Busting the ‘Mean Girls at the Office’ Myth
A new book by Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris takes a look at the notion about “mean girls,” “queen bees,” and women’s competitiveness with each other in office settings.
Amy Boardman Hunt of Muse Communications interviews Kramer about “It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace: Women’s Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built It,” and the conclusion that there is no empirical evidence that women have more intense or frequent conflicts in working with other women than men do in working with other men or that women and men do in working together.
“The enduring notion that women are mean to—or hostile or antagonistic or competitive with—other women, can be explained, in part, by the fact that women often hold other women to higher interpersonal behavioral standards than men do,” Kramer, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, says in the interview.