#ChooseToChallenge the story of the catty woman

Note: Portions of this were originally posted as an article in Islandista Magazine, a Caribbean women's publication I edited and published between 2008 to 2018. Significant modifications have been made to update it.

"My $i$tren!!! My hitta!!! I know I tell you thi$ all the time, but Money cud neva buy what you give me!! Our friend$hip will alway$ be family!"

Thus read part of the raunchy, riotous and deeply heartfelt birthday message which Barbadian superstar Rihanna posted on Instagram back in 2014 in tribute to her long-time best friend Melissa Forde.

The post celebrated a friendship that stretches back decades to their days as schoolgirls at Barbados' Combermere School and which has stood the test of time and mind-boggling, world-wide fame.

The two women's enduring bond illustrates the power of female friendship, a point Rihanna referred to in her Instagram tribute when she expressed her gratitude, saying:
"I will never take for granted the day you packed your $hit and left BIM to come hold me down, cuz God know$ I would never be able to $urvive thi$ and remain my$elf through it all!"!

Yet, when it comes to female camaraderie, a pernicious prevailing narrative would have you believing that true sisterhood among females is hard to come by. The internet abounds with memes about untrustworthiness, drama and rivalry between women.

Up last month, the (now former) CEO of the Tokyo Olympics Committee and former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori felt the need to say this of proposals to have more parity in having more women in decision making bodies:

"Women have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak, all the others feel the need to speak, too. Everyone ends up saying something... If I say too much, the newspapers are going to write that I said bad things, but I heard somebody say that if we are to increase the number of female board members, we have to regulate speaking time to some extent, or else we’ll never be able to finish."

Now - considering we live in a world where mansplaining is a real thing and constant interruption of females particularly in professional settings has been proven with research over and over again, his comments are almost laughable for how false they are. The irony, right? The audacity? 

lolz.

Or they would be laughable if they didn't reveal a very unfunny truth about the story which society tells about women - as competitive, as catty, as the worst under-cutters of other women.

Lean In author and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and frequent collaborator, psychologist Adam Grant have written about this narrative in an op-ed The Myth of the Catty Woman. 

In it, they brought the stats to dispel the tired old trope which causes too many of us to view each other with (mentally exhausting) suspicion instead of sisterhood.

The truth is much more nuanced (isn't it always?) than simply 'women can't be trusted'. They cited a range of workplace-focused research which showed a range of factors at play, from the unspoken but very real penalties women (and minorities) pay when they advocate for others like them to the pressures and instinct to protect turf when a woman is the 'only one' in an executive setting.

On the other hand, a lot of the narrative... just... isn't... true.

Despite the very real threats, in an extensive Standards & Poors survey they mentioned, women were actually more likely to advance to the senior tier in companies where there was a female chief executive and more likely to be mentored (so they can reach those top rungs) when there are other women senior executives.

So where has the narrative come from?

Well, women are expected to be nicer than men.

And by many measures, they are - for instance, at creating workplaces that are safer and more respectful. A study from the University of Zurich shows women's brains literally reward them more for kinder behaviour while men's reward them for selfish behaviour.

However, with this expectation (in part grounded in reality) that women are expected to be nicer, comes a higher penalty when women behave in a not-nice way. Like say, being competitive with another woman or being abrupt or harsh.

We dislike women more when they aren't nice. We remember it more and punish it more. We also amplify and overplay conflict between women more than we do with men, making it more problematic than it is.

Which is weird when you think of the fact that conflict between men leads to like... wars. And that men are the majority of perpetrators and victims of murder.

What is also weird is how much of this sentiment is believed and fuelled by women themselves. I know we've all heard women who make a point of stating that they don't have/trust female friends or don't like female bosses.

For my one part - I can't relate. My experiences throughout life of camraderie with other women has been incredible - top tier.

It's not that I haven't experienced rivalry or undercutting from other women, because of course I have.

But I've also experienced being in the deepest throes of teenaged tabanca and it was my female friends who let me bawl in their lap, soaking their legs with tears over some trifling guy, while they patted my head.

I've experienced being so low that I couldn't even eat and it was a female friend who literally dragged me from my bed, cooked me a meal, sat in front of me and made me eat it, bite by bite.

I've been far from home and suddenly without accommodation in a strange city and when I called on my childhood female friend, just like that, I had somewhere warm and friendly to stay. It wasn't even a question.

And the women in my life aren't just foul weather friends, propping me up when things go wrong.

We have shared joyful moments - dancing at my wedding, watching scintillating cricket matches together, partying in sun and rain. And we have laughed – how we have laughed! We have shared the best jokes – things that still make me randomly burst out laughing 10 and 20 years later.

My female friends and mentors have been my greatest cheerleaders, encouraging me to run for (student) office, move to new countries, apply for jobs and start businesses. They have recommended me for jobs, given me opportunities to prove myself and enthusiastically written glowing recommendations. They have made me strong when I doubted myself.

So on this International Women's Day, perhaps we can do ourselves all a favor and #ChooseToChallenge this tiresome and untrue narrative, instead grounding our perceptions of women in the many, many positive experiences we have rather than amplifying the negative.