Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work on May 9th. The quotes in it are telling. No one wants to mention it. Women have quit over it. We are all holding ourselves back because of it. It’s there as a wholly different problem then a nice set a gams being remembered more than a pitch for a change in strategy. This problem with men is known and tractable.  But women sharing power- that’s a game of musical chairs. There is only one throne to be had. We forget Emily Post and play passive aggressive chess matches of belittlement where the pawn can’t specifically call out the queen unless she is speaking with a rook or knight who happens to be in the right time and space to understand. The problem with the company of women is that we are expected to serve as a shadow, not as a team. One woman serves as the other’s step. For whatever bundle of cultural mores we cannot be the group that rows in sync and that hand over hand helps to bring others all up. We do not want to add more girls to the board room. It seems, in the company of women that more than one in the position of power is intrinsically threatening. Darn, I thought we had already graduated high school. In the original Grimm’s story it is the little pigeons who cry, “Turn and peep, turn and peep”. They get the attention of the king’s son and he passes on the false bride (who actually hacks off her own toe to make the shoe fit) for Cinderella instead. In the workforce of women the goal is not to be the bride (there are indeed those of us who have been there, done that). The goal is to level the field. A chance to work hard and to be respected for what you can do. The ability to serve and build a team. To make things happen. And were we to help one another out, a level field would mean more women overall. That’s not a moral I have found. Yet. Because it is in many, not all places that we find this dynamic. So we reach out beyond the confines of one little moat and look elsewhere. We work with men, we work with women who are compassionate over competitive or we go off and do our own thing. Create our own set of rules. We don’t play games.]]>