Why Women in Tech Don’t Support Each Other

Sorority in tech is a legend. And we all know it.

There’s a story we tell each other as women in tech. That because we’re few, when we meet we support each other. That scarcity creates solidarity.

It doesn’t.

We’re so few that the space men leave us feels like competition with our own gender. Not because we’re unkind. Because the system built the scarcity, and scarcity produces aggression turned inward — often directed at the women who look most like us.

Research calls it “systemic displaced aggression”: when institutions create structural scarcity, the frustration gets redirected toward other women, not toward the system that produced it. Emerald

Men support each other because the space is theirs. We fight over crumbs and pretend they’re a feast.

“Although feminist ideals emphasize mutual support and collective empowerment, institutional conditions often make such solidarity difficult to sustain. These tensions are particularly visible in disciplines where women remain underrepresented.”
— Emerald Publishing

I remember a lunch. We were three of us. A senior woman at the table, a younger woman, and me. The senior spoke the entire time. Survival strategies, career advice, a steady stream of guidance. She meant well. But she left no space. Not for questions. Not for other voices. Not even for silence.

And then came what I thought was a red line. The threshold I believed every woman knew should not be crossed.

When you have a child, you finally gain credibility with the men at the table.

She said it like a gift. I saw the younger woman’s face.

I thought of women without children — not always by choice. Women who already carry that weight: an unfulfilled desire, and on top of it, the pressure from outside. Even from women like this one.

Even at work. I thought of women who are childfree by choice and still have to justify that choice, argue for it, defend it. As if their body were public property.

I answered:

I don’t think our credibility should depend on what we do with our womb.

I could not stay for long after that. That woman had internalized the rules so completely she was handing them out as wisdom.

This is what the system does. It doesn’t just exclude us. It teaches us to exclude each other. It makes us believe that the only way to survive is to become the gatekeeper of the little space we’ve been given.

And the worst part? We don’t even notice. We think we’re helping.

The problem is not women. The problem is what scarcity does to women. And scarcity in tech is not an accident. It is a design.

Welcome to Code Like a Girl, the community where women in tech come to be seen, heard, and championed as they walk this path together.

If you are a woman in tech, this is the room where the other women aren’t competing with you for the one open seat.

I live a double life.

In tech, I’m often the only woman in the room. Often the only foreigner too. There are many ways to be an outsider. I accumulate them.

Besides my job in tech, I have my coaching firm. I needed that space to see something else, to be exposed to other perspectives. Through coaching, I met women from many other fields, tech included. Those women have a completely different attitude outside the room I know.

My double life is made of women.

Coaches, facilitators, trainers. Women working inside organizations with a mission to create space, to make the invisible visible, to turn diversity into leverage. In those rooms I breathe differently, because I don’t have to be on guard.

We realize we come from the same room. We are still there from 9 to 5. We occupy that space but differently. We are now trained to recognize the pattern. We leave tables where people — women included — spread toxicity.

Outside, no one is handing out survival tips. No one is performing seniority. We are just thinking together.

That quality of room exists. I have been in it. And it showed me that what we’ve been told, that women don’t support each other, is not a truth about women. It’s a truth about what happens to women in the wrong room.

Change the room, and everything changes. You can just have a look, breathe, and come back with the energy you need with a new understanding of the dynamics. Or you can choose to change rooms for good. It is up to you.

Many of us decide to change rooms. Many want to build something of our own, and spend years getting ready.

The step away — leaving tech, changing direction, building something different — has become a survival strategy. Women leave tech roles at a 45% higher rate than men. Half of those who enter the field leave before the age of 35. 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35 — compared to 20% in other types of jobs. Not because they don’t love the work — research shows that even those who leave were happy with the work itself. Something else goes wrong. The environment. The circumstances. The room. slideshareTechCrunch

Like any strategy, it requires preparation. I have watched women prepare for years. Courses, certifications, ideas, plans. And I have watched those same women leave all their energy in the games of that room — until the project in the drawer becomes a habit. Until “I’ll work on it when I have time” is something they’ve been saying for so long that no one believes it anymore. Not even them.

The room depletes you. And what it depletes most is not your work, it’s your defense.

Sometimes you need to step outside the room, not to leave it forever, but to finally see it. Even some days are enough to understand what you are carrying. And to decide what you want to do with it.

A few months ago, with a woman I deeply respect, we asked ourselves the same question this piece keeps circling back to: what if we stopped looking for the room, and built it?

Both of us, at two different latitudes, facing the same dynamics. We realized the ceiling of the room you’re in becomes your ceiling. Most of us don’t even notice it happening. Change the room, and the ceiling changes too. So we built one.

We built it for a specific woman. Capable. Something in the drawer — a project, a next chapter, a direction she can almost see. Tired of defending her ambition before she’s even allowed to talk about it.

We built it for women operating at the same altitude, who understand the specific weight of carrying something you haven’t started yet, without asking you to make it sound smaller, safer, more reasonable.

From this conversation, I am now sure:

Sorority can exist. If you change rooms.

We're grateful to Emanuela B for sharing her work here. If you want writing that traces a workplace pattern back to the system that built it instead of blaming the women caught in it, follow her.

Emanuela named the real culprit: not the women fighting over crumbs, but the scarcity that put the crumbs there. Code Like a Girl is the room for women in tech who are done turning that frustration on each other and ready to build something together instead.

Subscribe for free and join our Rise Together Thursday chat. It’s a community where women in tech share their latest work, spotlight another woman’s post, and support one another through thoughtful comments and restacks.

You’ll come in with work that deserves more attention and leave feeling seen, supported, and connected.