Workplace Drama: Men Can Be Mean Girls Too

In an ideal world, work is where one feels great accomplishment, enjoyment, and comradery among peers, as everyone works towards a shared goal. Good co-workers help us move towards a feeling of occupational self-actualization, or a sense of reaching one’s full potential in one’s work¹. We are often at work more than at home, and the relationships we form there can be lifelong and lasting. If all that sounds a little kumbaya, the flipside of this type of ideal workplace is dysfunctional at best and abusive at worst, in which employees report experiences of workplace bullying, microaggressions, or generally feeling targeted.

We’ve all heard the popularized term mean girls, from Tina Fey’s 2004 movie of the same name, in which teenager Cady Heron, new to public school, experiences the cruelty and ruthlessness of a teenage clique, headed by the ultimate socially aggressive bully, Regina George. As this term has become ingrained in the popular culture, it has been used to describe bullying behavior in a variety of settings, including workplaces. The connotation here is that this is behavior specific to women, whom we stereotype as naturally catty or superficial, skilled predators ferreting out perceived weaknesses in the ability, appearance, or performance of their prey. This type of descriptor does not typically get applied to men, though men experience their own type of masculinity contest in the workplace, in which they are challenged to get ahead in ways that are more about bravado than professional growth.² Why do we stereotype women as mean girls? And what does this behavior look like in men, anyway?

Research on the social behavior of adolescent girls often points to higher levels of relational aggression, including things like gossiping or excluding people from the group, as compared to boys the same age—this is not always the case, and often the motivation for such behaviors is the same regardless of gender.³ One reason we may stereotype women as mean girls is that we ignore the social context in which relational aggression occurs, namely, within a culture that defines and expects femininity to be performed in a specific way.⁴ Because as a society we view women as more relationally oriented, we see this type of aggression as inherently more female, just as we might view physical aggression as more male. For men, there is also an expectation to perform masculinity in a certain way at work, by working the most hours, asserting social and financial dominance, and proving or maintaining one’s status, which can mean exploiting perceived vulnerability in others to keep one’s place secure.² Workplace social hierarchies, and the dysfunctional behavior that maintains them, are built upon the relational aggression of men and women and are part of a larger organizational culture. We expect women to be mean girls because we don’t recognize the relational forms of aggression that men exhibit in the workplace and the toxic workplace culture that perpetuates gendered stereotypes of both men and women.

Before you label your female coworker as a mean girl, take a minute, see if your male coworker is behaving the same way, and consider whether or not your boss (and most likely their boss) is encouraging it. The need to maintain power and control is genderless.

Image by Drazen Zigic on Freepik