Illustrations by Jacqui Oakley

WATCHING the weekly behaviour of the female candidates on the second season of The Apprentice is like watching every negative stereotype about women at work. Cast in archetypal babe/bitch roles, these wannabe high rollers will don tight miniskirts, teeter on stilettos and show off their assets—in low-cut blouses—in the hopes of gaining that competitive edge. One woman went so far as to rip off her skirt, right on Wall Street, to sell a chocolate bar for $20. They also belittle, bad-mouth and steal credit from one another in order to avoid hearing those ubiquitous words: “You’re fired.” These non-stop catfights prompted Donald Trump’s executive Carolyn Kepcher to bluntly state that the antics of the all-female Apex team made her “embarrassed to be a businesswoman.”

It should. Would you want to work for any of these female candidates? If they were 15 years younger, the women of The Apprentice could successfully audition for the sequel to Mean Girls. But wasn’t the large influx of women into the workplace over the past few decades supposed to have made the office a kinder, gentler place? Aren’t women great at relationship building? And doesn’t it make sense for women to be allies given the dearth of female CEOs? Apparently not.

According to the 2003 Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute Survey of Abusive Workplaces, 58 percent of bullies in the workplace are women. And women bully other women 87 percent of the time. “That’s fascinating and counterintuitive to those who have the idea that women are nurturing, and that once they’ve broken the glass ceiling and gotten into management, they will grease the skids for those who follow—they will protect the sisterhood,” says Gary Namie, a social psychologist and co-author of The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job.

Namie became interested in the subject of workplace bullying eight years ago when his wife, Ruth, also a psychologist, began working at an HMO mental health clinic in northern California. Just three weeks into her new job, the female boss who had welcomed Ruth with hugs and smiles began to systematically dismantle her self-confidence. “She was bullying me,” recalls Ruth, her voice shaking. “The changes were really subtle but it was a constant barrage of ‘you didn’t do this right.’ She undermined me at every point, and got me to doubt myself,” says Ruth. “I think the only way for her to feel good was to make me feel bad and that was her main reason for existing.”

Her co-workers, mostly women, behaved like prurient motorists, lightly pressing the brake pedal to rubberneck the carnage at a roadside traffic accident. “I was pretty isolated,” says Ruth. “No one would ask me out to lunch or for coffee.” After several months, she was put on administrative leave; her patient calendar wiped clean. Ruth eventually hired a lawyer and was able to reach an out-of-court settlement.

Gary and Ruth Namie started the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute, now based in Bellingham, Wash., in 1997 as a way to make sense out of what happened to Ruth and to help other victims of workplace bullying throughout North America. Since launching the institute, both Ruth and Gary say they have learned some interesting things about workplace bullies, in particular that bullies operate in very different ways according to their gender. Bullies, whether male or female, are likely to be the boss, but they both tend to choose women as the recipients of their abuse. Men are more likely to scream at their targets in public, calling them names like “idiot” and “stupid,” says Gary. Women are more likely to adopt tactics of indirect or passive aggression, such as leaving snippy voice mails, using the silent treatment and encouraging colleagues to turn against their objects of attack. Female targets are also more likely than their male counterparts to have their professional contributions discounted, be denied resources to succeed in a new job, have their e-mails and office space scrutinized and bend over backwards to please their micromanaging bosses. They also tend to be extremely competent at their jobs.

Just as troubling as bully tactics are, however, what is more startling is there is very little one can do about being bullied. In the absence of specific laws, there are few effective options to stop a bully. Often, bullied employees will go to the human resources department for help, but HR represents management’s interests, not the complainant’s, Gary Namie points out, and will likely write off a complaint as a “personality conflict.” But bullying isn’t a conflict; it’s the misuse of power. Few collective agreements contain specific clauses about psychological harassment or bullying on the job. The institute’s research shows only 13 percent of office bullies are brought to task, while 87 percent of bullied employees end up leaving their jobs.

The Namies’ findings come as no surprise to Lauren Bernardi, a Toronto lawyer and human resource adviser. Her law firm, Bernardi Fairbairn, has been offering seminars on workplace bullying, harassment and violence for the past four years. “I find [the weapons] female bullies [use]—backhanded comments, not saying hello or goodbye and isolating someone so they feel demoralized—are just like [the things] little girls do in the schoolyard,” says Bernardi.

One of Bernardi’s clients, on medical leave from her job as a lawyer in the securities industry, says: “They don’t come up to you and say you’re a bitch; they just cut you out. They don’t support you … it’s not the kind of thing where you would think, ‘Oh my God, she can’t do that.’ It’s just unco-operative, uncollegial and eventually very damaging.”

As a new employee, says the client, her female boss gave her menial tasks and micromanaged every aspect of her work. “She so much as said I was incompetent on several occasions.” What made her vulnerable was that she really needed the job. “My husband had gone back to school and I was now the breadwinner,” she says. “My boss knew that.”

No one in the office rose to her defence. “In the whole 15 months I was there, one colleague never spoke a civil word to me unless there was a supervisor present. I’d come into the department behind her with my hands full and she’d let the door go; never ever said good morning. She just snarled at me. Behaviour like that just boggles my mind,” she says.

A little more than a year in this toxic work environment has left her with panic attacks, insomnia, and cascading viral and bacterial infections. “I’m no psychologist but this truly was like grade school. It was schoolyard bullying. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my professional life,” she says. “The day I left, two members of the secretarial staff both said they didn’t know how I put up with it for so long.” According to Bernardi, this is a classic scenario. “I think people endure this kind of behaviour for a long time, until it affects their health,” she says. (Continue..)

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