In one of my first jobs out of college I worked in a small San Francisco public relations firm, Horne, McClatchy & Associates, whose eight employees were all women. Now defunct, the firm raised money and staged special events for non-profit groups like UNICEF and the Exploratorium science museum. I liked my executive assistant job and I especially liked my boss, a kind, creative woman who was also a published poet.
But the longer I worked there, the more I realized I didn’t like that there were no men in the office. I feel like a bad feminist saying this, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it was about the atmosphere that grated on me. A former colleague recalls a kind of “mean girls” targeting of one of the managers, who wasn’t as efficient and well-turned-out as the other three, and there was a competitive atmosphere that I found unpleasant, which seemed tied to the fact that we were all female. Hastings law professor Joan Williams, author of What Works for Women at Work, has called the competition between women at work the “tug of war.”
Dispatches From The Front 