The Loneliness of Leading Other Women

There is a story we tell about women supporting women, and then there is the experience of being a woman in charge of other women, and the two have less in common than the story suggests. The woman who leads other women occupies a position the culture has not quite figured out how to describe. She is expected to be both authority and ally, both decisive and warm, both the one who makes the hard calls and the one who holds emotional space for the people affected by them. The contradiction is rarely named, and the loneliness it produces is rarely acknowledged, even by the women experiencing it. 

I have spent the last few years interviewing women in leadership roles across industries, from founders of small companies to executives at large ones, and one theme has surfaced more consistently than any other. The higher these women rise, the more isolated they become, and the isolation is sharpest when the people they lead are other women. They expected leadership to be hard. They did not expect it to be lonely in this particular way, and they did not expect the loneliness to be the thing that almost broke them. 

A Loneliness That Does Not Match the Story 

The cultural narrative about women in leadership assumes a kind of sisterhood among the women involved. The female boss is supposed to mentor the women under her. The women under her are supposed to celebrate her success. Everyone is supposed to lift each other up. This story circulates in commencement speeches, leadership conferences, and the steady stream of corporate content about women supporting women. It is a beautiful story. It does not match what most women in leadership actually experience. 

What most female leaders experience is something more complicated. They have women on their teams who expect a kind of friendship that the role cannot accommodate. They have women below them in the hierarchy who interpret normal management decisions as personal betrayals. They have other senior women who treat them as competition rather than as peers. They have boards and investors who hold them to standards their male counterparts are not held to. And they have almost no one with whom they can be honest about any of this, because admitting the truth would violate the sisterhood script and make them look bitter or ungrateful or, worst of all, like a bad feminist. 

So, they hold it. They hold the difficult feedback they have to deliver and the pushback they get for delivering it. They hold the awareness that women on their teams are watching them more critically than they would watch a male leader. They hold the lonely knowledge that the women they thought would be their peers are often their fiercest competitors. They hold all of it in silence, because the alternative would be to say something that the culture does not have ears for, and saying it might cost them more than the silence does. 

Why It Is Worse Than Leading Men 

A common assumption is that it must be easier to lead other women than to lead men, because women presumably understand each other. The opposite is often true, and the reasons are structural rather than personal. When a woman leads men, the dynamics are usually clear from the start. The man may resent her authority, but he is not expecting her to be his friend. He does not generally expect emotional caretaking from his manager. The relationship has limits that both parties tend to recognize and operate within. 

When a woman leads other women, the relationships often lack these limits. Women on her team may consciously or unconsciously expect the relationship to include a level of emotional intimacy that the role cannot sustain. They may expect her to be available for personal conversations, to remember the details of their lives, to soften feedback so it feels supportive rather than corrective, to handle their disappointments with extra care. None of these expectations are wrong in themselves. They are just incompatible with the actual job of running an organization, and when the leader cannot meet them, the team often experiences the gap as a personal failure rather than a structural reality. 

Research on workplace dynamics has documented this gap. A study published in 2023 in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that women working under female managers reported higher expectations for emotional support from those managers and higher disappointment when the support did not materialize. The same study found that women working under male managers had no such elevated expectations and rated their managers more favorably for the same actual behaviors. The female leader is being held to a different standard, and the standard is one that no manager can fully meet while also doing the job of leading. 

This produces a particular kind of exhaustion for women in leadership. They are managing the actual work, which is significant. They are also managing the emotional expectations of the women they lead, which is enormous. And they are managing the gap between what they can give and what is being expected of them, which is constant. The gap creates ongoing low-level conflict that male leaders do not have to navigate in the same way, and the navigating itself depletes the leader over time. 

The Sponsorship Vacuum 

Beyond the immediate team, women in leadership often discover that they have fewer peers than they thought they would have at this level. The pipeline of women rising through the ranks has slowed at the very top, and the women who do make it find themselves in rooms with far fewer other women than they expected. The expected sisterhood at the executive level often turns out to be a thinly populated room with a few women in it, several of whom are not particularly interested in helping each other. 

The relationships among senior women in many industries are more competitive than the public narrative admits. There are reasons for this. The number of seats at the senior table is limited. Boards still operate with quiet quotas that allow one or two women but rarely many. Investors still ask female founders questions they do not ask male founders. The systems that determine who advances have not changed as quickly as the narrative has, and senior women often find themselves competing with other senior women for scarce resources in ways that male executives, operating in an environment of relative abundance, do not have to. 

This is not because senior women are uniquely competitive or unkind. It is because they are operating in a structure that pits them against each other while telling them they should support each other. The contradiction is exhausting. Many female executives describe the strange experience of meeting another senior woman at a conference, feeling an immediate kinship, and then watching that kinship dissolve when they end up competing for the same opportunity a few months later. The structural conditions of senior leadership for women still produce more competition than collaboration, regardless of what anyone wishes were true. 

