Why are Women Bullying Women?
May 11, 2009
by The New Agenda
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Forty percent of workplace bullies are women, according to a survey published by the Workplace Bullying Institute. Moreover, these women bullies target other women more than 70% of the time. As the New York Times asks:
In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?
Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called “the pink elephant” in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways, and conference rooms?
In the following excerpt from her post on women bullying women, blogger Charlotte Front and Center draws parallels between women’s struggles in the work sphere and the political sphere, and points out one of the reasons why we at The New Agenda feel that now is the time for a new women’s movement in which we have each other’s backs.
The research for women on bullyng at work is massive and disappointing, but how that problem has reached over into politics is blatantly obvious if it is looked at with open eyes. Women’s groups have noted the sexist language and treatment from the mass media, but have failed to see their own shortcomings in helping this bullying and patriarchy along. Is there any doubt it exists? No, but where the blame is placed is wrong.
During the 70′s the women’s movement was expected to show how women entering into management would show the better side of business with nurturing and intuitive management that would ultimately lead to multiculturalism and diversity.
Things haven’t worked out that way for women or else the majority of women would not still be in lower to middle management. The blame instantly goes to men as the ones perpetuating it, but women have chosen to adopt the same hostile behaviors they complained about as they increased their management ranks in the corporate world, which stand at 40% today. The answer to this phenomenon from many leading women’s groups is that men are reacting with increasing hostility to the new competition from women, but the world-wide research doesn’t back this thinking. With more women in supervisory roles, the complaints of bullying and hostility come mostly from other women! …
Grace Lau, a Canadian researcher from the University of Waterloo, studied the situations that pit women against women in the workplace, and it involved a belief that they did not see themselves as belonging to a “group” and would continue to act as individuals in the workplace. She contends that this is the root of present day issues undermining the treatment of women.
The findings should be a wake-up call. Failure of women to support other women seems to be the pervading issue no matter which study you read… Women have much to consider after having witnessed the 2008 election year. National feminist groups have not led women in a productive way… Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were ravaged by sexism from other women as well as men… In 2008, and continuing into this year, women may have realized for the first time how far they haven’t come, and how out of touch they really are with other women…
As a retired nurse, who worked for thirty years in a mostly female profession… I don’t find this one bit surprising.
I think it is those who wish to impress their brothers in the patriarchy that are the worst. But, that’s not all. Self hatred is rampant among nurses… and it spills over in their interactions with other women like them.
A sad state of affairs, to be sure. And one of the reasons I decided to retire early.
I think human nature simply has the capacity to bully and maybe women bully women more often because it is easier to do so, women haven been bullied so often.
The whole idea that women have about individuality and not identifying with other women as a group is self-defeating and very disappointing. Like it or not, in our country groups have more power than individuals; look at the AA’s success at electing Obama. It succeeded and there is now an AA president. Women somehow think that if they say that they vote for the individual, not because of sex, that makes them smarter. How pathetic; it makes them look pretty dumb to me…and the patriarchy laughs themselves to sleep every night.
I’m no longer willing to say the blame rests with men. Who cares where the blame rests? Sure, they knocked us down to start with, but who’s keeping us down?
I’m just tired of that; it’s too useful a dodge for taking responsibility for one’s own actions. (Christ, I could like such a super-conservative.) I read a similar post on another blog once where the opster remarked that women hating women in a patriarchy was just men hating women by proxy.
Sure, it was true, but the way the commenters responded to it was so disheartening. They were leaping all over it, as if that little “get out of backstabbing free” card just let them hate and so it with a clear conscience. Affixing blame to men let them act like it wasn’t their fault. They just latched onto that one phrase and stopped there.
I don’t give a crap whose “fault” it is to start with. I don’t think it’s useful to say “women should stop hating on each other but the blame ultimatly rests with men.” How about we grow up and amputate the end of that sentence?
“Women have to stop hating on one another.”
There.
Let’s not loose sight of what went down during the primary. obama did not win the popular vote, Hillary did. Obama got the nomination in much the same way GWB won the 2000 presidential election — even though Gore won the popular vote, GWB got more delegates because the elections process is controlled and operated by the party leaders, not the people!
As we all know, it was clear from the outset that the DNC had already decided obama was going to get the nomination, and would make certain he would by any means necessary. The way they set the stage for an obama ‘win” was, long before the democratic primary, the DNC required certain states which did not have caucuses in the past, to have them in the 2008 democratic primary. Why would they do this? This was done specifically to help obama win delegates in the early part of the primary (to offset his losing the primary), in order to give the impression to the public that he was the new frontrunner and to put Hillary on the defensive and be made to look like she was not the people’s choice.
