The Extra-Weird Work in Female Friendships
On the ethics of Sisterlifting nobody warns you about
No one warns you that some of the most devastating betrayals won’t come from men but from other women.
We talk a lot about, and celebrate, sisterhood.
But what happens when a friend ‘borrows’ your work, your words, your help, and pretends it was hers all along?
This essay is about that. We are not talking lawsuits but here’s what it is: the subtle, uncredited lifting that happens between women who call each other close friends.
It’s about what it means, and what happens, when someone steals your brilliance without the transparency to acknowledge they didn’t make it alone.
Let’s settle in for this one:
Women have always built in the margins.
Our creative labour hides inside the rhythms of mundane daily life. In friendships, it’s especially easy to overlook because this labour looks like love.
The headline that shines on someone’s homepage often began in a WhatsApp chat with a bestie. The sentence that 'felt spot on' was sharpened by a gal-pal in a voice note. A dog walk and chat with kids in tow, gave a piece its spine.
Creative thinking is shared between girlfriends freely, co-constructed in unguarded, intelligent exchanges only close female friends know how to have.
Then a post goes up, a book deal drops, the world claps and the woman who shaped it behind the scenes is quietly deleted from the story.
This is the unspoken economy of creative kinship between women: shared documents, shared thinking, shared instincts.
But not always shared credit. We are fluent in editing each other. In shaping, softening, giving, gifting. But rarely in claiming. And almost never in being cited by name.
It’s a type of betrayal we don’t often name because it comes wrapped in affection.
Let’s call it what it is: a gendered failure of credit, silent authorship theft, and an expectation that being invisible is somehow acceptable.
I’ve had titles I wrote show up as someone else’s Substack heading. I’ve heard my metaphors echoed by people who have literally read my drafts. I’ve watched frameworks I designed get reshaped, barely, and then taught as original insight. And I’ve been told, when I mentioned it, that it was a compliment.
Let’s be honest: I don’t need more compliments. I prefer credit. Credit isn’t about my ego. It’s me caring about ethics.
When a man does it, we already have a word: Bropriation.
Bropriation happens when a man takes credit for an idea a woman first introduced, often in the same meeting, sometimes in the same breath, and repackages it as his own. You’ve seen it. You’ve lived it. It’s textbook patriarchy.
When a man takes your idea, it’s theft. When a woman does it, it’s complicated.
We want to believe in the myth of shared sisterhood. We want to believe we’re all in it together. But if we can’t speak about the power imbalances within female friendships - creative, intellectual, professional - we’re participating in the same silencing we claim to oppose.
When one woman lifts another’s labour without naming it, she’s not breaking sisterhood. She’s revealing what kind of sisterhood it really was: affectionate on the surface, extractive underneath. It feels like close friendship. But somehow it was intimacy used to excuse (unintentional?) exploitation.
Solidarity thrives on mutuality. This wasn’t that.
Here's what happens, over time, when credit is withheld:
➡️ We start to second-guess our memory.
➡️ We wonder if the phrase/model/idea was ever really ours.
➡️ We go quiet in group chats.
➡️ We hold back the brilliant voice note because someone else might polish it and post it first.
➡️ We begin to believe our talent only matters when passed off as someone else’s.
That’s how creative women disappear: slowly, softly, through a thousand unnamed contributions.
It’s got a vibe, sure. But it’s never had a name of its own, until now. I’m calling it Sisterlifting.
Sisterlifting is when another woman takes your insight, phrasing, or framework, often offered in the spirit of kinship, and presents it as hers.
It masquerades as shared brilliance, but only one of you ends up cited. The other is left ghosting the margins.
It’s not like bropriation. It’s sisterlifting: the theft we forgive because it feels like friendship.
But not all theft between women is sisterlifting. Sometimes, the closeness is missing, but the pattern is hauntingly familiar.
Mel Robbins published Let Them and sold the fuck out of it. Millions nodded and reposted. But the phrase, and its emotional logic, was first spoken years earlier by Cassie Phillips, a smaller, less famous creator who coined it in a poem. Robbins never named her. The concept soared. The original voice faded.
Sisterlifting relies on proximity: shared space, shared trust, shared intimacy. The Mel Robbins case sits adjacent to this, it wasn’t between friends, but between two women operating in different spheres.
It was Sage Justice’s sharp analysis that helped me see the Mel Robbins saga not just as erasure, but as something closer to plagiarism because Robbins and Phillips weren’t friends, and there was no shared proximity to excuse the omission.
Let me be blunt, this is nothing to do with cancelling Mel Robbins.
It’s about recognising an important pattern: it’s almost always the woman with the bigger platform who lifts from the woman with less. The hierarchy stays hidden, but the effect is the same: visibility for one, invisibility for the other.
We are trained to look away. But let’s look together.
Whose work built the ladder we’re standing on?
And if we know, we have a responsibility to say so.
This subject feels difficult for a reason. Power-seeking is woven into how masculinity is shaped in culture. Femininity, on the other hand, is built on a foundation of communality: emotional availability, self-erasure, unpaid care.
When a woman reaches for power, even something as basic as acknowledgment, she’s seen as disturbing the social order.
Research shows that women who are perceived as asserting themselves provoke responses of contempt and even disgust. Not because their actions are harmful, more because they are seen to step outside the boundaries of what good women are meant to be.
