Why is it almost always a woman writing the takedown of another woman?

When a successful woman is being publicly dismantled in a long-read profile, the byline at the top is almost always another woman. Not always. But often enough that I stopped treating it as coincidence years ago.

The pattern is consistent enough that when a client tells me a damaging piece is coming, the first thing I want to know is who the journalist is. The majority of the time, it is a woman. Sometimes a woman the client has met. Sometimes a woman who was friendly six months ago. Sometimes someone whose career intersected with theirs in ways the client only fully understands when the piece lands.

And often, more often than people would assume, it is a woman the client has never met, never spoken to, never crossed paths with at all. No provocation. No prior incident. No history of any kind. She has simply decided that this is the woman she is going to write about, and the piece arrives out of nowhere.

You only have to delve a little bit deeper to notice something else. The woman writing the piece has very often, at some earlier point, tried to be the kind of woman she is now writing about. The career did not go in the same direction. The brand did not take off. The audience did not follow. You do not have to be a cynic to spot it, and you cannot help but think the word nobody wants to say out loud: jealousy.

The commercial logic behind the takedown

We spend so much time now talking about supporting women, raising women up, making space for women in industries that did not want them. Then a slot opens up at a national paper for a piece designed to take a successful woman apart, and there is never a shortage of female writers ready to take it. Imagine a world where women actually had each other’s backs. We are not in that world. If anything, we are drifting further from it.

There are structural reasons the byline keeps being female, and they are worth understanding if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of one of these pieces.

The first is access. Female subjects, particularly in entertainment, business or media, tend to grant longer interviews and more behind-the-scenes time to female writers. Editors know this. So when a profile needs intimacy, contradiction, or that “what’s she really like” texture, the commission often goes to a woman. The writer gets in, has the long lunch, sees the house, hears the unguarded comment. Then she writes what she saw, which is often not what the subject was hoping for.

The second is editorial cover. A man writing a critical piece about a successful woman is a tired story. A woman writing the same piece reads differently. It carries the implicit signal that even her own peers do not buy the act. That is more useful for the publication. It travels further, it gets quoted more, and it is harder for the subject to push back against without looking like she is attacking another woman who was just doing her job.

The third is incentive. Long-form female-on-female profiles are some of the most read pieces in any given week. There is a quiet career boost in being the one who got close to a famous woman and came back with the goods. It is the kind of piece that turns a freelance writer into a name.

So the supply of women willing to write them stays healthy, the demand for them stays enormous, and the personal motive slots quite neatly into a commercial structure that was already pulling in that direction.

Accountability is not the issue

This is not a blanket defence of every woman in the public eye. Obviously, there are women who deserve every word the press throws at them. Ghislaine Maxwell is the clearest example. There are women in positions of power who have caused real harm, and journalism that holds them to account is one of the most important things the profession does.

That is not the kind of journalism I am writing about.

What I find harder to understand is why so much investigative energy seems to land on women whose main offence is being successful, visible, complicated, occasionally annoying, or simply not quite as likeable as the internet has decided they ought to be. There are wars, political failures, institutional cover-ups, cost of living scandals, corporate negligence, abuse networks, genuine corruption and any number of public interest stories that deserve serious, sustained scrutiny. The fact that we are still arguing about what is and is not in the Epstein files, rather than that being treated as one of the defining accountability stories of our time, says quite a lot about media priorities.

Why are so many “investigative journalists” spending their time chasing down largely harmless, often innocent women, when stories involving real, documented harm are sitting right there? Why is the energy that could be aimed at people who have caused serious damage being spent instead on women whose worst crime is being visible, successful, imperfect, or photographed looking faintly pleased with themselves at a launch dinner?

There are women who absolutely warrant scrutiny. There are women who have abused power, harmed others, enabled abuse, concealed wrongdoing or benefited from systems that deserve to be exposed. Journalism should go after them properly. It should go after them relentlessly. It should also be honest enough to distinguish between a woman who has caused real harm and a woman who has simply become a satisfying character to dislike.

