Diva Shontay sent this to me and it is a very interesting topic. I'd be interested in hearing what others think. It was posted in January, but is still relevant.
Article (Link follows below to the full story)
By PEGGY KLAUS
Published: January 10, 2009
I GREW up the youngest of four girls, and nothing was more important to me than my sisters. Sure, we had our fights, but the idea of not getting along for any extended time was out of the question. Helping one another was paramount, especially after my mother died during our childhood.
Later in life, as I started my career, these lessons from my sisterhood served me well, and I naïvely thought that the same would be true for other women, especially on the heels of the women’s movement. But to this day, a pink elephant is lurking in the room, and we pretend it’s not there. For years, I have heard behind closed doors from women — young and old, up and down the ladder — that we can be our own worst enemies at work.
Let me stress that throughout my career, I’ve benefited in countless ways from the advice and support of my female colleagues, just as so many others have. But while women have come a long way in removing workplace barriers, one of the last remaining obstacles is how they treat one another. Instead of helping to build one another’s careers, they sometimes derail them — for example, by limiting access to important meetings and committees; withholding information, assignments and promotions; or blocking the way to mentors and higher-ups.
And if you are a woman and happen to have a female co-worker who is a bully, watch out. A recent study by the Workplace Bullying Institute examining office behaviors — like verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority and destroying of relationships — found that female bullies aim at other women more than 70 percent of the time. Bullies who are men, by contrast, tend to be equal-opportunity tormentors when it comes to the gender of their target.
Despite all the money spent annually on women’s leadership conferences and professional development programs, you’d be hard-pressed to find a workshop on women mistreating one another at work - Full Article.
Peggy Klaus coaches executives and leads corporate training programs. E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.