The loneliness this produces is specific. It is the loneliness of a person who is told she should have a community at this level, who looks around and does not find one, and who concludes that the failure must be hers. She has not done enough networking. She has not built the right relationships. She is not the right kind of person. The conclusion is wrong. The community she was promised does not exist, in many sectors, because the structural conditions that would produce such a community have not been built. The promise was aspirational rather than descriptive, and the women who believed it are paying the price for the gap. 

The Bottom of the Pyramid Disappears 

Another source of loneliness for women in leadership comes from a place she may not have anticipated. As she rises, the friendships she had earlier in her career become harder to maintain. The women she used to grab coffee with as peers are now her direct reports or her competitors. The relationships have to be renegotiated, and many of them do not survive the renegotiation. Some of her old friends become uncomfortable around her new role. Some become resentful. Some try to leverage the friendship for professional advantage, which strains the friendship. Some simply drift away because the gap in daily experience has grown too wide to bridge. 

The leader who notices this happening often grieves it without telling anyone she is grieving it. Acknowledging the loss would feel like a betrayal of the friendships, which she still values, or like a complaint about success, which she does not want to make. So the grief stays private. She watches the friendships thin without being able to say what she is watching. She tells herself this is the price of leadership. She is correct. She also has nowhere to put the price. 

The newer relationships she might build with other senior women are slow to develop because everyone at this level is busy and guarded. The women who might become her peers are also navigating the conditions just described, and they are also being careful about which relationships to invest in. Trust takes time to build at any level. At the senior level, with everyone overextended and slightly guarded, it can take years. The leader is often left in a transitional period that lasts longer than she expected, with the old relationships fading and the new ones not yet formed. 

What Helps 

The women in leadership who navigate this loneliness most successfully tend to do a few specific things. They build peer relationships outside their own industry, where competition is structurally impossible because they are not competing for the same opportunities. The chief marketing officer of a consumer brand develops a friendship with the founder of a tech company. The hospital CEO meets monthly with a woman who runs an investment fund. The relationships work because the women are not in each other's competitive landscape, and the freedom from competition allows for the kind of honesty that is hard to access inside any single industry. 

They also invest in formal peer groups, often paid ones, where the structure of the group creates the conditions for honesty. The most successful of these groups are small, confidential, and led by a skilled facilitator who can keep the conversations from devolving into networking or self-promotion. The leader who participates in such a group regularly often describes it as the one place she can say what she actually thinks without managing anyone's reaction. The structure protects the honesty, and the honesty protects her. 

They make peace with the fact that the women they lead cannot be their peers. This sounds harsh until you have lived it. The role of manager is not the role of friend, and trying to make it both produces worse outcomes for everyone. The leader who accepts this can show genuine care for the women on her team without sacrificing the clarity that the role requires. The team often functions better when the leader is clear about the relationship, even though this clarity initially disappoints women who hoped for something more intimate. The disappointment passes. The functional relationship lasts. 

They also seek out women who have already navigated what they are navigating. The woman five years ahead, who has lived through what the leader is living through now, can offer a kind of counsel that no peer at the same stage can offer. These relationships often require effort to build because the senior women are busy and have their own commitments, but they tend to be among the most valuable relationships a leader can develop. The wisdom of the women who came before is rarely written down. It has to be passed from one woman to another in conversations that take time and trust. 

What the Culture Owes These Women 

If the loneliness of female leadership is structural rather than personal, then the responsibility for addressing it cannot rest entirely with the women experiencing it. The conditions that produce this loneliness need to change. Boards need to be diversified beyond token representation. Investor classes need to fund women on the same terms they fund men. Companies need to build more than one senior seat for women in their organizational structures. The pipeline at the top needs to widen so that women who reach senior levels are not the only ones in the room. 

Beyond structural change, the cultural narrative about women in leadership needs to make room for honesty. The sisterhood story is beautiful, but its constant repetition prevents women from naming what they actually experience. If we cannot talk about the difficulty of leading other women, we cannot improve the conditions of leading other women. The honesty is not a betrayal of feminism. It is the precondition for the kind of solidarity that feminism actually requires, which is the solidarity of women who can tell each other the truth. 

For the woman in leadership who is reading this and recognizing her own loneliness, please know that the loneliness is not your fault. You did not fail at sisterhood. You did not build the wrong kind of team. You are operating inside conditions that produce the very experience you are having, and the conditions are bigger than you. The fact that you have not found the community you were promised does not mean you are unworthy of community. It means the community has to be built, often by you and other women like you, often in small intentional ways, often slowly and over years. 

The room you need exists, but it is rarer than the culture has led you to believe. Finding it requires patience, persistence, and the willingness to keep looking even after you have been disappointed. The women who eventually build the peer relationships that sustain them in leadership describe the building as some of the most important work of their careers. The work is not glamorous. It is not photographable. It does not generate press. But it is what keeps the leader functional over the long arc of her work, and the long arc is what we should be paying attention to, not the short bursts of success that the culture prefers to celebrate. 

Your loneliness is real. It is also not the end of your story. The community you need is possible. It just has to be built more deliberately than you were told it would.