Do Working Women Keep Each Other Down?

May 29 -- There has been a lot of press about "mean girls" lately, but do those playground bullies grow up to become mean women in the workplace, like the conniving Sigourney Weaver who tried to sabotage poor Melanie Griffith's career in the movie Working Girl?

Some new numbers suggest it might be true.

In 1999, women owned 9.1 million businesses in the United States, and held 48.9 percent of all managerial and professional jobs. But currently, there are only nine female CEOs positioned at the helm of America's 1,000 largest companies. A controversial book, In the Company of Women: Turning Workplace Conflict into Powerful Alliances by Pat Heim and Susan Murphy, suggests that frustrated female employees can blame the women they work with for keeping them from these top jobs.

While men certainly play a role in keeping women from the top of the corporate ladder, women often do more harm than good for their workplace sisters, Murphy said.

"They don't really like the term catfight, but it's a shorthand they know that everyone understands, men and women both," Murphy told Good Morning America. "And those catfights are sort of a dirty little secret that women don't like to talk about."

A recent Oxygen Media poll found that 65 percent of women resent women who are either in power, or act like they are. Women also acknowledged that among female co-workers there is backbiting and gossip, indirect acts of aggression that can thwart someone else on their path to success, Murphy said.

Heim used to run workshops for women in business entitled "How to Survive in a Male World," but workshop participants didn't seem to think that men were the ones holding them back.

"They'd say, 'yeah, that's true, but women are the real problem,'" Heim said. Murphy and Heim, who speak to about 50,000 people a year on gender and workplace issues, believe the problem is that women become close in the workplace, and when friendships between female colleagues go sour, they can wreak havoc in the office. Men do not have that problem, because they tend to be more reserved with one another at work, the authors say.

Snipers, Gossips in the Workplace

Heim and Murphy's mantra is that "female alliances keep females free," but in their book, they cite seven different types of difficult women in the workplace who work against that ideal: the Gossip, the Sniper, the Clam, the Saboteur, the Kitchen Sink Fighter, the Cabal Queen and the Super Bitch.