http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24980427-5012694,00.html

It's the corporate stereotype -- the ruthless alpha male. But is the real bullying going on among the women in the office? Shelley Gare reports.

A few months ago, I heard a horrible story. A young features editor had been working in a magazine office where one of the higher-ups had taken a dislike to her. The superior deliberately started excluding her colleague from the information loop. She organised office drinks or lunches but didn’t include the young editor. Others would be invited with an admonishing shush: don’t tell you-know-who. The young woman, whose desk was placed so that her back faced the office, used to sit at her computer and silently weep, thinking no one could see her. She sat there for another six months.

When I first heard this tale, I felt terribly sorry for this young woman. I was repelled by the cruelty and that it had happened in a workplace supposedly devoted to helping women enjoy being women. But there was also a tiny bit of me that thought … well, she was an adult. It was a few women being immature, but she had her job. All she had to do was get through each weekday until 6pm and then she’d have her real life waiting for her at home. How hard could it have been?

Few women can be as upfront in their bullying of their sisters as Queen Elizabeth I of England. Faced with a younger, more beautiful rival, Mary Queen of Scots, who also had a claim to the throne of England, Elizabeth simply had her cousin’s head chopped off. It was lethal. Direct.

By comparison, when adult women bully each other, they are mostly indirect. They use weapons that are hard to detect and that leave wounds invisible to the eye. The adjectives psychologists and bullying experts use to describe such shadowy methods are “covert”, “subtle” and “manipulative”. The tactics are ostracism, exclusion, spreading rumours and playing favourites. Information is withheld; secrets are kept; a victim’s contributions – to either a conversation or a workplace – are ignored. It’s bullying by stealth.

“Aggression in men tends to be worn much more clearly,” says Dan Auerbach, a Sydney-based analytic psychotherapist. “But those subtle expressions of dislike between women make it much harder to fight back, and harder for other people to see what’s going on.”

Schoolyard bullying is, thankfully, finally out in the open; corporate bullying is now recognised; and the popularity of the 2004 film Mean Girls, inspired by the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, means we now know that teenage girls can have more in common with Conan the Destroyer than Bo Peep.

But talking about the kind of bullying that can go on between adult women turns out to be secret women’s business, a no-go area, in spite of the fact that every woman to whom I spoke for this story knows it happens and knows how devastating it can be. It’s the last great taboo, as Anthea Paul, author of the best-selling Girlosophy series, puts it. She says: “It’s the one thing that every woman is aware of but they’re scared to talk about. It is so traumatising when it happens to you, and it damages people emotionally and financially.”

We’re not talking federal Labor MP Belinda Neal here, with her alleged tirade at the staff of a Gosford restaurant and nightclub in mid-2008. Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and her delight in her nickname, was a little closer to the mark. “Sarah Barracuda … she’s proud of that name now, she uses it in her campaigns,” Nick Carney, a former mentor and Wasilla city council member, told US online magazine Salon.com. “But she got that name from the way she conducted herself with her own teammates. She was vicious to the other girls, always playing up to the coach and pointing out when the other girls made mistakes.”

But it was an article in the “news with shoes” title Grazia about the feud between actor Sienna Miller and supermodel Kate Moss that provided a picture of female bullying more awful and accurate: “Kate immediately took a dislike to Sienna … She set about turning her whole Primrose Hill set against Sienna, effectively isolating the young actress from the ultimate A-list social gang. That hit Sienna badly because she had always craved Kate’s friendship and approval.” A source helpfully told Grazia how the gang “all laughed” at Miller.

This isn’t the yelling, abuse or threats that we associate with corporate bullying as practised by both sexes, nor the punches and kicks of the schoolyard. And perhaps one reason it stays secret is because it’s hard to talk about this bullying – how it’s done, why it’s done and who does it – without scrutinising the bigger picture: how women deal with each other and how they really feel about each other.

Says Pru Goward, former sex discrimination commissioner and now NSW Liberal MP: “I think (this bullying) is taken for granted by women … It’s just one of the pains in the butt of being a female, that we do this with each other. I never went to a forum where someone didn’t get up at some stage and say, ‘I wish women would pull together instead of pulling each other down.’ And there would always be a titter of agreement through the room. And then somebody else would get up and wag their finger and say, ‘That’s the problem! You’re always criticising women!’ It is just pushed under the carpet. Women do not want to discuss it.”

