Monday, Feb. 01, 1988

When Women Vie with Women

By David Brand

Laurie Bernstein well remembers starting at a small Southern law firm and getting distinctly icy treatment from the only other woman lawyer on the staff. When Bernstein was given one of her female colleague's cases to handle, resentment turned to spite: Bernstein discovered that she was not getting the court documents, letters and other important papers she needed to handle the case. Late one evening she and a senior partner found the missing material hidden in the woman's mailbox. Ms. Sabotage was severely reprimanded. "I felt terrible," recalls Bernstein, 30. "I had expected a camaraderie to emerge between the two of us as the only female lawyers at the firm. But quite the opposite occurred."

Now, hold on a minute. This is not the way it was supposed to be. All of that demonstrating and pamphleteering in the early '70s was supposed to have & helped women move into professional and managerial jobs without resorting to destructive behavior. But as more women rise in the corporate power structure, they are discovering, much to their dismay, that they are not always sisters under the skin after all. In fact, many of them are acting suspiciously like . . . well . . . men. "Now women are encouraged to be as aggressive as men on the job," write Psychotherapists Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach, co- authors of the just published book Between Women: Love, Envy, and Competition in Women's Friendships (Viking; $17.95).

The authors, who like many feminists have spent years trying to open corporate doors, are trying to comprehend the world they have entered. Female bonds are being broken, they say, as women discover that "the feelings of competition and envy, the scurry for approval, the wish to be acknowledged and noticed by other women are now a part of their daily work lives." Nor do some younger women seem to care much about feminist ideals. "I see a lot less concern among younger women about sticking together," declares Nancy Ferree- Clark, associate minister at Duke University. "They don't feel the allegiance to the women's movement that older women do. They say, 'Gee, that's passe. I can make it on my own.' "

Things can get pretty nasty behind the Escada suits and the hint of Giorgio perfume, if Author Judith Briles is to be believed. In her recently published book, Woman to Woman: From Sabotage to Support (New Horizon Press; $18.95), she sets down nearly 300 pages of testimonials supporting the hypothesis that women are attacking women in the workplace with carefully veiled venom and viciousness. "If women are going to sabotage someone, it's more likely to be another woman than a man," declares Briles, 42, a former Palo Alto, Calif., stockbroker.

Many women scoff at this portrait of the female barracuda maneuvering her way around corporate reefs. "I have found a tremendous amount of helping and generosity among the women in my industry," says Mary McCarthy, 42, a senior vice president at MGM/UA Communications in Beverly Hills. Lawyers Renee Berliner Rush, 31, and Julie Anne Banon, 32, say they became best friends while working for a Manhattan executive-search firm. "From the day we began working together, we believed that the way to succeed was to work with and help each other, not to work against each other," says Rush. The two women now run their own headhunting firm for lawyers.

Perhaps reality lies somewhere between the rapier thrust and the sympathetic ear. There may be a tendency for women to be more jealous of one another than men are of their colleagues, says Niles Newton, a behavioral scientist at Northwestern Medical School. That stems, she thinks, "from insecurities because they haven't been in the workplace as long as men." Assertiveness and rivalry also make many women feel uncomfortable, "and it becomes much more a problem in the workplace, where they are a natural occurrence," says Anne Frenkel, a social worker with the Chicago Women's Therapy Collective. "Women have to understand that being competitive with someone doesn't mean you don't like them. Men can be competitive and still be friends."

Still, friendships between women -- what Simone de Beauvoir called that "warm and frivolous intimacy" -- are too often the casualties of success these days. Eichenbaum, 35, and Orbach, 41, are concerned that "in the world of every-woman-for-herself, the old support systems can be tragically undermined." That sometimes happens when women win promotions and find themselves supervising women who were once close friends. "I tend not to have relationships with women I supervise," says Kathy Schrier, 40, a union administrator in Manhattan. "Some women can't make that break, though, and it hurts them as managers."

Other women have problems relating to their female bosses. Even though MGM/ UA's McCarthy has high praise for her female colleagues, she admits that in the past she has "felt sabotaged" by executive secretaries. "It was jealousy of my position from someone on a lower level," she says. Corporate Lawyer Deborah Dugan, 29, recalls that when she joined a Los Angeles law firm, her assigned female secretary "refused to work for me. She said she would have trouble taking orders from another female."

How can women cope with these conflicts? Chicago's Frenkel believes professional women must stop taking another woman's success as a personal affront. "They have to separate out business from personal issues," she says. For some women, that's impossible, as Laura Srebnik, 33, a Manhattan computer educator, discovered when she suddenly found herself supervising a "dear friend" at a political lobbying group. The friend, she says, became hostile, talked about her behind her back and then quit. The parting explanation, says Srebnik, was "that I had become one of 'them' " -- the power structure. For some women in the workplace, that is still the ultimate insult.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York, with other bureaus