I’m done with the story that women tear each other down

You know the one. Queen bees. Mean girls. The colleague who smiles while she sharpens the knife. We’ve repeated it so often we half believe it about ourselves. I stopped believing it a long time ago, and last Saturday I got the clearest proof I’ve had in years.

Just after 7am, more than 500 women walked into The Sevens Stadium, in pink, by choice, on their day off, for Pink Ladies Games. Over 100 teams. 38 nationalities. Colleagues, friends, sports clubs, groups who decided over coffee to give it a go. And for one morning I watched the exact opposite of that tired story.

6 battles, and not one of them about being the fittest

We play 6 battles. In Her Shoes squeezes a whole day of running a household into 15 minutes, odd socks and rogue Lego included. Order Up is our take on the waiters’ race, and I promise you’ll never look at a waiter the same way again. There’s Mic Drop, where you grab the microphone and give a power ballad everything you’ve got. Pull It Together, where something big needs moving and only teamwork gets it over the line. Bounce Back, the sporty one, a nod to getting up every time you fall. And Ocean’s Five, a puzzle only brains and instinct crack. None of it rewards the fittest body. It rewards the best team. So a complete first-timer and a HYROX athlete end up side by side, and both matter. Zero judgment, every age, every size, every shade of skin, all on one field.

What that does to a room

Some of the loudest cheers of the morning were for teams that weren’t your own. Women made space for the one who’d told me a week earlier that she “isn’t sporty”, and then roared when she finished beaming. Strangers who’d been matched into a team at sign-up left as a group with a name, a flag and a plan for next year.

A morning for everyone

Around the field, it was a morning for everyone. A marketplace of around 25 local founders, most of them women, selling what they make. Pink Caravan’s mobile clinic, so a free health check could happen quietly in the middle of the fun instead of as a separate, daunting appointment. Families and partners on the sidelines, kids everywhere, men competing in their own track alongside us. More than 24,000 cheers landed on the teams in the run-up and on the day. You cannot manufacture that kind of energy. You can only build something worth showing up for, and then get out of the way.

We braced for empty seats

I won’t pretend I was relaxed about any of it. We brought Pink Ladies Games back to Dubai after a long pause, and you’re never quite sure whether the city will come with you. We braced for empty slots. Instead it sold out, and we ended up with a waiting list of teams we couldn’t fit. That tells me something bigger than one event. In a city where everyone is busy and half of us are far from where we grew up, women are ready for a morning that is theirs, together, in real life.

So, about that story

There’s a lot I could say about health, about awareness, about what this means for companies. I’ll save it. Because the thing I keep coming back to is simpler, and I watched it happen a few hundred times on Saturday: women showing up for each other, for no reason other than that it’s good.

So they say women can’t root for each other? Come to The Sevens at 7am and say that to me again.