Bullying, but not as you know it

How to tell the difference between bitching and bullying in the workplace.

We all know we won’t get on with every other woman at work – but why does the behaviour of some co workers deeply wound while you remain immune to the shenanigans of others? How come you can laugh off the antics of some, but others are not so benign?

Bitchy behaviour can be so insidious or slippery that it’s often hard to tell if you’re really being targeted or if you are simply too sensitive. You feel an uncomfortable mix of confused, amused, devastated and angry. You don’t want to believe that someone in the sisterhood could possibly be doing your head in, whether consciously or unconsciously.

You think you should be able to handle it, especially when you pride yourself on bringing out the best in others; or you assume that it’s merely a personality clash or miscommunication that you’ll be able to fix. But if you can’t fix it, the negative effect gets harder to cope with. You remain haunted by a cruel secret that you’re too humiliated to mention – another woman is causing you grief and you haven’t done a thing to deserve it.

You might have seen Mean Girls (2004), and laughed and cried in subterranean recognition. Most of us can recall a mean girl from school days – perhaps you were upset by malicious things girls said or did, or maybe you noticed how the ‘in’ girls were mean to the girls on the outer. If you didn’t have direct experience of this at school or in your teenage years, you probably know of a friend or relative who was troubled or hurt by bitchy behaviour.

What happens to these mean girls? Some of them grow out of it, but others grow up and go to work, taking their nasty behaviours with them.

In my psychology practice I specialise in careers counselling. Over the last 30 years I have worked with thousands of people, both individually and in groups. My clients are aged from early twenties to mid sixties and range across most occupations. The gender split is around two thirds female, one third male.

Most women who come to see me have one of two major issues: they feel invisible, devalued, or hurt by their relationships with managers, colleagues or staff in the workplace, or they are in a poor vocational fit and don’t know what to do. In a significant number of cases, the two themes are intertwined.

Of the women who have problems with the people they work with, an increasing number are worried about female workplace relationships. Dismissive, snide, nasty – in other words, ‘bitchy’ – behaviour from another female is a distressing component of their work life. They have usually suffered privately for some time before they seek professional help; being on the receiving end of another female’s nastiness is painful to talk about.
Most of my clients who work with bitchy women have one of two reactions.

They are either shocked because they haven’t come across such insidious behaviour before, or the experience forces them to revisit bad memories of school days where they were marginalised or taunted by mean girls. In some cases, clients have grown up with a mean female family member – a mother or sibling – and are dismayed to find the torment repeated in the workplace. When bad memories are triggered, women often wonder what they are doing to attract this behaviour.

I became curious about a conundrum. Over the years, I’ve heard so much detailed distress from clients about bitches in their work  places, yet so very little from friends, colleagues, acquaintances and the general public. Women will readily talk about their lack of potential partners – the fear they won’t find anyone to have a child with – or confess that they can’t find a decent man (or woman) to go out with. Surprisingly, it seems that admitting to having no sex life is easier than fessing up that you are struggling at work because your boss is a bitch. Why is this so?

Despite the public silence on the topic, my studies have revealed an outpouring of horrific tales that secretly haunt some of these women.

Why do nearly all members of the female population instinctively know what ‘bitchy’ means? With the exception of three or four respondents, no one asked what ‘working with bitches’ meant. They know it intheir bones, from personal experience or observation of others in their workplace.

Yet, in professional settings it is rarely, if ever, discussed. Occasionally someone might say, ‘There’s a bitch at work,’ or ‘I work for a real bitch’, and in most cases, their shrug indicates that’s part of life and that no dialogue will be entered into. Some women raise their eye  brows knowingly, and the conversation moves on. But other women will frown, accusing them of letting the side down (‘That’s not nice’;‘You shouldn’t label women like that’; ‘Well, I’ve never had that experience – maybe you’re doing something to attract it’; or even, ‘You’re letting the sisterhood down’).

Who wants to be misunderstood, called a traitor, considered to be pathetic, or wear a sign that says ‘bitch bait’? And so mostly, a woman who works with a mean girl – a bitch – will keep her problem to herself.
To be clear bitchiness isn’t bullying. While bullying has featured in the media for some time, very little – if any – serious attention has been given to bitchy behaviour. Is it considered such a trivial piece of female behaviour that it isn’t taken seriously? Do people not know about it unless it has happened to them? Has it been considered such a minor subsection of bullying behaviour or so harmless that no one bothers to raise it, or is it too politically incorrect?

Regardless of what other people think, coping with a bitch at work is exhausting, hurtful and stressful beyond belief. Just because it isn’t bullying as such – just because you are not being threatened in a physi  cal or mental sense by someone who is using her power over you – does not mean that it is not serious or dangerous. Bitches might not exercise aggression or put your physical safety on the line, or threaten you with dismissal if you don’t comply with their instructions, or frighten you into submission or tears – but they wage a campaign nonetheless.

What bitches do is insidious – they may cloak their malevolence with sweetness and niceness, accusing you of being the power monger while they are ‘too hurt or scared’ to speak to you. And they might be so subtle that no one could ever prove that something happened.

Women don’t cope well with bitchy behaviour in the workplace nor should they be expected to. It harms, damages, violates and confounds. It’s time to put the issue on the table, and help the women who are affected decide how best to protect themselves.

This is an edited extract from the book Working with Mean Girls by Meredith Fuller, published by Viking, rrp$29.95