The oldest form of people power.

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for social impact professionals navigating power, career, and change.

What's inside today's newsletter:

1. How gossip became a sin — and who decided that
2. What evolutionary science actually says about why we do it
3. Whisper networks as resistance, from fiction to the UN
4. Why relational intelligence is the most underrated leadership skill of our time

This week, I want to talk about something we all do — and have been taught to be ashamed of.

Something dismissed as trivial, feminine, low. Something that is, if you look at the evidence, one of the most powerful tools marginalized people have ever had.

I want to talk about gossip.

1. 📖 Dearest gentle reader... a short history of who decided gossip was shameful

If you have watched Bridgerton, you know Lady Whistledown.

She is anonymous. She operates from the shadows — overlooked and underestimated. And yet she circulates information about who is rising, who is falling, who owes what to whom, with more precision and reach than any official channel. The ton is scandalized by her. The ton is also completely dependent on her.

What she does has a name, and it is not flattering: gossip.

For centuries, gossip has been coded as a female failing. A moral weakness. The vice of idle women with too much time and too little sense. The word itself has roots in "godsibb" — Old English for a godparent or close companion, someone trusted with intimate knowledge. It was only later, as that intimacy became something to control, that the word curdled into something shameful.

And who did the policing? Who decided that sharing information in informal networks was unseemly, beneath serious people?

I'll let you sit with that question.

2. 🧬 What evolutionary science says: gossip as survival technology

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar — whose work on human social networks is widely cited — has spent decades studying what we actually talk about when we talk to each other. His finding: roughly 65% of human conversation is social information. Who did what. Who can be trusted. Who is in, who is out, what happens when you violate the norms.

In his view, gossip didn't evolve because humans are petty. It evolved because humans needed to survive in groups too large to monitor individually. Physical grooming — the kind you see in other primates — only scales so far. Language, and specifically social language, allowed us to build and maintain bonds across much larger networks. Gossip, in this frame, is distributed intelligence. It is how a community tracks who is trustworthy, who is a threat, and what the rules are.

More recent research backs this up. Studies by social psychologists Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer found that gossip — specifically, sharing information about someone who violated a social norm — is primarily prosocial. It warns others. It protects the group. It regulates behavior more efficiently than any formal institution ever could.

"Storytelling, gossip, and song," writes Isabelle Hau in a recent piece on relational intelligence in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, "were not cultural luxuries but evolutionary necessities — tools to cultivate trust and belonging in ever-expanding groups."

Gossip is not the opposite of serious work. It is the work, when the work is building collective power.

3. 🕯️ From whisper networks to the UN: informal intelligence as resistance

This week, the Commission on the Status of Women opened at the United Nations in New York. Thousands of diplomats, activists, and development professionals gathered — even as the US delegation worked to strip the outcome document of phrases like gender equality and gender-based violence. Even as funding cuts gutted the organizations that send people to these tables in the first place.

I keep thinking about The Handmaid's Tale. Not as dystopia. As documentation. (No spoilers, promise!)

What kept June/Offred and the women around her alive — what made resistance possible — were the whisper networks. Information passed hand to hand, eye contact across a room, a name slipped into a pocket. The powerful have always known that informal networks of shared information are a threat. That is precisely why they have tried, in every era, to code them as shameful.

Women, queer people, disabled people, poor people, descendants of colonized and enslaved people — we have been building these networks for as long as we have needed to survive institutions not built for us. The office contact who warned you about the predatory senior leader before HR had any paperwork. The WhatsApp thread that told you which funders were worth the meeting and which ones wasted your time. The peer who texted you: I heard they're restructuring your team — start updating your CV now.

That is not small talk. That is intelligence infrastructure. And it has always disproportionately kept marginalized people safer and smarter than any formal system was willing to.

4. 🤝 Relational intelligence: the leadership skill this moment is asking for

Here is the thing about this age we are entering.

AI can process data faster than any of us. It can summarize, synthesize, generate, predict. What it cannot do — what no machine has ever been able to do — is build the kind of trust that makes real information sharing possible. The trust where someone tells you the thing they wouldn't put in writing. The trust where you share the real read on a situation, not the official one.

Isabelle Hau, in her recent SSIR piece on relational intelligence, makes the case that we are entering a relational recession — loneliness rising, connection declining, AI rushing in to simulate what human bonds once provided. The defining capacity of this moment, she argues, is not IQ or even EQ, but RQ: relational intelligence. The ability to build trust, navigate tension, repair rupture, and create meaning with others.

What she is describing, in part, is what gossip — at its best, in the hands of people who need each other — has always done. It is relational intelligence in action. The information economy of people who were never given formal access to power.

The question is not whether we gossip. We do. We always have. The question is whether we do it with intention — whether we use our informal networks to warn, protect, build, and organize. The difference is whether the network is rooted in shared values and genuine care. Whether information moves in service of the collective or in service of individual power.

A closing thought

The powerful would prefer we stay in our separate silos, our separate despairs. They would prefer we not compare notes. They would prefer that informal networks of trust and information remain something we are ashamed of rather than something we deliberately build.

So: compare notes. Build the network. Trust the people who show up for you. Share what you know.

And know the difference between gossip that protects and gossip that destroys. You already do.

Speaking of which — I've been sitting with something all week that I'll dig into properly in next week's newsletter. Two prominent women of color CEOs. Both publicly accused of bullying by their staff. One was swiftly ousted and scandalized. The other has largely been celebrated by the sector. Why?

Is this a case of #BelieveWomen? A case of power operating the same way regardless of who holds it? Or, as usual, something more complicated than either?

I don't have a clean answer yet. Stay tuned.

Tell me: What has a whisper network — formal or informal — done for you in your career? I'd love to hear.

Maya 🧡

P.S. Speaking of building your own network...on Tues, March 31, I'm hosting a free 90-minute workshop, Career Crossroads: What's Your Next Strategic Move? Come for the clarity. Stay for the people you'll meet. Register here →​

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