It is documented fact that the obama campaign then bused people in from out of state (which they not only did in Iowa, but in other states as well) to ensure an obama “caucus win” in those states where he lost the primary against Hillary. The DNC also changed the rules to make certain that a caucus win would result in obama winning, in many cases, as many delegates as Hillary did for winning the primary in that same state. A caucus win has anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 votes where a primary win is to the tune of hundreds of thousands votes. Doesn’t make sense does it? But the DNC and obama got away with this because of the biased media and an uneducated public regarding these changes.
Having said this, I would like to urge “The New Agenda” members and readers to join us in a ‘live chat” over at NoQuarterUSA this Wednesday night beginning at 9:00 p.m. EST. NQ is posting clips from the HBO emmy nominated documentary film “Hacking Democracy” for viewing and then to be discussed. The film features primarily the work Bev Harris and I did while investigating and documenting election issues all over the country for Black Box Voting.org.
My point is this. If The New Agenda wants to help women get elected into office, they first need to learn just how corrupt our election process has become over the past several decades and join us in our mission to change it by getting rid of the machines and bringing citizens back into the process of counting votes by hand, at the precinct on election night. As long as voting machine vendors control our elections, our elections are subject to fraud.
We can kick and scream all we want, but the party leaders and the power elite will continue to choose (as they clearly did with obama) who will get into power, as long as citizens are kept out the process and the counting of the votes is secret.
The truth is, we cannot take our country back, until we take back our elections.
“Sound like such a super-conservative.” Sorry.
And BTW, just to answer the question in the title, which I think was posed rhetorically …
Women bully other women because they can’t get away with doing it to men, and that makes them resentful.
Women can’t and won’t hold men accountable. Look at how that silly woman in that beauty pageant was shredded alive for saying about gay marriage exactly what Obama said. Look at how many supposed “feminists” are capable of holding their noses and voting for anti-choice men, but the minute Sarah Palin showed up with the same leanings — plus the nards to walk the walk — they tore her to pieces. Women refuse to hold men accountable, and forgive them everything.
This builds resentment, and the secret (accurate) suspicion that one is a spineless, useless pushover. They thirst to hold someone somewhere accountable for their actions.
So the minute a woman sets a toe out of line, they rip her to pieces to prove to themsevles how “tough” and “uncompromising” they are. Because they don’t have the guts or the confidence to go after the man.
Kathleen, 100% agreement. NOTHING matters worth a damn with crooked elections. Until then, we’re pressing a button connected to nothing. It might as well be a pacifier. Suck all you want, ain’t no milk coming out.
Murphy at Pumapac wrote on this same article on how the data has been skewed into another “Oh no whats wrong with women” column from the NY Times. She has some interesting points.
http://pumapac.org/2009/05/10/.....-the-back/
What holds me here at TNA is the inclusive nature and the need not to recruit from allied groups, not that invitations aren’t out there but the critical distinction is invitation V recruitment. I think the founding principles here are rock solid at TNA and it has gone beyond being a mere popular blog very quickly.
I think it would be great if women adopted The New Agenda’s new slogan “We’ve Got Your Back.” It would put us all back in the same boat instead of squabbling among ourselves. We can do it!!! In the end, most of us want to see women advance. What a postive focusing of our power…..
The women are protecting the male workers.
I don’t really know enough about the survey to judge its validity, but is it really true that “women don’t like to talk about it”? I think some women love to talk about how they can only get along with men in the workplace because other women are such catty backstabbers. It’s no wonder that some women “will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women — more so than men — have mistreated them” — it’s a bid for acceptance as one of the boys. I’m not sure that articles like this help.
Hi Bes, thanks for the link to Murphy’s take. very good analysis. still, there is also bullying going on . it is none of NYT business to wonder about it. But, we need to advance the concept, that women need to support each other, focus on the positive. strengthen our networks. hold each other’s backs until someone cracks that glass ceiling.
in the meantime we need to talk with our juniors that women of any age including girls need to be respected.
Women and men alike will bully the easy target. It was like that in the school yard and it’s like that in the work place. Katie Curic and Tina Fey are great examples in their slandering and rape of Sarah Palin. Attacking Barak Obama would have been to dangerous. He had the $700,000,000 campaign war chest and the all boys club behind him. Palin was the easy target. To bad Tina Fey didn’t learn anything from her movie Mean Girls.
