I decided to do a short series—four newsletters—because of the response to last week’s newsletter, “Ending the Manel.” If you missed it, read that one quickly first for context.

A friend of mine is contemplating starting her own business—or specifically taking herself out of an institution which sells her services and working for herself instead. She has many advanced, highly specific therapeutic degrees and will have no problem filling her slate with clients, and groups, and content-based support work, but she has a lot of understandable anxiety about the leap. She’s been asking around for advice and the resounding feedback is that she must peddle scarcity: Limited-time opportunity! This will sell out fast! And so on. When she told me this, my heart sank, not because it doesn’t work (obviously, it does), but because I’m so tired of manufactured scarcity—women already encounter enough of it in our thinking and in our daily lives.

“I think there’s real scarcity in your practice, which is one thing,” I offered. “Your time is limited by the hours in the day, and you likely won’t be able to take on everyone who comes. And yes, some programs have a start date and people need to sign up before then. It’s okay to say all of that. But hitting peoples’ fear and panic buttons by creating scarcity where it might not exist is not a vibrational match for your highly, highly sensitive system. You will count yourself a fraud if you feel like you manipulated people into signing up.” Obviously, she knew all of this and just wanted reassurance that she wasn’t an idiot for not adopting standard marketing practices. And this is where I waver: Because a refusal to play the game means you likely won’t win it. I know what I think is more valuable (integrity), but that’s a privileged stance—because scarcity for women is real. And it also can’t be overstated that playing the game doesn’t necessarily work either: It’s hard to win when you not only hate the rules, but the game is rigged.

We all know the pay gap—85 cents to the dollar, women to men. (That said, we definitely don’t spend enough time on its nuances, namely that single white women typically earn as much as their male peers. It’s mothers and women of color—and the Venn diagram of those two groups in particular—who really take the hit.) The pay gap isn’t the worst offender when it comes to women and money, though: I write in On Our Best Behavior in the Greed chapter (which is all about scarcity and feelings of not-enoughness) about the wealth gap, which is 32 cents to the dollar, women to men. Yep, you read that right. It’s a staggering gap to bridge.

For women, scarcity is often very real, and not just when it comes to cash: Access to higher salaries yes, but also to resources, time, visibility, opportunity, funding, mentorship, to a seat on the executive team or in a board room where tokenism, or “twokenism” often reigns. And this is where real scarcity and the perception of scarcity get wobbly. Because instead of solely railing against systemic inequities, we are conditioned to train our sights on the woman in the seat, armed with the belief that in order to make room for ourselves, she must be dethroned. That if she has the thing, we can’t possibly have it too. (Back to the Envy chapter in On Our Best Behavior.) When we engage in this type of behavior, we inhibit our ability to expand by keeping what’s possible constrained to what’s in our sights, what we already know to be possible. This is subtle and it’s also deeply rooted. It’s difficult enough to identify when this socialized behavior has us by the throat—it’s much harder to change it, particularly when it’s largely invisible and functions as a norm. (I’m coming back to this in a minute.)