But that is almost never who I am called in for.

The women I see behind the headlines

The women I tend to work with are not Ghislaine Maxwell. They are women who have built something, often slowly and at real personal cost, and have then been sketched in ways that bear almost no resemblance to who they actually are.

In nearly every case, once I get to know them properly, I find myself inspired by them. Not in a glossy, motivational-poster way, but in the much more real sense of watching a woman who has worked relentlessly, survived more than people realise, built something in a man’s world and somehow still has to worry about a stranger with a notebook trying to reduce her life to a neat little character assassination.

That is the part people do not see. Before an article ever comes out, there is often a quiet campaign happening behind the scenes. Journalists contact former colleagues, current colleagues, friends, ex-friends, assistants, business contacts, acquaintances, people they met once at an event, anyone they can find. They send carefully phrased messages that make people wonder what has happened. They create suspicion before they have even written a word.

Even when they find nothing, damage has already been done. People start asking why a journalist is sniffing around. They wonder what the woman has done wrong. They become cautious. Some distance themselves. Some panic. Some talk because they are flattered, frightened or simply do not understand the consequences.

That has a real cost. Charities get nervous. Investors hesitate. Potential business deals slow down or disappear entirely. Brands quietly back away. Partners who were previously enthusiastic suddenly want to “wait and see.” No one wants to attach themselves to someone who might be days away from a damaging profile in a national or international newspaper, even if the piece is unfair, exaggerated or built on very little.

Reputation is not only damaged by publication. Sometimes it is damaged by the process of being investigated by someone who has already decided what kind of story she wants to write.

That process is far crueller than most people realise. It is not just “journalism.” It is strangers quietly walking through someone’s life, knocking on every door, seeing who will open it, and hoping someone says something useful enough to justify the piece. Her ambition, relationships, appearance, friendships, staff turnover, old messages, tone in meetings, private mistakes and bad days all become potential material.

A lot of the women who come to me are innocent of what is being implied about them. Sometimes the accusation is completely false. Sometimes it is heavily exaggerated. Sometimes something ordinary has been framed as sinister because that is the direction the piece needed to go. Anyone who has worked in crisis PR for long enough knows the difference between a story that is genuinely uncovering wrongdoing and a story that has decided on its conclusion before the facts have been allowed to interfere.

Of course, in some cases, the client has slipped up at some point. People do. The question is never whether someone has made a mistake. Everyone has. The question is whether the mistake warrants a hit piece designed to dismantle a career that took years to build. Almost always, the answer is no.

I find people who have messed up at some point more interesting, not less. It usually means they have lived a bit, made some bad decisions, learned something the hard way and developed a more realistic understanding of themselves. I am far more suspicious of people who present themselves as permanently correct, perfectly stable and morally untouched by real life. I have never met one of those people in person, and I am not entirely convinced they exist.

A woman can spend twenty years building a career, employing people, creating work, supporting others, surviving private crises, recovering from bad decisions, and still be reduced to the one moment that makes the neatest paragraph. The internet loves a tidy moral shape. The press knows this. A woman who has lived a complicated life is far easier to write about if she can be made into a lesson.

Women are punished differently

Female journalists know this, or at least they should. They know that women are punished differently in the public eye. They know that a man can be difficult, intense, chaotic, arrogant or emotionally unreliable and still be described as brilliant, tortured, visionary or complicated. A woman displaying even a fraction of the same behaviour is much more likely to be framed as unstable, manipulative, calculated, deluded or monstrous.

The language changes. The tolerance changes. The appetite for humiliation changes.

A male public figure can often survive being disliked. In some cases, it becomes part of the brand. He is difficult, but talented. He is volatile, but interesting. He is arrogant, but successful. With women, dislike has a way of becoming moral evidence. She is not just annoying. She is fake. She is not just ambitious. She is dangerous. She is not just imperfect. She is evidence of something rotten.