Murphy’s points were valid.
If I get a pet parot, I’ll buy the New York Times so I can line it’s cage with it.
Amen to that, Kathleen.
See, I mean Hear ya’ at nine on Wednesday!
Janis
Please note that Sarah Palin just appointed a pro-choice judge to the Alaskan Supreme Court. As she stated in the general election, her views on abortion are her personal views and her appointment of judges to the court would be based on their competency. John McCain holds that view as well.
John McCain did not oppose the appointments of Ruth Ginsberg or Steven Breyer, both pro-choice judges.
So this pro-choice democrat voted for McCain Palin.
To bad the woman haters won.
It seems to me pretty obvious that in cultures which value individualism, aspiration and competitiveness, and which organise themselves in rigid hierarchies, bullying is going to emerge as an inevitable response. Add an oppressive need to conform, fear of failure, lust for success and overwhelming contempt for “losers” and the incentive to dump all collective, cooperative strategies in favour of aggressive back stabbing and intimidation is clear.
The NYTimes is beginning to worry me, with all of the pieces they are coming out with about how women are against other women (like Dowd does by example).
It was the NYTimes who published a series of articles and tried to start a movement of “smart women opting out” – meaning that women go to Ivy League colleges and then opt out of the work force by getting married and staying home with kids. The subtext of the articles was “why bother educating women when they are only going to stay home anyways??”
It was later written (elsewhere) that this “trend” of opting out was not a trend at all, but just a few isolated pockets of women doing it, while the vast majority stayed in the workforce after having kids, either because they had to financially, or because (like me) they just love working.
So I would take with a grain of salt anything they have to say about gender relationships at this point…
One thing I learned in this election cycle is that so many of my fellow liberal democrats who are patting themselves on the back for voting for the halfrican American, hardly realize that hate was just shifted from one group of people to another. It is always the cowardly who are the haters. They will pile their hate on anyone who is vulnerable. At this point in our culture its not so safe, and definitely not cool to be hating on a black man. So the hate seemed to shift. Sure alot of hate was there before, but now, my God! Its gone way to far. The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News,CBS the “music” industry and so on have engaged in an orgy of misogyny.
The ones who are so proud of themselves for not being racist, are now misogynists instead. Having America’s first Black president would be something to be proud of, if he in fact won through any process that resembled democracy. But he did not. If he won without the help of the worst kind of campaign against all things female, that might have been nice. Unfortunately what we saw was a travisty of democracy and a bunch of haters playing a shell game with their hate..
I noticed from all of the Obamabots who called (me-who voted for every black major in my city of Brotherly Love)- a racist, Hell, they even called my balck Major, Michael Nutter, horrible things for supporting Hillary; I noticed that these people saw Obama as nothing more than the black candidate. They didn’t know his voting record, or much else about him. They had something to prove, to themselves and to others. They need to convince themselves that they are not the haters. Maybe they suceeded, who knows.
I guess hate is a kind of energy. It doesn’t die, it just changes forms.
Excellent post on “hate being a kind of energy that changes form”!
You hit the nail on the head. Obama is simply the new face of the New World Order that the power elite knew would be able to lead the sheeple into the abyss of total control by the power elite.
Glad you will be joining us tonight at NQ for the live chat about our corrupt elections process. If we don’t fix that, women like Hillary and Palin will never reach positions of real power necessary to balance the patriarchy with the much needed matriarchy!
[...] Monday, we published a short piece on our blog about a Sunday NYT Business article titled Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work. From the [...]
When you have a person like Jeff Ursino, as a member of the board of trustee in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, you compromise that district. Google his name so you can understand what a bully he was towards my family and pray for the children of PVUSD. He is not the best choice for the kids and the only reason he is getting this post is because no one opposed him, so now they are stuck with him. He is heartless, fired me 12 days before Christmas, via UPS and for no good reason, breaking California labor codes and more, while I was ill and with a workers comp case pending, goodluck to all he makes choices for . All I was trying to do was be there for my daughter but he didnt care, oh and I was ill, he had the doctors note stating I would not be back until the 16th and he fired me on the 13th, but I didnt know until the 15th, what a guy…This really saids a lot about the way he treats people and what is important, once a bully always a bully, especially when you bully as an adult and enjoy doing it.And yet the bank never fired him but my tax dollars bailed them out, where is the justice??
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