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Female "Bullies" At Work: What Are These Pieces Really Trying To Say?
New York, 11:40 AM
Tue Dec 22
61 posts in the last 24 hours
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Female "Bullies" At Work: What Are These Pieces Really Trying To Say? |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
05/11/09
My wife (now in her fifties) has returned to the workplace full time after many years of working at home or working part time. She loves the content of her job (as a therapist for autistic preschoolers) but puts up with no end of misery caused by some of her co-workers and superiors. Much of the problem seems to be that she's in an older generation than most of her co-workers, but the fact of the matter is that they, as well as her top management, are all women. She is nearly at her wits' end trying to figure out how to deal with it.
And pardon me ladies, but most of the behavior is the stereotypical "female" behavior (freezeouts, dirty looks, withholding of information, etc.) that my own Aspergerian male self probably wouldn't even notice.
Please don't get pissed off at me for noting this. For myself, I've worked for men and women and overwhelmingly prefer to work for women.
But dismissing this is no different from dismissing male bullying with "boys will be boys".
05/11/09
Here's a counter anecdote- I temped for a few months in a small hedge firm where the boss routinely reamed guys by calling them ugly, fat, small dicked, retarded, failures who were lucky to even have a job. He also threw things at them. This is apparently not uncommon in finance.
Women tend to use relational tactics more than men (the freeze out, passive aggression) and while that sucks the pieces that discuss it frequently overlook the bat shit craziness of stereotypical male anger. I had a very crappy female boss once who routinely bitched me out using relational tactics and I'd take that any day over the psycho hedge fund guy (who never even yelled at me).
I'm tired of articles about evil women keeping other women down. If a journalist is going to write about workplace bullying s/he should write about workplace bullying in all its forms and not overlook the data to make a sensational story.
05/11/09
Bullies are 60% men and 40% women? But women tend to bully other women and men bully both genders equally.
Where could that information possibly come from ? Business surveys ? Interviews ?
Wouldnt results of a survey need to be qualified ? Men PERCEIVE themselves being bullied or women DESCRIBED other women.....?
I am not seeing any scientific rigor or evidence behind this anecdotal and pedestrian article.
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05/11/09
Also, I've never been bullied by a co-worker in retail or restaurant settings... only in an office.
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05/11/09
lauded for only comprising 40% of the bullies in the workplace.
Shyeah, that'll happen.
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05/11/09
Good for you if every woman you work with supports you and order stuff without giving you an attitude. I wish that were the case for me. I don't think it's misogynistic to have articles about this. I've seen this first hand.
05/11/09
05/11/09
If the women you work with have trouble taking orders from you the problem is either them or you. The problem isn't their vaginas.
05/11/09
These phenomena and dynamics at work exist. Class (or lack thereof) exists. Sexism exists. Gender, race, religion, bias, prejudices, this is real life, and these things exist. To deny that certain factors come into play is beyond ridiculous.
I meant "ranking" as in a junior employee, not lower class. Women in my office who feel "powerless" lash out at women in in my office who have superior positions to them. If they do not exist in YOUR office, good for you.
But I see it (esp. among admins, secretaries, receptionists, office staff, whatever the PC terminology is now), and I've seen it time and time again.
"Power to the sista" is an ideal, and there are many many women who are not on the same page. That's just the harsh truth. There are many women who do not want to see other women get ahead, and will do any amount of sabotage and back-stabbery to bring them down out of spite, envy, mental illness, what have you.
Do men bully? Of course. No one is suggesting they don't. But to bash articles that write about women who do and then accuse them of some evil patriarchal scheme is pointless, irrelevant, and torch-bearing. It's too simplistic intellectually, and I can't do it.
05/11/09
Not every woman supports women getting ahead, but I think your post is part of the problem. You're attributing all kinds of motives to activities that could be a million different things and stereotyping an entire class of women.
05/11/09
Also, as the daughter of a female boss (I don't work for her, but my good friend does and likes her) who worked incredibly hard to get where she is now, I highly resent this article.
05/11/09
I'm not fucking "nurturing." I'm not supposed to be "nurturing" at work. I'm not here to fucking soothe over someone's dented ego or simper and make nice or organize a cookie bakeoff or whatever shit women ostensibly love to do but actually don't. I'm not a "bully" or "aggressive" just because I have ambitions and I like to see results.
As soon as we can stop thinking in terms of rigorously sectioning off 50% of the world's population just for daring to be born with XX chromosomes, and treat everyone decently, we can start overcoming these problems. It does no good to scream and shout about how "OMG MENS AND WIMMENS ARE SO DIFFERENT IN TEH WORKPLAAAACE!11" That only perpetuates this nonsense.
05/11/09
I'm certainly not good at "networking", like they say, but why should I have personal relationships with people that have nothing in common with me and we don't get along? Just so I can have these people get me jobs or bring them into the company? I don't think so. Plus having ADD will make my skills of "organizing" pretty poor.
I hate that we have to act into our stereotypes, when a lot of us don't act that way at all. I'm not going to bullshit my personality just to make the male hierarchs happy.
05/11/09
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05/11/09
"We're competing with our sisters for dad's attention, or for our brother's attention," Ms. Cirocco said. "And then we go on in school and we're competing for our teachers' attention. We're competing to be on the sports team or the cheer squad."
Really??? How is this ANY DIFFERENT FROM BOYS?
05/11/09
05/11/09
That said, I find that the female bullies I've encountered are always in my low-wage shitty jobs, where everyone (regardless of gender) engages in pithy and mean-spirited relationships.
05/11/09
And another maybe related problem is that some women feel the need to be friends with everyone. If anyone isn't overtly friendly or doesn't wants to chat or go to happy hour, it's taken personally and passive aggressive behavior begins.
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Fin.
Where's my freakin' byline?
05/11/09
But WOMEN!?!?!?
Fugedaboudit!!!!???
It's not prejudice when it's true! Right fellas!?!
Woooooohoooooo! Let's institute national tits Tuesday!
05/11/09
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05/11/09
What I mean is, people who have had a bad situation with a female colleague or boss will say things like "I'll never work for a woman again!" as though it's something that is now a universal truth for all women. But I doubt anyone would say "I will never work for a man again." One is seen an individual flaw, the other a gender flaw, probably because of the catty "mean girl" female stereotype.
05/11/09