Today’s Orlando Sentinel ran an article about women in the workplace being each other’s worst enemies.  I have been saying this for years. 

Does it seem like everyone gets along with the men in your office - men and women alike? How may women can you say the same about?

In my experience, young women are more likely to come onto the professional scene with a social chip on our shoulder, or with agendas that reach beyond our own professional achievement. We are more likely to be subtly or overtly competitive toward people (usually other women), not just toward work, and are more likely to continue the Gunner persona beyond law school. We are less likely to welcome new same-sex associates (or more likely to do so with ulterior motives), and when it is offered to us, we are more likely to take kindness as condescension. What makes these behaviors so striking is they seem to be confined to the inside of the law firm, where the competitive heat is most intense. These same women are perfectly pleasant with other women and women lawyers, on the telephone, or on the other side of a transaction (for example, two of my closest friends met each other and became friends when they were opposing counsel on a multi-million dollar lawsuit).

It is not just the youngest women though. Secretaries and paralegals who have been at a firm many years sometimes resent taking instruction from a 25-30 year old female attorney, who has had more career opportunities than she has. Sometimes it does not matter how polite and respectful the young attorney is, she will have to defend her instructions to, and interactions with, staff in ways that a male attorney of any age never would. (There are some wonderful exceptions to this though; one of my favorite people in the world is a real estate paralegal who answered all of my stupid questions that I did not want to ask the partner when I was learning real estate, and was the best mentor I ever had in a law firm.) 

I have also heard of a female baby boomer lawyer instructing a Generation X part-time lawyer / full-time mom that her working part time does a disservice to all women lawyers, in that it keeps us from being taken seriously. That may have been the case in the 1970’s feminist movement, but these days, more women are in a position to explore different types of working roles and schedules. I hope it becomes generally expected that women will undertake this exploration, so that our own daughters will have numerous and varied opportunities to choose from.

And hopefully, they will get along with each other better than we apparently do.