Fuller - Working with bitches: identify the eight types of office mean girls and rise above workplace nastiness

Working with

Bitches

Working with

Bitches

Identify the Eight Types of
Office Mean Girls and Rise Above
Workplace Nastiness

Meredith Fuller

Copyright 2013 by Meredith Fuller

First published as Working with Mean Girls by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011

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Composition by Cynthia Young

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuller, Meredith.
[Working with mean girls]
Working with bitches : identify the eight types of office mean girls and rise above
workplace nastiness / Meredith Fuller. First Da Capo Press edition.
pages cm
First published as Working with Mean Girls by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7382-1659-1 (e-book)
1. Problem employees. 2. Women employeesPsychology. 3. Bullying in the
workplace. 4. Abusive women. 5. Interpersonal conflict. I. Title.
HF5549.5.E42F85 2013
650.1'3082dc23
2012041914

First Da Capo Press edition 2013

Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com

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To Sandra Hacker,
with respect and gratitude

Were quiet because it is awful to admit and you dont want anyone to know. Your husband knows; youre crying over the stove. Your teenagers wonder if their high-achieving mother is actually just pathetic. You doubt yourself. You dont want patronizing advice about how to manipulate a manipulatorI wouldnt play the bitch game, even if I was capable of it.

Kaylene

Bitchy behavior can be so insidious or slippery that its often hard to tell if youre really being targeted or if you are simply too sensitive. You feel an uncomfortable mix of confused, amused, devastated, and angry. You dont want to believe that someone in the sisterhood could possibly be working against you, 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 its merely a personality clash or miscommunication that youll be able to fix. But if you cant fix it, the negative effect gets harder to cope with. You remain haunted by a cruel secret that youre too humiliated to mentionanother woman is causing you grief, and you havent done a thing to deserve it.

You appreciate that you wont get on with every other woman at workbut how come some bitches can deeply wound while you are immune to the shenanigans of others? How come you can laugh off the antics of some, but those of others are not so benign?

You might have seen Mean Girls (2004) and laughed and cried in subconscious recognition. Most of us can recall a mean girl from school daysperhaps 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 outside. If you didnt 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 behavior.

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

In my psychology practice, I specialize in career counseling. Over the last thirty years, I have worked with thousands of people, both individually and in groups. My clients are aged from their early twenties to midsixties 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 dont 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, nastyin other words, bitchybehavior 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 females 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 havent come across such insidious behavior before, or the experience forces them to revisit bad memories of school days where they were marginalized or taunted by mean girls. In some cases, clients have grown up with a mean female family membera mother or siblingand 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 behavior.

I became curious about a conundrum. Over the years, Ive heard so much detailed distress from clients about bitches in their workplaces, yet so very little from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and the general public. Women will readily talk about their lack of potential partnersthe fear they wont find anyone to have a child withor confess that they cant 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?

To explore this furtive topic of bitches at work, I established focus groups of women of different ages and occupations and who hadnt met each other before. I assumed I would need to facilitate conversations between strangers and that there would be a slow warm-up. Not so! As soon as we sat down, a frenzied and sustained discussion took place. Relief! Given permission to talk, these women appreciated an opportunity to vent about a topic that had silently dogged them. Many had assumed that they were the only ones with the humiliating female flaw of attracting the bitch in the workplace.

I analyzed my notes from clients. I spoke with friends and colleagues. I contacted various social media sites and association memberships and invited anyone I knew to complete an anonymous questionnaire or interview, or both. Strangers who heard of my research called me with stories that they would recount in florid detail.