There's a lot of truth in this article.  When I was younger I had some terrible run ins with older females at work and they can make your life hell if you get on the wrong side of them.  

Most males in the workplace are far more tolerant and easy going and as the article says - they usually get it out of their system fairly quickly and openly - although there are always a few long term fumers who huff, puff and brood but won't say why they're angry.

Perhaps the perpetrator bullies because she feels that her job could be under threat by a younger person.   It's very childish - but still some people are so insecure they just don't grow up.

Yes when i was 17 I went to Sydney and worked mostly in offices as a receptionist , mostly everyone was older than me so I felt rather protected..

After a couple of years I was told I would make more money as a factory worker...so I thought "OK..I can do that" so I tried it. From the moment I got there it was on..the boss took an unwelcome "shine" to me and it upset a girl there whom the boss was having an affair with..I was pretty niave and never really noticed until her friends decided I should "go"..at that point they became quite aggressive..threatened with a screwdriver, invited ( never went ) to a party that no doubt meant I would be bashed.

Another Australain girl there said.."be careful what you say they are nasty"..but I didnt really heed her advice. She was scared of them- I think I was too niave to know exactly what I was getting myself into..I wasnt from the city.

In the workplace these women had a very nasty mentality...I think they were Lebanese or something like that. They werent bosses as such but they certainly thought they were.

I quit after a few weeks.

I found this bit especially interesting:

THERE ARE SOCIAL REASONS, maybe reasons of survival, too, for all this covering up. Dan Auerbach talks about an important difference – in terms of societal norms – between men and women. He makes it clear he’s speaking in very general terms and that it’s a classical view but … he takes a deep breath: “Men tend to think they are entitled to be direct, to go towards what attracts them. In traditional western culture, we’ve become accustomed to women’s power being based in attracting attention towards them rather than actively pursuing an interest, and so women might not feel as entitled to be as direct about what they want. They may have to find roundabout ways to disguise their interest.”

He also says: “What we comfortably see as assertive in men, we may label as aggressive in a woman. With these norms in mind, a woman’s sense of shame may kick in at a lower threshold of assertiveness than it would in a man.”

Virginia Haussegger mentions Malcolm Turnbull’s admission on ABC-TV’s Q&A program last September that there was no love lost between he and Peter Costello. “Men can say unpopular things about another man and get away with it. The moment women do that, they’re really ostracised,” she says. “It’s interesting that in politics, it’s assumed that women will work together, that they will be the cohesive, nurturing, inclusive elements in a political debate. They’re not allowed to act independently. If they do, they get thrashed.”

So is there a process of natural selection going on here? Are women who act in more indirect ways seen to be more desirable, which means the gene responsible is more likely to be passed on? Or at least, are women who act covertly more successful in today’s society than their more direct sisters? If so, and if it’s a result of behaviour being determined by what’s agreeable to men, then nothing seems likely to change soon, given the surprise findings in a recent paper on differences between the sexes by an international research team. Apparently, the more prosperous, egalitarian and healthy a society is, the more we seem to live up to the man/woman stereotypes made famous in John Gray’s Mars and Venus books.

“The gap between the personality traits of men and that of women widens as the society in which they live becomes more modern, economically affluent and gender egalitarian,” the research team wrote in its 2008 paper “Why can’t a man be more like a woman?” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in the US. The argument is that in traditional cultures that tend to be poor and agrarian, the men are more stressed by hardship, and so are more cautious, less assertive. In developed countries, men are less constrained, freer to be assertive.

There is an exquisitely painful scene in the Keira Knightley film The Duchess that will pummel the solar plexus of any woman watching even if we now live in the 21st century and the film is set in the late 18th. The Duchess tells the story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and her brutal marriage. The duke, played by Ralph Fiennes, utters several memorable one-liners about power and the roles of women throughout. At one stage, as his wife pleads for a chance for her own life, offering him what she thinks is a reasonable compromise, the duke hears her out uncomprehendingly, as if he were listening to an otter asking for an invitation to dinner. “I don’t do deals,” he says finally, his lip lifting. “I’m in charge.”

How often do women still stub their toe – or break their heart – on that truth?

