A question I can’t stop thinking about
I have been saying it for years. In interviews, in talks, in rooms full of women who nodded along because it felt true.
Women are statistically smaller, slower and weaker than men. So our default became collaboration. Negotiation. Coalition. Not competition. And that instinct, I have argued, is our superpower. The thing that, if we had more of it in boardrooms and investment committees and government chambers, would make those spaces more balanced, more resilient, more sustainable.
I believed it. I still find it compelling.
And then someone said five words that I haven’t been able to put down since.
What if it’s a scar?
Here is the other version of the same story.
Girls are not born collaborative. They are trained to be. From the earliest years, girls are rewarded for accommodation and punished for assertion. They learn quickly that the same behaviour that gets a boy called confident gets a girl called difficult. So they adapt. They find other ways to get what they need. They build coalitions. They negotiate. They read the room. They smooth things over.
And over decades, those adaptations become so ingrained, so automatic, so deeply woven into how women move through the world, that they start to look like nature. They start to look like a superpower.
But what if they’re not? What if what I’ve been calling our greatest strength is actually the most sophisticated coping mechanism ever developed in response to being consistently excluded from direct competition?
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever showed in Women Don’t Ask that women don’t negotiate assertively for pay and promotion not because they don’t want to, but because they are socially penalised when they do in ways men simply aren’t. Cordelia Fine spent two books systematically dismantling the neuroscience behind claims of innate female difference, showing that most of what we assume is hardwired is actually the product of environment. Alice Eagly’s social role theory argues that what looks like female nature is actually a rational adaptation to the roles women have historically been permitted to occupy.
On this reading, our collaborative instinct is not a gift. It is a very clever, very old response to a world that left us no other good options.
I want to be honest with you about where I am with this.
I don’t know which version is true.
I’m not sure anyone does. The evidence is genuinely contested. The biological story isn’t without support. The structural story isn’t proven either. Most serious researchers sit uncomfortably somewhere in between, which is not a satisfying place to be when you are trying to build something.
What I do know is this: the moment I entertained the possibility that it might be a scar, something shifted. Not because it made me feel worse about women. But because it made me ask a different question.
“If the behaviour is a scar, then what caused the wound? And who has benefited from us calling it a gift?“
Because here is what remains true regardless of origin: the data on what happens when more collaborative, less zero-sum approaches enter male-dominated spaces is not nothing. Boards with gender balance show lower risk volatility. Investment committees with more diverse membership outperform over the long term. Research from Barber and Odean, from Levine and Stark, consistently shows that when women do invest, they do it with more patience, more intention, and better outcomes than the narrative about female risk-aversion would suggest.
So whether this thing is nature or nurture, superpower or scar, the world is measurably worse off for having too little of it in positions of power and decision-making.
This is the question I want us to sit with at our first ever in-person event, Your Wealth, Your Way, on 3 November.
Not “how do women get better at money?” We have been asked to fix ourselves for long enough.
But: what are you actually building? What does financial success look like when it’s built around your life, your values, your version of enough? And what is in your way?
Maybe what’s in your way is a belief you inherited. About risk. About what you deserve. About whether you’re allowed to want more, or differently, or on your own terms.
Maybe that belief is a scar too.
The question worth asking is not whether the scar is there. It’s whether it’s still running the show.
Your Wealth, Your Way is our first in-person evening event for high-earning women who want to stop measuring themselves against somebody else’s financial template. Tuesday 3 November 2026, Shoreditch, London. Places are limited. Find out more below.