The Coolest Girls Don't Compete Anymore.

Jillian Sanders
5 hours ago
3 min read

Living in New York City for nearly two decades often felt like existing inside a perpetual highlight reel. The city attracts ambitious people, and success is woven into the fabric of daily life. In that world, it becomes easy to measure your life against other people's milestones and wonder whether you're keeping pace.

In my late twenties, I congratulated a colleague after she landed a job at a television station we'd both interviewed for. In the months that followed, I found myself paying close attention to every mention of her name and checking her LinkedIn page with embarrassing regularity. Every promotion, announcement, or new opportunity seemed to land directly in my field of vision. The more attention I paid to her progress, the less attention I paid to my own. Somehow, she had become the benchmark against which I was measuring my life.

This feeling wasn't unfamiliar. In high school, I'd spent plenty of time observing the popular girls from a distance, envying their confidence and the effortless way they seemed to attract attention. On the cusp of thirty, I was surprised to recognize the same feeling resurfacing in a different form.

Psychologists have long explored the ways women are conditioned to view one another as competition. For generations, women absorbed the message that security and success were limited resources. Those beliefs became internalized and passed down from mother to daughter, woman to woman. One manifestation of this is what researchers call relational aggression: a form of social competition in which status is negotiated through exclusion, comparison, and judgment. For most women, that instinct begins early.

Glennon Doyle writes about this in her book Untamed. She describes asking her son and his friends if they're hungry. They answer without hesitation.

When she asks her daughter and her friends the same question, there's a pause. The girls look at one another before answering, as if the correct response must first be determined by the group. Self-evaluation often arrives long before self-understanding.

Girls are frequently taught to be accommodating, agreeable, and aware of how they're perceived. For much of history, being chosen mattered. Before women had financial independence, marriage often determined social standing and economic security. Beauty functioned as a form of social currency, and another woman's desirability could feel like a direct threat to your own future.

Marriage may no longer determine a woman's fate, but the habit of measuring ourselves against one another runs deep. By middle school, many girls have already learned to track who is prettier, more popular, more accomplished, or more admired.

But something is changing.

We see it in the millions of women filling stadiums for Taylor Swift concerts and WNBA games, joining female founder networks, supporting women-owned businesses, and building communities centered on connection rather than competition. Women are no longer waiting for permission to define culture; they are creating it.

Hello Sunshine, founded by Reese Witherspoon, was built around the idea that women's stories deserve to be at the center of books, film, television, and podcasts. Its success reflects a growing appetite for stories that portray women as fully realized people rather than rivals competing for attention.

Amy Poehler's podcast Good Hang offers another example. Through candid conversations with longtime friends and collaborators, Poehler highlights something rarely celebrated in earlier generations: female ambition alongside female friendship. The message isn't that women must choose between success and connection. It's that both can exist at the same time.

The generation embracing these ideas is now raising the next generation of girls.

For the first time, many young women are growing up with a broader understanding of what it means to live a successful life. They are seeing examples of women pursuing careers, building businesses, choosing motherhood, remaining single, creating community, finding love later in life, or combining those paths in ways previous generations rarely imagined.

That doesn't mean comparison will disappear. It is and always will be a deeply human instinct. But it may mean that girls spend less time trying to fit themselves into someone else's story and more time discovering what they want their own story to be.

Every time a woman celebrates another woman's success, offers support instead of comparison, shares an opportunity, speaks well of a friend who isn't in the room, or refuses to participate in the rituals of ranking and measuring, she helps create a different model.

We can teach the next generation that another woman's success is not a threat to their own. In doing so, we leave them a wider, more generous vision of what is possible.

The stories we inherit are not our fault. The stories we pass on are our responsibility.