Women May Be Their Own Worst Enemies at Work

When you think of the concept of women fighting women, you may conjure up images of hot oil and mud pits and screaming yahoos in nightclubs near the Los Angeles airport.

But that’s just the minor leagues of female-bashing, compared to the art-form stuff that goes on in offices and other workplaces.

That’s the thesis of San Clemente author Tara Roth Madden, who set out several years ago to write a humorous book about the things women do to each other in the corporate world.

Only thing was, the subject didn’t turn out to be so funny. What Madden discovered was that women all too often end up being their own worst enemies in their efforts to climb the company ladder.

The book, “Women vs. Women,” was published in 1987 and marked another point on the continuum of the women’s movement. You might say it widened the discussion a bit, for while men have historically taken the rap for holding women back, Madden theorizes that women “are helping men by covertly fighting one another. That invisible combat removes half the players from the game. In time-honored female fashion, our unacceptable behavior has remained hidden, not only from other women, but from ourselves as well.”

Today, the former journalist and businesswoman is working on a second book from the scenic overlook of her South County home.

Unfortunately, she says, not many women have taken her advice from the first book. At a time when many women work--either by choice or out of economic necessity--Madden contends that they’re still sabotaging one another.

“What amazed me most when I was doing research for the first book was that the young women didn’t go from where I am and go forward; they went back,” Madden says. “For whatever reasons, their value systems seemed more like Grandma’s than Mom’s. They wanted a man, they wanted a relationship, and they didn’t want to work overtime, and they didn’t want to work on holidays. They were there to date--not necessarily at work, but the conversations (at work) were usually more about relationships than about hints on how to get any advanced training or learn more about computers.”

The skirmishing takes many forms, but much of it, Madden contends, results from myriad cultural lessons learned early on, including exercises in the petty jealousies of young girls and their parents’ stereotyping of their societal roles.

Women then carry that over to the workplace, Madden says. “They spot one another’s idiosyncrasies, physical imperfections and signs of aging . . . with more glee than dismay,” she writes in her book. “In a spurt of negative sisterhood, they want other women to suffer the same sting of outrageous fortune.”

She claims that successful women don’t carry other women on their backs because they like the uniqueness of their own good fortune. And at the other end of the work scale, Madden says, younger career women hurt themselves by sharing secrets too quickly.

As such, the “girls” clique seems the picture of sisterhood until one gets promoted. Then, Madden says, the other members have a bevy of information to use (and do) when complaining to the supervisor that the woman shouldn’t have been promoted in place of one of them.

“Men are afraid to get in the middle of these relationships,” Madden says. “I think men would fight women more at work, but they don’t have to. When two women fight, they both lose. When they’re overly friendly at work, I think they’re holding themselves and other women back. It ruins their credibility.”

The solutions to the problem are rather simple, she says: “What I’d like women to do is go into work, and for the hours they’re at work, I’d like them to talk about work and act in a businesslike way. I don’t want them to make friends with other people at work. I don’t want them to go to lunch with other women at work, because I think they give away power.”

A recent Fortune 500 survey, Madden says, showed that women hadn’t made many inroads into the top corporate positions in the past 10 years, despite all the ballyhooed consciousness raising.

Women must look at surveys like that and wonder why they should even bother.

When you only get one life, it’s hard to fit it all in.

In our office, a woman is the big boss, and other women have key jobs. If there’s internecine warfare going on, I’m oblivious to it. And if there is, I just hope I don’t get hit by any stray bullets.

But as a man, I suppose I must disqualify myself as an expert on the subject; that is, I can’t be sure if what Madden says is the gospel truth.

All I know is that no man could get away with saying it.