Women evolved to value equality in close alliances, making status gaps tricky to navigate.

Women are especially sensitive to competition when status gaps threaten relational equality.

Women do not dislike competitive women overall; their reactions depend on context.

Women dislike competitive women who compete against them or their friends but not toward their rivals.

Why Competitive Women Are Sometimes Seen as Threats

The media often portrays competitive, ambitious women as villains, and this pattern appears again and again in popular movies and TV shows. Consider one of the most iconic depictions of a powerful woman in The Devil Wears Prada: its formidable editor, Miranda Priestly, who is feared and disliked by most in the film simply for being authoritative and unapologetically ambitious. The stereotype is embedded in the title itself, where a successful woman is framed as cold and devilish for being open about her ambitions.

Similar villainization occurs in dynamics that appear outside fiction. Consider the phenomenon “tall poppy syndrome,” where women who are successful or stand out are often socially “cut down,” particularly by their close friends.

Traditional explanations of the above illustrations point to the double bind: Women who display confidence and competitiveness, traits often needed in order to succeed, violate expectations that women be warm and modest. Decades of research show that women who behave assertively are penalized socially, whereas men showing the same behavior are not. This dynamic is echoed in popular culture; for example, Taylor Swift’s “The Man” highlights the harsher judgment of ambitious women.

In line with this perspective, part of understanding why women villainize ambitious women can be understood from the “queen bee” theory. The term queen bee was coined to describe the perception that some women in........

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