The Short Read
- Women-to-women bullying is real, and it is often subtler than formal harassment.
- It can show up as exclusion, gatekeeping, humiliation, credit-stealing, gossip, icy feedback, appearance-policing or quiet career sabotage.
- It should not be reduced to the lazy stereotype that “women are women’s worst enemies”.
- Research suggests this behaviour often grows inside unequal, male-dominated and competitive systems, where women are made to feel scarce, scrutinised and replaceable.
- In India, the issue can feel especially invisible because women are expected to be grateful for opportunity, graceful under pressure and loyal to the idea of “sisterhood” even when the workplace does not feel sisterly.
- The way forward lies in better workplace culture, clearer behavioural norms, stronger mentorship and sponsorship, and more honest conversations between women themselves.
Women-to-women bullying: The story nobody likes to tell
Women-to-women bullying is one of those workplace realities people usually describe in half-sentences.
They say things like, “She was difficult.” Or, “There was a lot of politics.” Or, “That team was not a very warm place for women.”
What they often mean is harder to say clearly.
Sometimes, they mean a senior woman who kept moving the goalpost for junior women, but was easier on men. Other times, they mean a colleague who smiled in meetings and then quietly cut them out of the information chain. And sometimes, they mean a manager who never used a slur, never shouted, never crossed a legal line, yet still made another woman feel smaller every week.
The old “mean girls” shorthand is tempting here. It is also lazy, and it makes an adult workplace problem sound like a personality drama. It lets organisations shrug and say, “That is just how some women are,” instead of asking why women often end up competing inside systems that were never designed with much room for them in the first place.
That is why this topic deserves a slower, more honest look.
What women-to-women bullying actually looks like
First things first: Women-to-women bullying is not always loud.
- Sometimes it is a woman getting interrupted by another woman every time she speaks in a meeting.
- Sometimes it is the colleague who keeps saying, “I’m only telling you this for your own good,” before taking a swipe at someone’s ambition, tone, clothes or visibility.
- Sometimes it is a senior woman who praises a young man for being “confident” and calls a young woman “too much” for doing the same thing.
- Sometimes it is the office version of social exclusion. These include lunches you are not invited to, WhatsApp groups where decisions are made before the formal meeting, information shared at the last minute, and credit redistributed in a way that leaves one woman doing the work and another owning the shine.
The Indian reality
In India, the texture can be painfully familiar.
- A young woman from a smaller town is made to feel that her English is not polished enough.
- A married employee is quietly tested for “stability”.
- A new mother is written off as distracted.
- An unmarried woman in her thirties is treated as “too career-minded”.
- A woman in leadership is told she is intimidating if she is firm, weak if she is gentle, and political if she is strategic.
Often, the comments do not come only from men. That is what makes the experience so hard to explain.
Why this cuts differently?
When bullying comes from a man, women often know which language to reach for. They can name sexism, bias, boys’ club behaviour or harassment.
When it comes from another woman, the language gets messy.
There is confusion first. Then guilt. Then self-doubt.
- Was she actually being hostile?
- Was I overreacting?
- Am I making this about gender when it is just performance pressure?
- If I talk about this, will people say I am attacking women leaders?
A lot of women sit inside that confusion for a long time.
Part of the pain comes from expectation. Women are often told, implicitly or directly, that other women at work will be natural allies. So when the opposite happens, it feels like a betrayal of an unwritten promise.
The other part is reputational. Many women do not want to feed sexist clichés. They do not want to become the person who “could not work with women”. So they stay quiet, even as the silence starts eating away at their confidence.
This is not about women being naturally unkind
That stereotype has already done enough damage.
Research on the Queen Bee Phenomenon has argued that when some women in male-dominated organisations distance themselves from junior women, this behaviour should be understood less as a female personality flaw and more as a response to discrimination, pressure and identity threat inside unequal systems. In other words, the workplace sets the stage.
- If women are treated as exceptions rather than the norm, they learn scarcity early.
- If only a handful of women are allowed near power, some begin to protect their place rather than expand the room.
- If a workplace rewards toughness in men but punishes warmth, solidarity or advocacy in women, some women start copying the culture that promoted them.
