August is a month in which SA turns its attention to women.
We celebrate the courage of the women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 and famously declared that “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo” (you strike a woman, you strike a rock).
We celebrate women who have broken barriers, built businesses, led organisations, served communities, and entered professions once dominated by men.
We talk about empowerment, gender equality, and increasing the number of women in leadership positions. And rightly so.
But Women’s Month should be more than a celebration.
It should also remind us of how far we still have to go and the responsibility we all share to ensure that women can rise without encountering numerous obstacles along the way.
Women continue to face significant barriers to equality.
Patriarchy, discrimination, gender stereotypes, unequal opportunities, gender-based violence, unequal care responsibilities, and limited access to positions of power remain realities in SA.
However, there is another barrier that is often overlooked: women can sometimes undermine other women.
This is not an easy subject to discuss, particularly during Women’s Month.
But if we genuinely believe in women’s empowerment, we cannot celebrate empowerment on the one hand while ignoring behaviours that undermine it on the other.
When women pull other women down:
Intra-gender rivalry refers to situations in which women, particularly in male-dominated environments, may undermine or distance themselves from other women.
Pull-Her-Down Syndrome and the Queen Bee phenomenon are used in literature to describe specific manifestations of intra-gender rivalry.
Pull-Her-Down Syndrome refers to a harmful form of jealousy in which another woman’s success is viewed with envy rather than celebrated as a collective achievement.
The Queen Bee phenomenon describes a different but related response, in which senior women may distance themselves from other women as an adaptation to discriminatory or male-dominated organisational environments.
These concepts should not be interpreted as evidence that women are naturally jealous, competitive or unsupportive. Quite the opposite.
They remind us that behaviour is shaped by organisational cultures and environments in which women may have had to compete for limited opportunities, recognition, and positions of authority.
But understanding the causes does not mean we should ignore the consequences.
When a woman deliberately withholds an opportunity from another woman, refuses to mentor her, excludes her from professional networks, diminishes her achievements, or actively obstructs her advancement, the damage extends beyond the individual woman. It weakens women’s collective progress.
And this matters because women cannot achieve gender equality if the few women who manage to enter positions of influence become barriers to those still trying to get there.
We need more women opening doors:
There is something profoundly powerful about a woman saying: “I know how difficult it was for me to get here, so I will make it easier for the woman coming behind me.”
That is the kind of leadership Women’s Month should celebrate.
Women in senior positions have an enormous opportunity to transform the lives and careers of other women.
They can mentor younger colleagues.
They can recommend talented women for opportunities.
They can share knowledge and professional networks.
They can sponsor women who might otherwise remain invisible.
They can challenge discriminatory practices and create environments where other women can succeed.
They can become door openers rather than gatekeepers.
And this responsibility does not belong only to women at the top.
Every woman who has influence over another woman’s career, opportunity, confidence, or professional development has an opportunity to empower rather than undermine.
This is particularly important in sectors such as higher education, government, business, and the public sector, where women are increasingly occupying positions of leadership.
Representation matters, but what women do with their positions matters just as much.
Having a woman in a senior position is not automatically evidence of gender transformation if she uses her position to exclude other women.
Conversely, a woman who actively develops, supports, and promotes other women can have an impact that extends far beyond her own career.
We must not blame women for women’s inequality:
There is an important distinction that must be made. We should never use the existence of intra-gender rivalry to shift responsibility for gender inequality onto women themselves.
The structural barriers remain real. Organisations must address discriminatory policies and practices.
Institutions must create equitable recruitment and promotion processes.
Leadership must be held accountable for gender-equity commitments.
Women must have access to mentorship, sponsorship, leadership development, and professional opportunities.
But women must also be prepared to examine our own behaviour.
Empowerment cannot mean advancing at the expense of another woman.
It should mean creating conditions in which more women can advance.
This requires a cultural shift, from competition to collaboration, from gatekeeping to sponsorship, from individual advancement to collective advancement.
It means recognising that another woman’s success does not diminish our own.
Her promotion is not our demotion. Her achievement is not our failure.
Her leadership does not threaten our leadership.
There is room for more than one woman at the top.
However, we should also be prepared to recognise and challenge destructive behaviour when we see it.
A woman’s position, title, or seniority should not place her above accountability.
If someone consistently undermines, excludes, or blocks other women, that behaviour should not simply be dismissed as workplace politics, personality differences, or “just the way things are”.
It should be recognised, challenged, and addressed.
Women who abuse their influence to undermine other women should not be protected simply because they are women.
At the same time, we must distinguish between legitimate professional disagreement and deliberate undermining.
Women should be able to disagree, compete fairly, provide criticism and hold one another accountable.
Women’s empowerment does not require women to agree with one another.
It requires fairness, respect, and a genuine commitment to creating opportunities for others.
Let us change what Women’s Month means:
Perhaps this Women’s Month, alongside celebrating women’s achievements, we should celebrate something else: women who use their success to create success for others.
The woman who mentors. The woman who recommends. The woman who shares her knowledge.
The woman who introduces another woman to an important network.
The woman who says a colleague’s name in a room where she is not present.
The woman who refuses to participate in gossip designed to destroy another woman’s reputation.
The woman who sees another woman’s success and celebrates it rather than feeling threatened by it.
These acts may appear small. They are not.
They are how cultures change. They are how leadership pipelines are built. They are how confidence is restored.
They are how women who have historically been excluded from positions of power begin to change institutions and society.
SA needs more of this.
The Women’s Month challenge:
SA does not need women to compete for the right to be the successful woman.
We need women to recognise that there is room for many women to succeed, reach their full potential, and contribute meaningfully to the broader transformation of SA society.
We need institutions, government, business and civil society to remove the structural barriers that continue to hold women back.
We need leaders to create cultures where mentorship, sponsorship, collaboration and fairness are rewarded.
And we need women to look honestly at how we treat one another. Because gender equality will not be achieved simply by putting more women in the room.
It will be achieved when women in the room make sure there is room for other women.
Empowerment over rivalry:
Women’s Month should therefore not only remind us of the barriers women have overcome.
It should remind us of the barriers we must not create for one another.
We cannot dismantle the glass ceiling while simultaneously building invisible walls between women.
We cannot demand that society empower women while tolerating women who deliberately undermine other women’s advancement.
We need to choose empowerment over rivalry. We need women who understand that their greatest legacy may not be the position they occupied, the title they held, or the achievements attached to their own name.
It may be the number of women they helped to rise.
So, this Women’s Month, let us celebrate the women who broke through.
But let us also recognise the women who hold the door open for others.
Let us challenge the behaviour that pulls women down and create a culture in which such behaviour is no longer accepted or normalised.
Because ultimately, women’s empowerment is not about one woman winning.
It is about creating a society in which women no longer have to lose for another woman to succeed.
And when we reach the top, will we pull the ladder up behind us, or extend our hands to help the next woman climb?
This Women’s Month, let us choose to extend our hands.
Prof Kariena Strydom is the first and only female full professor, as well as the only female C2 NRF-rated researcher, in the faculty of management and public administration sciences at iYunivesithi Walter Sisulu.
