Women Bullying Women at Work

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10women.html

The article from the New York Times is called Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work

begin quote from above nytimes webpage
ONE reason women choose other women as targets “is probably some idea that they can find a less confrontative person or someone less likely to respond to aggression with aggression,” said Gary Namie, research director for the Workplace Bullying Institute, which ordered the study in 2007.

But another dynamic may be at work. After five decades of striving for equality, women make up more than 50 percent of management, professional and related occupations, says Catalyst, the nonprofit research group. And yet, its 2008 census found, only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.

Leadership specialists wonder, are women being “overly aggressive” because there are too few opportunities for advancement? Or is it stereotyping and women are only perceived as being overly aggressive? Is there a double standard at work?

Research on gender stereotyping from Catalyst suggests that no matter how women choose to lead, they are perceived as “never just right.” What’s more, the group found, women must work twice as hard as men to achieve the same level of recognition and prove they can lead.end quote.

I think that other dynamics than mentioned in the article are also at work here. First, down through history men have always made their own rules and traditionally women have followed "The Rules". But maen were always making new ones for themselves.
But men always understood that when you make new rules you might die at the hands of another man. So since men understand this they tend to be egalitarian in the way they treat men and women because if they discriminate against a man by himself he might just kill him and if they discriminate against a woman she might sue him in court. So being egalitarian a man saves his life and keeps himself out of court.

But a women executive might have reached as high as she can go within her company. So all she can do is defend her position from other women moving up below her. The better her underlings are at their jobs the bigger threat they are to her job. So for a female executive to make the underling over achiever good at her job miserable is a strategy for keeping her executive job long term. So, if the female executive eliminates the competition in this way she might keep her executive job until she retires with a pension. This is definitely a factor in all this.

Also, most women have been conditioned not to be violent. This is not really true with most men. There is always a point that violence can be reached by a man. Women know this so they might be afraid to bully a man, both for how it might make them look to other men and women but also because this man might not put up with being humiliated by a woman in public. So the reason an executive woman would bully another woman 70% of the time is just to stay alive.