That does not excuse harmful behaviour. It explains why blaming individual women alone does little to solve the problem.
The Indian corporate context adds another layer
Women’s representation in India remains limited in too many areas. McKinsey’s 2025 report found that women make up 33% of entry-level workers in India and only 24% of managers. Obstacles often show up early in the pipeline. When leadership tracks already feel narrow, competition can harden into guardedness.
And then there is the quieter inheritance many of us grow up with. What’s that? The belief that women must adjust, endure, compare, prove, compete for approval, and police one another along the way.
That is why any conversation about women-to-women bullying eventually touches internalised misogyny. The workplace may modernise faster than the social conditioning people carry into it.
The Indian office has its own version of this story
If you ask around honestly, you will hear patterns.
- A woman says her toughest boss was a woman who expected perfection from female team members and “potential” from male ones.
- Another says the women on her team were warmer in public than in private, and that every promotion cycle felt like a whisper network.
- A third says the sharpest judgments she received at work were about how late she stayed, how often she travelled, how visible she was with senior leadership, how she dressed, how she spoke, whether she laughed too loudly, whether she had children, and whether she planned to.
That is one reason the issue remains underreported in India. It often arrives disguised as culture, personality, standards or professionalism. Very little of it looks dramatic enough to trigger formal escalation. Yet repeated low-grade hostility can do real damage.
A study of 228 working women in Indian organisations found that trust in leaders and team members was linked to greater civil behaviour at work. It also shows that civil behaviour, in turn, was linked to women’s general well-being. That may sound obvious. It is still worth sitting with. Civility is not a cosmetic value. It changes how people feel, function and stay.
Women-to-women bullying at work: What it does to women
It is no secret that any trait that looks like bullying does a lot of damage. Here is what women-to-women bullying at work can lead to.
The first casualty is usually ease.
A woman who once spoke freely starts rehearsing every sentence.
- She avoids visibility.
- She keeps her ideas to herself until they are fully safe.
- She stops asking questions that might invite mockery.
- She becomes careful in ways that look professional from the outside and exhausting from the inside.
The second casualty is trust.
If the room already expects women to support one another, and that trust breaks down:
- Women often become reluctant to seek help from senior women at all.
- They start second-guessing every compliment, every invitation, every performance discussion.
- They keep a distance where they might once have built a connection.
The third casualty is growth.
McKinsey and Lean In have repeatedly shown how much women’s advancement depends on fair support, manager advocacy, sponsorship and respectful environments. Women also report that everyday forms of disrespect and microaggressions make it harder to speak up, take risks and surface concerns at work.
Once bullying enters the mix, a career can shrink quietly. A woman may stop going for stretch roles, avoid influential teams, or decide she would rather be invisible than exposed.
That is how talent drains out of organisations long before resignation emails are written.
It also damages the idea of sisterhood itself
Here is a part that matters a lot.
When women-to-women bullying becomes common, “women supporting women” starts sounding like branding instead of truth. That is dangerous, because real solidarity is still one of the most valuable things women can build at work.
Many women have moved ahead because another woman opened a door, gave honest feedback, named a bias, recommended them for a role, pulled them into a room, or protected them from being erased.
That is why the answer to this problem cannot be cynicism. It has to be a better culture and stronger practice.
The case for mentorship for women becomes even more urgent here. Not mentorship as a decorative HR phrase, but as a living habit. A habit that is about making introductions, sharing context, normalising ambition, giving credit, offering stretch opportunities, and refusing to treat other women as threats by default.
What leaders must do to combat women-to-women bullying
Organisations often miss the issue because they are looking only for obvious misconduct.
Women-to-women bullying rarely introduces itself so clearly. It hides in tone, pattern and power. So leaders need sharper eyes and more mature definitions.
Start by naming behaviours. Exclusion, ridicule, reputation-damaging gossip, credit theft, chronic undermining, appearance-based shaming, deliberate information-hoarding and hostile “coaching” should all count as culture issues, even when they do not fit the narrow frame of harassment.
Train managers to read patterns, not only incidents. One rude comment may be unpleasant. But a repeated pattern that consistently isolates one employee is a different matter.
