MARC BRYAN-BROWN/© 2012 MARC BRYAN-BROWNMore leaning, less fightingI have had my share of egomaniacal male bosses, but I also know how female fury can strike.
Some years ago, I was working for the director of a UN agency — when an email landed in my boss’s inbox: “I just hate that Katrin Park.” It was, ironically, from a gender adviser, who didn’t know I managed my boss’ email.
The hostility was shocking. My boss wasn’t exactly invested in empowering her staff, either.
And so, I more than understand the 39% of women who, according to a Gallup poll, prefer a male boss over a female one (just one-quarter of women said they preferred the latter). Woman-on-woman bullying is not a simple case of disappointment, in which we look for and fail to find workplace sisterhood.
It’s as serious, if not as visible, as the wage gap in the battlefield to end inequity. As is the case with all workplace bullying, it’s discrimination and a major contributor to lost productivity.
A study this year by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, found that 30% of office bullies were women — and they targeted other women more than two-thirds of the time.
Male bullies unloaded on both sexes pretty much equally and preferred open verbal abuse, whereas female bullies typically opted for subtle putdowns and backstabbing.
There are many explanations for workplace infighting among women, not all of which fall on the shoulders of the perpetrators themselves. Even though a record number of women are in the workforce today, the glass ceiling is not budging.
In 2013 women held 17% of board seats in corporate America. In 2012 and 2013, fewer than one-fifth of Fortune 500 companies had 25% or more women directors. Ten percent of companies had no women on their boards.
Given that stark reality, one might expect women to be building “lean in” alliances and sticking together. Sadly, many have only been pitted against each other in a zero-sum game to elbow their way up the corporate totem pole.
To be sure, gender stereotypes play a role, too. Under social pressure to be compassionate and supportive at all times, women can’t duke it out (verbally) with each other like men do. So tension frequently finds insidious, indirect ways to surface.
What makes female bullying especially pernicious is that women, whether they are the targets or the perpetrators, are the losers. The same Workplace Bullying Institute study found that women targets lost their jobs at a higher rate than men did, and 30 percent of women who bullied men got fired. Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson's case is an example of both, a bully-turned-target who then got sacked.
Ultimately, female bullying is a power issue that overrides the gender issue.
Pretending that everything is honky-dory in the workplace will not make the problem go away. If recognizing female bullying is considered as undermining the hard-won progress in the last decades, then we need a different kind of feminism that allows women to be who they really are: human.
Men get to be humans in the office. So too should women.
Employers need to call out all types of bullying as the serious offense it is. Businesses need to take a lead on recruiting more women into senior roles. It’s the right thing to do and the savvy thing to do from a profit motive.
An ongoing study by the University of California at Davis found that companies with higher number of women executives and board of directors had 50% more profit and three times more revenue than companies that did not.
From elections to boardrooms, women have been in the limelight recently. These are positive developments. The recent rise in celebrity feminism, espoused by the likes of Emma Watson, emphasizes the inclusion and role of men on the road to gender parity.
But no amount of empowerment workshops will stop those set on beating up on members of their own gender as they strive for equal opportunity.
Park is a former UN staffer based in Seoul, South Korea.
