The Way you Judge Other Women says something about You

Not a comfortable title. I know.

Stay with it.

Think about the last time you had a strong, fast, negative reaction to another woman. Not a considered opinion. A snap. She posted something and you felt that instant curl of irritation. She said something at work and you wrote her off before she'd finished the sentence. You saw what she was wearing, or what she was eating, or how she was parenting, and something in you contracted.

Where did that come from?

I'm not asking so you can feel bad about it. I'm asking because the answer is usually more interesting than 'I just don't like her.'

The Inner Critic Has an Outward-Facing Mode

Most women are very familiar with the inner critic as a voice that goes inward. The one that picks apart your choices, your body, your words after a conversation ends. The one that keeps a running tally of everything you got wrong.

What's less talked about is that the same critic turns outward. Research on self-criticism and social judgment consistently shows that the standards we apply most harshly to others are usually the standards we apply most harshly to ourselves. The critic doesn't switch off when it's aimed at someone else. It just redirects.

So when you judge another woman for being too loud, it's worth asking: where have you been told you're too much?

When you judge her for being too quiet, what have you been told about women who don't speak up?

When you judge her for her body, her choices, her relationships, what has the voice inside you been saying about your own?

I try not to judge. I genuinely do. But if I'm honest, it's something I notice in myself more than I'd like, and not just towards people I don't particularly like. I've caught it with people I do like, which is the more uncomfortable version to admit.

What I've come to recognise is that my judgment almost always traces back to something I perceive I'm lacking, or something I feel I should have by now. Careers. Recognition. Relationships. When I see someone else having the thing I want and haven't got, something in me contracts. I dress it up as an opinion. It's usually envy wearing a costume.

The version that's hit me hardest to look at involves motherhood. My kids are neurodivergent. The road that comes with that has tested me in ways I genuinely couldn't have conceived before I was in it. And somewhere along the way I started using that as a quiet measuring stick for other mums. The ones whose parenting looked smoother, whose kids seemed easier. I'd catch myself thinking "they don't understand, they don't have kids like mine" and filing their struggles as less valid than mine.

What I eventually had to sit with is what that judgment was actually doing. I was using my own hard experience as a reason to dismiss someone else's. Which meant I wasn't really seeing them. And underneath that, if I'm honest, I was also using it as a reason not to look too closely at myself.

That's the thing about judgment. It feels like it's about the other person. It almost never is.

Negativity Bias Plays a Role Here Too

The brain is wired to notice threat faster than safety. This is well established in cognitive neuroscience, and it applies to social threat as much as physical threat. In a world where women have historically been compared, ranked, and found lacking, other women can register as potential threat without any conscious decision to see them that way.

This isn't inevitable. It's a pattern. And patterns can change.

But they don't change by pretending the pattern isn't there. They change by noticing it.

The Judgment That Hurts the Most to Admit

There's usually one category of judgment that stings most to look at. The one where, if you're honest, you've been judging a woman for something you quietly want for yourself, or something you've already decided you can't have.

She's confident. She doesn't apologise. She takes up space without seeming to carry guilt about it. And something in you bristles.

That's not a character flaw. It's information.

It usually means that quality lives in you somewhere, and you've been told, directly or indirectly, that it isn't safe to own it. So you keep it at a distance. You keep it on her. And you judge her for having it.

What This Has to Do With Your Patterns

I work with women who are self-aware and still stuck. They know where their reactions come from, at least in part. They've read the books, done some version of the work. And yet the same dynamics keep showing up.

A large part of that is because the patterns that drive our reactions don't live at the conscious level where insight can reach them. You can understand intellectually why you react a certain way and still have no real control over whether you react that way.

Awareness is the start. It's not the finish.

A Practical Place to Begin

For one week, notice your snap judgments about other women. Don't act on them, don't suppress them. Just notice them.

Then ask: is there any version of this that I also say about myself?

You don't have to do anything with the answer immediately. Just let the question sit.

Most women find that the most persistent judgments they carry about others are the ones they've been hearing about themselves, internally, for years. That's not a coincidence. That's the inner critic finding an outward target.

The Own Your BS® program goes deep on this, specifically on how the inner voice develops, what drives it, and what it takes to change it. If you want a starting point, the book is a good one.