Why Women Bully Women in the Workplace

In this episode, Olga Khazan award winning writer for The Atlantic, draws upon her powerful article in the September 2017 Issue, "The Queen Bee in the Corner Office" to discuss why women bully each other in the workplace. Recognizing that this complex issue is as easily dismissed as unreal as it is cast as inevitable, she interviews women across disciplines from law offices to consulting firms to academia. She reports on Pew and Gallop surveys and examines a number of studies including one of 60,000 managers. What she consistently finds is that although there is evidence of positive mentoring and support of women by women bosses, there is a persistent theme of women undermining, sabotaging and mistreating other women in the workplace. Turning to psychologists and researchers, she uncovers a number of dynamics that may prompt this behavior as " tokenism" "favoritism threat" "system justification" and most importantly the way in which culture and context shape behavior.