What Is Female Bullying?

Whether in school or at work, the archetypal bully tends to be an extremely insensitive male who seems to take delight in causing pain or humiliation to others. However, most women can attest to the fact that the female bullying exists. These are the “mean girls” at school, so brilliantly illustrated in films like Mean Girls or the black comedy Heathers, and they certainly exist in the work environment too.

The goals of the female bully may not be that different than those of the male bully, although some people point to key differences. The bully is usually a deeply insecure person who works out insecurities by making the lives of others miserable. He or she may specifically target people viewed as either competition or viewed as weak.

Female bullying can mean a variety of behaviors from intimidation, disgusting pranks, and obstruction of ability to do a job. Unlike the male bully, implied threats of physical violence, particularly in the work environment are less common of the female bully, though they can occur. More common behaviors in female bullying can include forming groups from which some people, typically other females, are excluded, spreading malicious gossip to others who have power to make decisions about a targeted person, over-emotionality (yelling, screaming), and finding other fairly covert means to degrade another person. Such bullying at work is often not that different from queen bee behaviors in cliques at junior high and high school, except another person may lose a job or feel forced to quit if bullying is successful

The whole idea that female bullying exists in the workplace tends to fly in the face of conventional thinking that women get along with each other and are the more cooperative of the genders. For years it’s been argued that a principal advantage of women in the workplace is this tendency toward group work, collaboration and cooperation. This is still true for many women, but there certainly remains a group apart from this that tries to get ahead through bully behavior instead of through creating collaborative environments. One explanation for this may be that there are still fewer women holding executive positions in many fields, and female bullying is one way to defeat competition. Alternately, if the behavior of the female bully was more or less ignored in school settings, some women may have never learned how to work in a collaborative way, and can only view achieving goals by the destruction or intimidation of others.

One theory advanced by Peggy Klaus in a 2009 article in the New York Times, “A Sisterhood of Workplace Infighting,” is that female bullying remains unaddressed in the workplace due to the fear that addressing it would prove a setback in the long fought battle for gender equality. Acknowledging that a few women do not know how to behave in the workplace might suggest that no women do and open the door for greater gender discrimination. However, Klaus and others suggest that some women really do need to be taught how to work without bullying, and some form of sensitivity training may be in order.

Advice for dealing with a female bullying or a destructive female clique in the workplace typically involves talking to management, but first documenting any behaviors that are destructive or aggressive. This may be challenging to do if actions of the bully aren’t overt, and especially if the bully is backed up by other group members. However, documentation of any acts, and discussion with management or human resources may prove helpful. Newer models for training workers to be more cooperative are beginning to be employed in some workplaces. Those being bullied could also research those models and suggest their implementation in a work environment.