Working Mum

I spend time on Twitter at least once a day following friends, celebrities and business leaders, seeing what they’re up to on a daily basis (although I think the whole world is following Stephen Fry).

One person I always look out for on the tweets is Marisa Thalberg. I also regularly pop on over to her website Executive Moms to check out the latest articles. The only downside to all of this is that Executive Moms is a US based social network rather than a UK one but in these days of technology I’m not letting that stop me (although I do keep finding myself writing ‘mum’ instead of ‘mom’, now I come to think of it I usually write it as ‘mam’ but that’s my northern roots).

Anyway back to the plot, and the reason for this blog. One of Marisa’s current articles is about bullying on the workplace. It’s a fair bet that the majority of us have been the subject of bullying at some point. I suffered at school a couple of times and once at a company I worked for. In all cases I was bullied by other girls / women.

An extract of the article is below and I highly recommend you read the full article on Executive Moms.

“A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece which put an interesting gender-based spin on this navigating, finding that there is a great deal of “bullying” in the workplace … with more than a fair share of it coming from women.

According to this piece, male bullies are equal opportunity offenders — but the women bullies among us tend to prey on our own kind. It poses the question: how can women break through the glass ceiling if we are too busy ducking blows from other women in the hallways?

I used to feel that the definition of post-modern feminism was to think of gender as a non-issue. Yet with each year of work and life experience gained, I’ve come to realize how naive that earlier notion was. In good and less than good ways, it matters. And it should therefore matter that the soft-hewn ties of sisterhood that could bind us in so many lovely ways are often so tattered and twisted in the world of work. (Probably the playground too, but that’s another story).”