I discovered a new word recently. It’s stutenbissig and it was the senior vice-president for global marketing at the German-based printing company Heidelberg, Adriana Nuneva, who introduced it to my vocabulary. I had been invited to give a series of talks about women in male-dominated workplaces and in my conclusion I talked about the way men respected each other but women too often didn’t. Nuneva explained that in German, stutenbissig literally describes the way female horses snap at each other, but now it’s used to mean the way women “bite” each other maliciously.

We agreed that we needed to be less stutenbissig in our lives. Perhaps that would be possible if we had more respect for each other.

I once wrote in a column, “There is a steely realism to the friendships and working relationships between men that goes missing between women. It is what bolsters men as a sex and the lack of it is what can bring women down.”

Lawrenson, in her seminal essay of the ’60s, coolly wrote of women’s complex feelings towards each other: “Arcane and unadmitted though many of these resentments may be, they find expression in the prickly conduct of feminine relationships, and few women are completely immune to them.”

For her pains, Lawrenson, one of the funniest and sharpest writers of her generation, and a woman who once wrote mischievously – at a time of militant feminism – that she rather liked ironing and folding, has been virtually written out of the history of American journalism.

Perhaps we’ll keep being stutenbissig – and secret female bullies will continue to prosper – until women can happily and fearlessly blow the whistle on all of it.

Maybe there is a competitive advantage in being able to ferociously drive other women away from your provider in a subtle way that he doesn't detect.

Quote:

I think they were Lebanese or something like that.

Or maybe salvadorian or perhaps Bulgarian?

Quote:

He also says: “What we comfortably see as assertive in men, we may label as aggressive in a woman. With these norms in mind, a woman’s sense of shame may kick in at a lower threshold of assertiveness than it would in a man.”

This Dan Auerbach is talking as though women are intellectually and emotionally inferior to men.  I don't think the writer knows what she's talking about either.  There's even inference that aggressive women are lesbians.

Women are just more complex thinkers.  I don't know how you can compare assertiveness to shame.  Women who are dominating and aggressive in the workplace aren't in abundance.  There's usually just one that makes life unpleasant for everyone else and that's because she's jealous or insecure.  Those who are confident within themselves are usually assertive without being aggressive.

abu_rashid wrote on Feb 12^th, 2009 at 6:27am:

Quote: I think they were Lebanese or something like that. Or maybe salvadorian or perhaps Bulgarian?

Yes as I said..or something like that..but not Bulgarian

This is not an Islamic topic.

I cant tell some groups apart...they look similiar to me.

Most women are sociopaths and will fake everything to get where they want.

At least most men are pretty honest.

Quote:

Most women are sociopaths and will fake everything to get where they want.

That's a bit harsh isn't it?  Are you normal enough Easel to sit in judgement of women in general tagging most of them as sociopaths.

As far as most men being fairly honest - well they try to be.

Hmmm..

From the women I've met, you will get the fake smiles, fake sincerity all in order to get closer to you, then abuse the fake trust they have generated to make you dance to their beat.

Then again I've hardly met the majority of women.

mantra wrote on Feb 12^th, 2009 at 7:19pm:

Quote: Most women are sociopaths and will fake everything to get where they want. That's a bit harsh isn't it?  Are you normal enough Easel to sit in judgement of women in general tagging most of them as sociopaths. As far as most men being fairly honest - well they try to be. Hmmm..

Mantra..ha ha.. :)

Men being more honest than women....? well I have to say not in my world easel...but then we cant tar all men with the same brush can we and the same for women.

Women have to start being on each others side a lot more....they have lived in competition with each other forever..the reason for the competive thing being - yes men!.

Thats wrong. And there is an element of truth in what you say...but you do get past that crap, thankfully.

Quote:

From the women I've met, you will get the fake smiles, fake sincerity all in order to get closer to you, then abuse the fake trust they have generated to make you dance to their beat.

Of course there are some women who are fake - but then so are plenty of men as well.  A lot of people put on a bit of an act until you get to know them properly.  Being superficial is just a way for some people to protect themselves or their space.

Women's politics is interesting.

I have witnessed women take considerable offence at the most innocuous remark.

I have seen women part ways with a cat fight but I have seen men part ways with nothing more than turning their backs and never speaking to one another again.

As for the workplace in general - it needs to be remembered someone that's been working in a role for a long time takes on a kind of ownership of the role - intentional or unintentional - and when others get involved it can be perceived as a threat to them.  Use some customer service skills to get them to unwind.