Their own worst enemy

The achilles' heel of the feminist movement:

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women's movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called "the pink elephant" in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?

Women don't like to talk about it because it is "so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women," Ms. Klaus said. "We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters."

Ask women about run-ins with other women at work and some will point out that people of both sexes can misbehave. Others will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women - more so than men - have mistreated them.

"I've been sabotaged so many times in the workplace by other women, I finally left the corporate world and started my own business," said Roxy Westphal, who runs the promotional products company Roxy Ventures Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. She still recalls the sting of an interview she had with a woman 30 years ago that "turned into a one-person firing squad" and led her to leave the building in tears.

The hemming and hawing about men being bullies is beside the point. The "way that women are supposed to behave" is nothing more than a romantic ideal that is coming crashing down in the face of egalitarian leveling of the playing field which has created a necessity for many women to fall back on their natural tendencies. All of the rhetoric about creating a "nurturing environment" or encouraging group identity as women will fail in a similar manner because they are based on a view of women that is little more than a memetic mutation of Victorian Era romanticism about female nature.

The anti-discrimination laws that feminists claim have helped women become successful are also an important barrier to getting rid of these female bullies. When women become bullies, they tend to be passive aggressive and to go to great lengths to sabotage other women using words and psychological warfare. Male aggressiveness can often border on being illegal, whereas female aggressiveness is more subtle and subjective making it harder for companies to make a case for firing a female bully. It's easier to write up a screaming man who overtly intimidates coworkers than it is to write up a woman who systematically psychologically attacks a female coworker.