Gender inequality | Why female leaders are seen as 'conniving'

After hearing several stories from both men and women complaining that ‘mean girls’ still exist in the workplace, authors Andrea Kramer and her husband Alton Harris explored whether there was indeed conflict at work between women.

The book It’s not you, it’s the workplace: Women’s conflict at work and the bias that built it, follows stories including one account where a woman described her previous female bosses as ‘b*****s’. The woman claimed that her female bosses had been so awful in the past, that she would now only work for men, the Financial Times reported.

Meanwhile, several published books including Mean Girls Grown Up; Catfight; Mean Girls at Work; Working with Bitches; The Stiletto in Your Back suggested that senior women are ‘cold’, unable to work with other women and ‘conniving’ in their attempts to hold others back.

According to the book, the authors suggested that women have no more frequent conflicts in working with other women than men do working with other men. Plus, there isn’t any evidence “that women are more mean-spirited, antagonistic or untrustworthy in their dealings with other women than men are in their dealings with other men”.