I don’t mean to talk smack about my sisters, but they started it! Look around and you can see the effects of horizontal hostility seeping through the pores of our relationships, organizational positioning, and even in the fairly meaningless daily interactions with fleeting females in our lives.

Just the other day, I caught myself in a mini-vacation back to my own tween cattiness of yesteryear. I spotted an annoying though inconsequential woman in my life tooling around town in a sports bra as a top. Besides the fact that I thought underwear as clothing went wayward with the 80s, I was baffled by her apathy to keeping up appearances. Surely she wasn’t proud of the snow white muffin top peeking above her capris!

The more I thought about my rude reaction, the closer I came to the truth. I was thrust into competitive mode because I feared she had found some secret ingredient to blind confidence that I had not yet attained. In order to bring myself up, my natural reaction was to bring her down. (Although, in all fairness, you had to see the ensemble to fully appreciate my knee-jerk mock reaction.) Still, why did my competitive nature manifest in an attempt to push her down through mean-spirited, gossipy ridicule? Why should it matter to me if she chooses sparkly pasties and daisy dukes over the standard weekend garb favored by the other women in that setting? Although I could pinky-swear that I will forevermore refrain from such petty behaviors, I recognize that I have a lot of introspection to tend to before promising that lofty goal. I simply cannot be held accountable for the poor fashion choices of others and a quick-draw resort to my sex’s evolutionary arsenal against competition. Studies indicate that this type of reaction in woman on woman competitiveness is especially common in the workplace.

Women: sneaky competitors
Nan Mooney, author of  I Can’t Believe She Did That! Why Women Betray Other Women at Work, claims that it’s not just a female problem, as both sexes are extremely competitive in the workplace. The difference is that women tend to compete more surreptitiously, some might even say sneakier, than men. Men reportedly tap into their aggressive nature when dealing with threatening co-workers and, therefore, are more likely to express their distaste directly. However, when women feel competitive with other women, we tend to revert to our evolutionary proclivity toward passivity and are, therefore, more likely to try to bring them down less obviously through gossip, slander, sabotage, and cliquish exclusion. Instead of confronting competition directly or asking ourselves why their success threatens us, we resort to a corrupt war against the competition even as we publicly pretend all is well.

Competition–part of the workplace environment
Phyllis Chesler has a psychologically bound rationale for this tendency toward unhealthy competition between women in the workplace. In her book, Women’s Inhumanity to Women, competition at work is seen as a natural result of the workplace environment. Everyone wants to stand out at work so when someone interferes with that individual desire, the typical reaction is to try to get rid of the rival rather than focus on how to better stand out. Men tend to be more overt in their efforts to rise above the competition and, therefore, make obvious attempts to squash the competition. Following the motto that “all’s fair in business,” men can fight aggressively in the war of business but move on personally almost immediately. Women, on the other hand, tend toward more covert operations, controlling the threat behind the scenes. Thus, while men are just as brutal and, often, even more so, women stay entrenched in the ongoing battle, unable to separate the business aspect from the personal.

Messy as this passive form of competition may be, if it was working for women it might squeak into being acceptable along the vein of  ”all’s fair in business,” but these habits usually prove to be self-defeating and certainly do nothing for women as a unified group. Part of the problem is that the archetype of workplace organizations is a design of men and, so, the tendencies and talents of women are not an intrinsic component of workplace culture. Thus, the typical organizational structure is more easily maneuvered through the aggressive tendencies of men rather than the innate and socialized inclinations for passive conflict resolution of women. Fortunately, passivity doesn’t have to be a nasty word!

Thanks to our intrinsically gentler nature, women tend to have a greater capacity than men toward working compatibly together within networks. According to Mooney, when women form relationships with other women in the workplace, they work more effectively together than men typically do. Also, women are more able to affect other women’s work performance which, of course, can yield hideous results if women in the workplace are attempting to spread negativity, but can be quite useful if that power is reigned in for good and not evil.

Hopefully you have not personally engaged in such unhealthy competitive behaviors with other women at work, but if you have ” you’re not alone. Luckily, you don’t have to feel alone at work either. Embrace other women as alliances: strive to work more cohesively, learn from one another, and communicate honestly. But, remember, you will always get a pass for bitchy behavior if a female co-worker enters the office wearing a sports bra as a top. Sisterhood can’t excuse everything.