That is why the female byline matters. Not because women should never criticise other women. That would be absurd, and also deeply boring. Women should be able to report, investigate, analyse and criticise anyone. But women working in media also understand, better than most, how quickly a female subject can be turned into a public sport.

Which makes it all the more uncomfortable when they choose to play along.

The queen bee problem, and why it is not that simple

There is a body of research on this kind of dynamic in the workplace, often filed under the rather unflattering label of queen bee syndrome. It was first defined in the 1970s. The original idea was that women who reach the top in male-dominated environments sometimes treat other ambitious women worse than they treat men.

The research has been contested since, and the more recent argument is that the framing unfairly blames individual women for behaviour rooted in the environments they were forced to compete in. Both sides have a point. What I see in my own work is not really about individual women being mean to other women in isolation. It is about how the systems around them reward certain kinds of writing about certain kinds of subjects, and how easily a bit of personal envy slots into a commercial structure that was always going to find a buyer for the piece.

That is why the jealousy point is uncomfortable but necessary. It would be dishonest to pretend it never plays a role. Not always. Not in every piece. Not in some cartoonish, handbag-clutching way. But often enough that anyone who works around media for long enough starts to recognise the shape of it.

Sometimes the writer has wanted the same kind of career. Sometimes she has moved in adjacent circles. Sometimes she understands the subject just well enough to resent her, but not well enough to be fair. Sometimes the takedown has the strange intensity of someone writing not only about the woman in front of her, but about a version of herself that never quite happened.

That does not mean every critical female profile is an act of jealousy. It does mean that we should stop pretending personal motive magically disappears because something has been commissioned by a respectable publication and placed under a polished headline.

This is a genre, not a verdict

What I want women in the public eye to understand is that this is a genre with rules. It is not a personal verdict on you. It is a commercial product with a predictable shape. The piece exists before you do. The journalist is filling a slot the publication has decided sells.

Once you see that clearly, you stop reading the piece as the world finally telling you the truth about yourself, and start reading it as a piece of writing made for a market.

That shift is the whole game.

The women who come through this strongest are the ones who refuse to absorb the piece’s framing of them. Not in denial. Not in spin. Just in a steady refusal to let a thousand-word commission rewrite a life that took decades to build. They respond when there is something worth responding to. They stay quiet when silence is sharper than noise. They keep working. The piece moves down the search results faster than they expect. The next thing they put into the world is bigger than the thing that was used against them.

By the time the article appears, the damage may already have started. Deals have gone quiet. People have backed away. Relationships have been strained. The subject is left dealing not only with the published piece, but with the unnerving knowledge that a stranger has been moving through her life, asking questions, collecting fragments and deciding which version of her will be sold to the public.

But the piece is still not the whole truth. It is one version, built from selected details, commercial incentives, editorial appetite, personal interpretation and the very old public desire to watch a woman be taken down elegantly.

We are aiming at the wrong women

The reason I keep coming back to all of this is that the women I see being written about in this way are, almost without exception, exactly the kind of women a healthier culture would be celebrating. Decent, talented, hardworking, often very kind. They are not perfect, but perfection has never been a serious standard for men, so I am not sure why women are still being asked to perform it.

There are women who deserve scrutiny. There are women whose actions demand investigation. There are women whose power, money, proximity to abuse or role in institutional failure should make them the subject of serious journalism. I would much rather we spent our energy there.

Instead, too often, we get the safer version. The successful woman with an attractive life, a few enemies, a complicated backstory and just enough public familiarity to make the takedown clickable. The woman people can enjoy judging without having to confront anything too serious. The woman who can be made to represent arrogance, ambition, inauthenticity, privilege, hypocrisy or whatever else the culture feels like punishing that week.

It is a shame for the women being written about. It is a shame for the women writing the pieces, who have channelled real ability into something corrosive. And it is a shame for everyone watching, because we are all being trained, slowly, to think the worst of successful women on the basis of writing that was commissioned with that exact outcome in mind.

I would much rather we spent that energy on the women who actually warrant it. There are plenty.