Why Women Are Bullies At Work

[antigone382]

170. I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as a victimization contest.

This thread became an opportunity for a whole lot of people to jump on board with perspectives that women were way nastier as coworkers and way more sadistic as bosses than men, in spite of both the contents of the actual article (which more or less describes female bullying in a context of male domination) and in spite of the research report on which the article was based, which found that a) bullies are more likely to be men; b) victims are more likely to be women; c) when you actually do the math to break down the statistics, women are equally likely to be bullied by men as they are by women, and d) men are far more likely to be bullied by other men than they are to be bullied by other women.

If there is a story to be told, as far as I can tell, it is in line with much feminist theory about the nature of patriarchy. Power is abused by whomever has it against those who are perceived to have less of it. In this case, men bully both men and women who are beneath them, at nearly equal rates (though slightly higher with other men), whereas women bully exclusively other women, because it is much less likely that they will have power over a man, both in terms of work hierarchies and in terms of social expectations. The article itself quotes the main researcher's suspicion that female bullies target other women because they view other women as more vulnerable, whereas they fear reprisals from men. The article also suggests that women bully other women because they feel vulnerable as women in a male-dominated workforce and are anxious to secure their status through the positive perceptions of men.

Yet this thread very quickly mushroomed into a referendum on the misbehaviors of women in the workplace, completely ignoring the male-dominated context in which that misbehavior occurs.