I came to this understanding more clearly through the writing of Rebecca Solnit, drawing on the research of Tyler G. Okimoto and Victoria L. Brescoll, and through generous, ongoing conversations on this topic with close women friends whose minds I admire1: , , , and Alexandra Broomer. Each one has had to contend with what it means to be talented and seen, while navigating the cultural discomfort that visibility provokes.
Put plainly: many women have been taught to feel uneasy around other women who rise.
To publicly cite another woman can feel like placing her at the centre. If she’s already influential, the tension heightens.
We’ve been conditioned to associate female visibility with threat. So instead of naming each other, we blur the edges. We hint at influence. We generalise. We say “a friend once said” when we know exactly who it was.
To name another woman in our work is a refusal. A refusal to carry the old expectation that women should offer everything and ask for nothing in return. It’s a gesture of clarity. It says: I know where this came from. I didn’t make this alone. And I want you to be seen, too.
Competition between women intensifies when we’re taught there’s only so much to go around.
Scarcity makes us wary, while care becomes conditional. Even friendships, especially creative ones, get shaped by the fear that naming another woman’s talent will dim our own.
But naming is not a sacrifice. It’s a skill. A muscle. A practice we’re responsible for, especially when the work was shaped in close proximity to ours.
Female friendships are where some of the most life-enhancing, idea-generating, emotionally intelligent care takes place.
So the question isn’t whether we believe in sisterhood, it’s whether we’re willing to practice a version of it that honours another woman’s talent without making it mean there’s less left for us.
It’s not a sign of lack to name another woman’s brilliance. It’s a sign of integrity. And our daughters (and sons) are watching. What we name, and what we withhold, teaches them what sisterhood really means.
✍️ The Practical Guide: How to Name the Work That Isn’t Ours (& avoid being a SisterLifter)
🌀 When we want to include a friend’s phrase or hook, we can say: “Loved when you said X, may I quote you directly?” It asks for consent and honours the source without fuss.
🌀 When we build on someone’s framework, we might say: “This grew from an idea I shaped with Y, tagging her here.” It expands the thought and acknowledges the collaboration that made it possible.
🌀 When an insight comes from a private conversation, we can say: “This came out of a call with Z, grateful for the spark.” It protects the lineage of the idea while strengthening trust.
🌀 When we can’t recall who said it first, we can still say: “This came through shared conversation, I didn’t land here alone.” It reflects the truth of collective thinking, even when memory fails.
🌀 And when we realise we’ve used someone’s thinking without credit, we can still say: “This line wasn’t mine, it came from X. I should’ve named her sooner.” It builds integrity. It models trust. It reminds us that honouring each other’s contributions is always possible, even after the fact.
🌀 When we notice something we shared, (an idea, argument, or framework etc) show up uncredited in someone else’s work, we can message: “Hey X, reading this, I recognised something I’d brought to our conversation. Can we talk about how it’s showing up here?” It’s a prompt for repair, not a drama. And it lets the relationship deepen around strong boundaries,2 rather than calcify around resentment.
👭 How about you?
Has someone close to you ever used your words, your thinking, your phrasing, and left you out of the story? Have you felt the tangle of feelings this can bring up?
We don’t have a cultural script for how friends name this, honestly, lovingly, without shame. If you’ve found words that helped (or wished you had), I’d love to hear them.
Drop them in the comments. Let’s build the language together.
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👉 last thing: Words I Needed to Read, or Wrote
My Imaginary Grown Up Home: shares an invitation to cherish what’s real, here, now. Love it!
Tender is the Raver: my interview with creative strategist, father, and DJ on what makes his creative and family life zing
Write Up!: Get paid to read your work at this new writing event in London, UK on July 19th. Submissions to close midnight 6th July. See you there?
25 ways to savour the summer season as your silly, sexy, sensory self: reminds that summer is calling us to play 🫶🏼
Why Jameela Jamil is done with being interviewed by women
That’s it loves, I’ve another essay coming soon on my experiences of being a glorious disappointment, thanks for being here. Grateful for you.
..and want you to see.
Remember this from : “Boundaries aren’t agreements you make with others, they’re agreements you make with yourself. You aren’t betraying or abandoning anyone by setting a boundary, you’re opting not to betray and abandon yourself. When you choose to respect your boundaries, you’re choosing the path that you’ve decided is the healthiest and best one for you.”
I once reached out to a massively successful Substack author and asked her to collaborate. Over the course of months, we hashed out our content, and then she disappeared.
A few weeks later, she posted an article on her Substack, on the topic we had discussed, that was blatantly plagiarized from a post deep in my archives. She made no mention of me whatsoever, but managed to cite the sources I referenced in my original post.
I was baffled. I had 30 subscribers, fewer views, and she felt giving me credit would, what, diminish her authority? Shrink her audience? That her hundreds of thousands of readers would abandon her because she used the ideas of a lowly newbie?
The power dynamic you mention, Danusia, is key; this wouldn’t have been pulled off so effortlessly if my platform were equal to hers. My Substack remained invisible, while silently supplying the content for hers to exponentially grow.
In the end, I filed a copyright infringement claim and the post was promptly removed. I wanted to let it go, that felt easier, but a friend pushed me to stand up for myself. And I’m grateful she did.
‘Credit isn’t about my ego. It’s me caring about ethics.’ I loved reading this article!
as I head deeper into research collaborations, credit is my new currency and I’m no longer hoping for the best but being clear from the outset what my expectations are.