I Am So Over This ‘Women Don’t Support Women at Work’ Trope

Vanessa Williams' character on "Ugly Betty" is a woman who does not support other women. Or other men, for that matter.

Yet another op-ed came out this week, this one in the Herald-Sun, claiming that women do not support other women in the workplace. Once again, this piece was largely pulled from anecdotal evidence and from claims by individual women that they didn’t get ahead at a given company or that their choices were disrespected by a female boss. I don’t want to marginalize any woman’s particular experience, but trying to turn an individual story into a larger trend or phenomenon is just lazy and cheap. To refute this article, I’m not going to talk about some of the experiences I have had as both a mentor and a mentee to kickass, intelligent, ambitious women. Instead, I want to talk more generally about the workplace and how it functions.

For a long time, it was difficult, if not impossible, for women to achieve business success on par with men. But in a relatively short (if we’re measuring, say, all of human history here) period of time, women have gone into business and performed brilliantly. That said, we haven’t achieved parity yet – though there are more female CEOs than ever before, they still make up a small percentage of the Fortune 500. Many women have to make difficult decisions about prioritizing their work responsibilities and their family commitments that men of their stature don’t have to deal with. And women don’t earn as much as men for doing the same jobs as them. To claim that women no longer face problems at work would be embarrassingly incorrect. However, trying to blame those problems on women in positions of success and saying that they aren’t supportive and helpful enough is incredibly unfair.

First, feminism does not mean supporting another woman simply because she has the same genitals as you. Voting for a female political candidate simply because she is female, instead of voting for the one whose beliefs and philosophies best match up with your own, is not a way of helping women. Phyllis Schlafly and Hillary Clinton have incredibly different views and approaches, despite the fact that they both happen to be female. Nor does a female boss owe female employees a certain kind of preferential treatment because her employees happen to be women. If men did that with male employees, we’d (accurately) scream sexism. And feminism isn’t about creating a new system where women are on top and men are on the bottom – it’s about giving every individual the ability to live up to their own potential and live the kind of life they want without their gender (or race, or class, or sexual orientation, or whatever) being a hindrance or limitation. I love when bosses go the extra mile to coach and mentor their employees, but that isn’t necessarily a requirement for their job.

So much of what happens in the workplace is based on personalities. Many bosses favor certain employees because the employee reminds them of them at a younger age, because they have a lot in common, or any other reason that often has nothing to do with work performance. It isn’t always fair, especially for the employee who wants their boss to like them despite the fact that they weren’t in the same fraternity, but it’s representative of real life. It’s normal for a boss to prefer working with someone they get along with (especially if you have to spend 12 hours a day together) or who does their job well.  But expecting female bosses to place gender above work performance, personality, office behavior, and a dozen other factors that go into office compatibility is unfair. When a male boss yells at a female employee, it’s “my boss is a jerk.” When a female boss yells at a female employee, it’s “women don’t support other women in the workplace!”

Placing all the blame on female bosses and perpetuating the “Women don’t support other women at work” trope does not help any woman. It makes young women suspicious of their bosses and older female coworkers, and it reaffirms some men’s stereotypes that women can’t work together or that they’re inferior employees. Also, doing what this Herald-Sun author did and holding a “panel discussion” or “town hall” where women can talk about a particular female boss who didn’t help them is not a useful or adequate way of addressing women’s inequalities at the office. All such events do is make women who get invited to speak on such panels feel important and provides them with something else to list on their CV. These panels are just echo chambers – very rarely do such events result in actual legislation, workplace outreach programs, or other practical efforts that could genuinely help women achieve workplace equality.

Here’s the moral of the story: sometimes, bosses suck. Sometimes people suck. Sometimes the bosses and people who suck are men, and sometimes they’re women. No, it isn’t fair, but that’s how it works, and the sooner you stop blaming abstract things like gender and start working on actual solutions that address specific problems instead of talking about how things make you feel, the faster you can change things.