There’s Room For Us All: A feminist reflection on competition, collaboration and the unlearning we still have to do

By Raji Mohanam

There’s a feeling I’ve come to recognize. It's quick, quiet, and hard to admit. It surfaces when a brilliant woman walks into the room and owns it. It’s a faint flicker of self-doubt. Most of us have felt it at some point in our career. It has nothing to do with wanting another woman to fail. It has everything to do with the toxic inheritance of systems built on the myth of scarcity. Corporate cultures reinforced lies about limited seats and finite success, leading us to believe in a false narrative that there wasn't enough space for all of us to thrive.

It's an uncomfortable truth that we don’t like to talk about: just how much old systems still live inside us. How women, especially those of us raised to believe we had to be exceptional to be seen at all, learned to guard our space. How patriarchal work structures and corporate hierarchies never expected multiple women leaders at the table. Maybe just one. The token. The exception. The bare minimum for proof that it could be done.

And so, we internalized it. Quietly. Elegantly. Instead of embracing and learning from each other's unique brilliance, we learned to scan the room for hierarchy and edge. To soften our praise. To withhold full admiration out of some vague, inherited fear of irrelevance. What’s lost in this performance of scarcity is profound. Because when women are free to collaborate without fear of being edged out, something rare happens. Ideas expand. Impact deepens. Workplaces shift from transactional to transformational. From guarded to generous. The very frameworks of leadership, credit, and visibility need to be reimagined if women are to lead in ways that honor both self and sisterhood. And until then, too many brilliant women will keep shrinking their light just enough to stay visible, but not threatening. Heard, but not too loudly. Talented, but not too much.

The truth is it doesn’t have to be that way!

I remember once sitting in a strategy session beside a woman who spoke with the kind of calm clarity that turned heads. She didn’t posture. She didn’t hedge. She simply knew what she was talking about. She did her homework. I was in awe but also hated how something in me shrank. Not because of her, but because I wasn’t sure where that left me.

Later that evening, I thought about how easy it is to confuse scarcity with truth. How often we mistake proximity for competition. How the rules we were handed by old patriarchal systems were still underpinning even our most progressive workplaces.

Most women thrive not in competitive isolation, but in environments where we find honest human connection. We are wired for it. For attunement, for creativity. For collaboration. And yet that instinct has been stifled by decades of systems designed to keep us performing for approval rather than building together.

I've evolved a lot since that strategy session early in my career, when my own insecurity got the better of me. Of course over the years I've gained a better understanding of myself and my unique talents, but it also took a lot of self-reflection and work. I've always wanted to be the woman who didn't feel the need to dim herself to let someone else shine—or vice versa. I know that someone else’s light doesn’t cancel mine out, it actually helps us both see better.

It’s a practice. A kind of unlearning.

Now, when another woman speaks and her words cut clean through the fog of a meeting, I sit in the warmth of appreciation. I admire the architecture of her thought. There’s space for all of us. Society just made us forget that.

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