when systems create only a handful of spots for women at the top, they create competition among women for those spots.
This dynamic—sometimes called the “Queen Bee Syndrome” in research literature—refers to women in positions of authority who distance themselves from or undermine other women. Research on this phenomenon, particularly the work of social psychologist Naomi Ellemers and colleagues, consistently finds that this behavior is not a personality type. It is most common in highly competitive, male-dominated environments where women are scarce in top positions.
Ellemers, N., Rink, F., Derks, B., & Ryan, M.K. (2012). Women in high places: When and why promoting women into top positions can harm them individually or as a group. Research in Organizational Behavior, 32, 163–187.
When a woman who has navigated a male-dominated system internalizes its norms, adopts masculine leadership traits to be taken seriously, distances herself from other women to signal credibility, and withholds sponsorship to protect a position that feels precarious, she is making a rational calculation within a structure that presents those as the only options. The structure is the problem. The woman surviving inside it is a symptom.
The Good Old Boys’ Club: What It Is and What It Costs
Most women who have spent time in corporate environments can describe what informal male networks look like in practice: the golf game, the after-work drinks, the mentorship extended to the person who “reminds me of myself,” the sponsor who went to bat for someone at a critical moment because they had a relationship.
Research confirms that these informal networks continue to function as a parallel career system, delivering real advantages through access, information, sponsorship, and advocacy. A 2023 study in the American Economic Review found that male employees in corporate settings gain significant career advantages from informal social interactions with senior male colleagues - advantages that women are structurally less likely to access.
Cullen, Z.B., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2023). The Old-Boys’ Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap. American Economic Review, 113(7), 1703–1740.
The cost of exclusion from these networks is concrete: slower advancement, smaller networks, less visibility with decision-makers, and fewer opportunities to build the social capital that translates to career mobility. When women try to gain access by adopting the behaviors of the dominant culture—at the expense of relationships with other women—they are not solving the problem. They are funding it.
What Structural Allyship Looks Like
Once the structural context is clear, allyship between women stops being a personal virtue and starts being a political act.
It means refusing the premise of scarcity—the idea that women must compete for limited space. It means actively creating access for other women rather than protecting hard-won terrain. It means sponsoring, crediting, amplifying, and advocating—not because it is warm and collegial, but because it disrupts a system that benefits from women staying divided.
And it means honest self-examination. Every woman navigating a patriarchal system has absorbed some of its rules. The question is not whether we have internalized any of it—most of us have. The question is whether we are willing to see it clearly and act differently.
You can’t dismantle a system you don’t understand. And you can’t build solidarity when you’re competing for scraps from the same table.
The system was not built for us. But we can build something better—together. That starts with seeing what we’re actually up against.
→ Next in this four-part series, I'll talk about one of the most painful dynamics in professional life: women not showing up for each other. Here’s an honest look at why it happens, what the research actually says, and what we can choose to do instead.
→ And if you're ready to go deeper, the Ally Ambassador Program and my Ally Activation Circle - Women As Allies for Other Women enable organizations to develop a culture of Allyship and continue to support that culture internally. [Let’s talk.]