Work's Bad Girls

By Andrea Sachs

Armed with a Ph.D. in health-care administration, Linda Leavell felt prepared for any problems in her new job as an executive at a community hospital in the West. But shortly after she arrived, she began hearing unwelcome news about another female executive at the hospital. "People who reported to me started coming back and saying they were nervous about what she was asking them," says Leavell. "She was questioning them about the directions I was giving." Leavell soon found out why: the woman was using the information in an attempt to discredit her in the eyes of the hospital's CEO. Despite a confrontation, the woman continued her behavior. Finally, Leavell left not only the job but the state. Says she, now an administrator at a hospital in Redding, Calif.: "I felt like I couldn't focus on the goals and mission that I had in front of me because I constantly had to look over my shoulder."

It is a basic tenet of business-world feminism that women are more collegial than combative males, that sisterhood is powerful. But a thought-provoking, politically incorrect new book turns that conventional wisdom upside down. If colleagues are sisters, the book holds, then look out: the workplace will be fraught with rivalry and dysfunction, because women often betray and undermine one another. (Think Linda Tripp.) "Without fail, in 20 years of conducting conferences and workshops about gender differences in business, almost every participant we've encountered has acknowledged that women damage other women's career aspirations," write authors Pat Heim and Susan Murphy, with Susan Golant, of In the Company of Women: Turning Workplace Conflict into Powerful Alliances (Tarcher/Putnam; $24.95).

Heim and Murphy, veterans of FORTUNE 500 companies, say they decided to write the book when they realized that "women consistently failed to support other women and even actively undermined their authority and credibility."

Heim and Murphy are not shy about using words or taking positions that are bound to generate controversy. Take the term catfight, which they say refers to "the incontrovertible truth" that when women work together, they often clash. Catfights include spreading malicious gossip and rumors, divulging secrets and surreptitiously attacking one another in the presence of others, particularly bosses. In fact, the book was originally titled From Catfights to Colleagues until the authors ran into resistance to the C word. "Men and women are not the same," says Murphy. "We're different biologically, and we're different in personal relationships, and we're also different at work. But different can mean good."

The core idea of the book is the so-called Power Dead-Even Rule, the theory that for two women to forge a positive relationship, their self-esteem and power must be kept "dead even." When one woman gets more power--through a promotion, for example--it sets off tensions. Women sometimes try to redress those status differences, the authors say, through hostility and sniping. The cure for a troubled workplace is to deal honestly with these feelings of competition. The authors say, "From our observations, women are somewhat more comfortable with a powerful woman who plays down her importance than one who does not."

There are plenty of women who disagree with some of the book's conclusions, if not its premise. "The work force is like anything else," says lawyer Janie Smith of Business and Professional Women USA. "You're going to have people who get along, and people who don't get along, of both genders. My personal experience has been that for the most part, women are pretty supportive of one another." Besides, says Smith, what's considered bitchy in a woman is seen as assertive in a man. "If you could remove the gender, I'm not sure you would come to the same conclusion by observing the same behavior," she says. Psychologist Dorothy Cantor, the author of Women in Power: The Secrets of Leadership, agrees. "Women don't all get along with each other any more than men all get along with each other. There are so many other factors besides our gender that influence how we deal with each other."

But others find truth in what Murphy and Heim assert. Says Susan Estrich, University of Southern California law professor and author of Sex and Power, "There's not a successful woman today who doesn't know that sometimes women are your best friends and sometimes they're your worst enemies." Estrich, who was the first female president of the Harvard Law Review, recalls that there was only one female law professor at Harvard at that time. "She used to almost consistently vote against any woman whose name came up for a professorship," says Estrich. "She'd look at us and say 'There are no women qualified to teach here.'" Estrich believes that this sort of "queen bee" behavior results from "a sense of insecurity, a sense that your success will come at my expense, that somehow if I'm not the only woman in the room, they'll get rid of me altogether. And if I push too hard for other women, they will see me as a woman's woman, as opposed to being one of the boys."

The authors report that a third of the women with whom they spoke said they would prefer a male boss. They warn women managers that "female employees who unconsciously live by the Power Dead-Even Rule will be offended by the very behavior in which you, their leader, need to engage to accomplish your goals." At the same time, don't just give up. Says Murphy: "Women come up to us all the time and say things like, 'Who does she think she is telling me what to do?' And we say, 'Well, she's your boss.'"

Heim and Murphy embarked on their research "to understand why women behaved as they did in order to help them find a way out of this destructive behavior." In consulting and lecturing to about 50,000 people a year at more than 100 corporations and agencies, the authors kept encountering the same complaints.

Needless to say, health administrator Leavell is equally convinced that women must look squarely at this issue. She began her current job with new resolve and immediately held a "retreat" at her home for her 10 female managers. She told them about her unhappy experience and invited their own tales. "It's almost like we're unconscious about it," she says. "It's there--women will say, 'It happens all the time.'" It just might be time to stop focusing on getting even and spend more time working together to get ahead.