Reward collaboration visibly. If a workplace only celebrates individual stars, women will keep absorbing the message that they have to win alone. Some of the worst behaviour grows in cultures that preach teamwork and reward scarcity.
Create support routes that do not feel theatrical. Employees are more likely to speak if they believe the response will be fair, discreet and useful.
And invest in sponsorship. McKinsey’s India, Nigeria and Kenya report identifies mentorship and sponsorship programmes as “differentiator policies” that correlate with higher levels of women’s representation and advancement. In a workplace where some women have learnt to protect their own survival, structured sponsorship can shift the rules of the game.
What women can do for one another
There is a collective side to this story, and there is an individual one.
Women can begin by becoming more honest about the forms this behaviour takes. Remember, not every difficult interaction is bullying, and not every woman leader needs to be softened into likability. Tough feedback is part of work. Competition is part of work. Disagreement is part of work. The line is crossed when the pattern becomes diminishing, exclusionary or punitive in a gendered way.
Women can also refuse the easy pleasures of workplace cruelty. This one is interesting, as it includes the casual takedown in the cab after work. The little pile-on against the “too ambitious” colleague. And the judgement about a woman’s tone, body, marriage, motherhood, clothes or networking. These things can feel small while they are happening. Their cumulative effect is large.
And when women are in positions of influence, the opportunity is bigger than politeness. They can hire fairly. Share information more generously. Give younger women room to make mistakes without branding them as weak. Offer feedback without humiliation. Notice who is being left out. Correct the narrative when another woman is being reduced to a stereotype.
That is what real allyship looks like on an ordinary Wednesday.
Change in Content on women-to-women bullying at work
Women-to-women bullying deserves more than embarrassed silence.
Indian workplaces have spent years discussing how men block women, underpay women, interrupt women, overlook women and test women. All of that remains true. But the conversation stays incomplete if it refuses to examine how women can sometimes reproduce the same hierarchy among themselves.
It is not a call to demonise women leaders. It is a call to stop romanticising workplaces in which women are expected to suffer in the name of sisterhood, while also being denied the conditions that make sisterhood possible.
Better cultures are built deliberately. Through clarity, through accountability, through women who choose not to harden into gatekeepers, through leaders who reward generosity and not just grit, and through systems that create more room, not more rivalry.
A healthy workplace does not ask women to love one another on command. It gives them a fairer environment in which trust can grow. That would already be a meaningful start.
FAQs
Q: What is women-to-women bullying at work?
A: It refers to repeated harmful behaviour by one woman towards another in the workplace. It can include exclusion, humiliation, gossip, gatekeeping, credit-stealing, hostile feedback and quiet sabotage.
Q: Is women-to-women bullying the same as having a strict female boss?
A: No. Tough standards or direct feedback are not bullying by themselves. Bullying involves a pattern of behaviour that diminishes, isolates or harms another person.
Q: Why does women-to-women bullying happen?
A: Research suggests it often grows inside unequal workplace cultures shaped by scarcity, male-dominated power structures, internalised misogyny and competition for limited opportunities.
Q: What can companies do about it?
A: Companies can define these behaviours clearly, train managers, strengthen reporting systems, reward collaboration, and build stronger mentorship and sponsorship pathways for women.
Editorial Note and Sources
This article is an editorial analysis written for Change in Content. It draws on research around the queen bee phenomenon, workplace incivility, women’s workplace experiences, and women’s advancement in India and globally. Key source material includes McKinsey and Lean In’s Women in the Workplace reports, McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2025: India, Nigeria, and Kenya, the Derks et al. review on the queen bee phenomenon, and Indian research on selective incivility and well-being among working women.
Sources
- McKinsey & Lean In, Women in the Workplace 2024.
- McKinsey, Women in the Workplace 2025: India, Nigeria, and Kenya.
- Belle Derks, Colette Van Laar, Naomi Ellemers, The queen bee phenomenon: Why women leaders distance themselves from junior women.
- Preeti S. Rawat, Shrabani B. Bhattacharjee, Vaishali Ganesh, Selective incivility, trust and general well-being: a study of women at the workplace.
