What It Really Means for Women to Support Women

A sentence that ended up printed on a Starbucks cup began its life as a private joke between diplomats. Madeleine Albright said she first used the line almost twenty five years before 2016, when she was the United States ambassador to the United Nations and worked closely with the six other female ambassadors there. She later called it the most famous thing she ever said. The line goes like this: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." Most of us have heard it, repeated it, or had it aimed at us, and very few people know what happened on the day it went viral.

On February 6, 2016, Albright spoke at a Clinton campaign rally in Concord, New Hampshire, and the line she had delivered many times before sparked a backlash from women who found it insulting to be told to choose a candidate because of gender. Within a week she wrote an op ed in the New York Times. She said she still believed women should help one another, but that it was the wrong context and the wrong time, and she never meant that women should back a candidate based only on gender. She also noted that if heaven were open only to people who agreed on politics, it would be nearly empty. That correction is the first thing worth understanding about this whole topic, because it separates support from agreement. A woman can vote differently from you, choose a different path, and disagree with you at the dinner table, and she is still not the woman that line was written to condemn.

The Woman Behind the Line

Albright did not pick up this belief from a book. She married three days after graduating from Wellesley, a women's college, and later decided to go back to graduate school for a doctorate. She recalled that the people who criticized her most were other women, who asked why she was in the library instead of home with her children and who compared their hollandaise sauce to hers. Out of that came her conviction that women needed to support one another. She became the 64th Secretary of State and the first woman to hold the job, serving from 1997 to 2001. It was widely reported that Hillary Clinton lobbied hard for her appointment, and Susan Rice, who later served as national security adviser under President Obama, was one of her mentees.

Women Who Did It Without Making a Speech

Some of the best examples of women supporting women never came with a catchy line. Toni Morrison worked as an editor at Random House during the height of the Black Power Movement, and she used that platform to amplify the work of writers and activists like Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara. She was also the first Black woman senior editor in her department, which means she could have kept her seat quietly and called it a success. Instead she spent her position on other people's books. In remarks to people about to start their careers, she told them: "If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." Notice that she did not say to be nice, or agreeable, or quiet about your own ambitions. She said to spend the power you hold, which is a much harder instruction than a compliment.

Why Some Women Pull the Ladder Up

Every woman has met someone who reached the top and then closed the door behind her, and psychologists call her the queen bee. A team led by Belle Derks at Leiden University studied 63 senior policewomen in the Netherlands and asked them to recall either the presence or the absence of gender bias in their careers. Women who did not identify strongly with other women responded to the reminder of bias by describing themselves in masculine terms, distancing themselves from other women, and denying discrimination. Women who did identify strongly with other women responded the opposite way, with a stronger drive to improve opportunities for the women coming up behind them. Derks said that when women are placed in higher positions without any change to the bias around them, some will choose themselves over the group. The researchers argued that queen bee behavior is a result of biased workplaces rather than a cause of them. That finding is not an excuse for anyone, but it changes the question from "what is wrong with her" to "what is she being asked to survive."

What the Numbers Say About Help

The 2025 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org surveyed about 9,500 employees and interviewed HR leaders across 124 organizations in the United States and Canada. At the entry level, only 31 percent of women have a sponsor compared with 45 percent of men, and employees with sponsors are twice as likely to be promoted. For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2025, only 93 women were. The report also found that when women receive strong sponsorship and consistent support from their managers, the ambition gap disappears. That tells us what support has to look like in practice, because encouragement is warm but sponsorship moves a career. A sponsor is someone with influence who puts your name forward when you are not in the room.

What It Looks Like on an Ordinary Day

Support starts with saying her name when she is not there. When a project needs a lead, a speaker, or a vendor, you offer the name of a woman you have watched do excellent work, and you say specifically what you saw her do. When you share a result, you credit the woman who built it, out loud and in writing, because lost credit is the quietest way help disappears. When a client or contact asks who you recommend, you refer a woman first and introduce the two of them yourself. Each of these costs a few minutes, and none of them requires you to be her best friend.

Support also has a conduct side that matters as much as the advocacy. It means telling her the truth in private when her work needs improving, since flattery protects nobody and silence sends her into the room unprepared. It means celebrating her win without turning it into a measurement of your own. It means refusing to join the conversation that picks a woman apart in her absence, whether she is a colleague, a competitor, or a mother who made a different choice than yours. And it means remembering Albright's correction, which is that a woman can disagree with you and still be treated as one of your own.

Staying Neutral Has a Cost

The idea behind Albright's line is older than she is. Robert Kennedy said in 1964 that his brother's favorite quote came from Dante, and the JFK Library says it is a summary of a passage in the Inferno holding that the hottest places in hell are reserved for people who stay neutral in a moral crisis. Women live with a small version of that every week. A colleague gets talked over in a meeting, an idea is repeated by someone else and praised, or a woman's name is left off a list. Staying quiet feels safe, and it is the choice that most often leaves another woman standing alone. Albright said it more bluntly than a campaign stage could hold, but the principle she was after still stands.

The Line Worth Keeping

Albright died in March 2022 at the age of 84, and the line followed her into the obituaries. She had explained that in a society where women often feel pressured to tear one another down, the saving grace is a willingness to lift one another up. Strip away the heat and the hell, and that is the whole instruction. It asks for small acts that are easy to skip, repeated by many women over many years, in offices and kitchens and group chats. The next time you sit in a room where a woman's work is being decided, you will know exactly what it looks like to be the one who speaks.