Opinion

She devils

Last week, after a former female Facebook employee published an astute and highly critical review of Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto, “Lean In,” Sandberg’s publicist, Brandee Barker, went on the attack.

“There’s a special place in hell for you,” she tweeted.

Barker was paraphrasing a quote widely attributed to Madeleine Albright, one also cited in recent weeks by Taylor Swift: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Ironically, one of the glaring flaws in Sandberg’s thesis — she argues that women will only truly succeed in the workforce if they adopt the same attitudes and approaches as men — is the tacit implication that women, by and large, champion each other.

It is an ugly, unfortunate and largely unspoken truth that they just as often do not.

In her new book, “Working with Bitches: Identify the Eight Types of Office Mean Girls and Rise Above Workplace Nastiness,” psychologist and corporate consultant Meredith Fuller explores the soft violence that occurs among women in the office — subtle, surreptitious behaviors that are meant to undermine, exclude and eliminate.

“One of the things that makes this so difficult is that women who suffer with this tend to be silent,” Fuller says. “As women, we’re supposed to be good at interpersonal relationships, so the thinking is, ‘It must be my fault.’ There’s a lot of shame. And we also don’t want to betray other women.”

Fuller has been in private practice for over 30 years, but says she began to notice an uptick in stressed female professionals about eight years ago, during the beginnings of the financial crisis. “I had a lot of first-rate women coming in and saying, ‘I’m dreading going to work, and I don’t know what’s wrong.’ ’’

Using an active sample of 200 women and a case study of 2,000, Fuller began amassing data. She also reached out to friends, asked clients if they’d contribute their stories to the book, posted surveys online.

“The floodgates opened,” she writes. “Despite the public silence on the topic, I experienced an outpouring of horrific tales that secretly haunt some of these women to this day. . . . Yet, in professional settings, it is rarely, if ever, discussed.”

Among the archetypes Fuller identifies are “The Excluder,” “The Insecure,” “The Toxic,” “The Narcissist,” “The Screamer,” ‘The Liar,” and “The Incompetent” — but what all have in common is non-verbal sabotage, a silent, constant shifting of the goalposts that leaves their victims wracked with self-doubt. Often, by the time they complain to a manager, they have little in the way of hard evidence and are such emotional and physical wrecks that they seem unstable at best, paranoid at worst.

“I had one very senior female executive reduced to tears,” Fuller says. ‘She went home to her husband — also a senior executive — and daughter and they laughed at her, saying it can’t really be that bad, “And she felt like she had to suck it up.”

To be clear, Fuller isn’t arguing that men aren’t capable of equally brutalizing their employees: They are, she says, but just in a different way. It goes, she says, to “the etiology of what girls and boys learn as kids,” and in the ways they relate among each other: boys tend to express aggression in more forthright and physical ways, while girls exclude, spread gossip, form cliques. These patterns extend into adulthood and into the office, and in her consulting work, Fuller says that 100% of the time, male executives are shocked when confronted with her data.

“The men say, ‘I just thought it was catty women,’ ” Fuller says. “They’re staggered. Men are more overt and simple: If a male is going to block you out, it’s very clear what he’s doing. Men don’t spend as much time on the non-verbal behaviors.”

In her most extreme cases, Fuller has seen otherwise high-functioning female executives — the bulk of her practice — suffer such deleterious effects to their health that they take sick leave or quit. One waitressed for a year, finding that job far less stressful, while others fantasized about suffering a catastrophic injury that would keep them out of the office long-term. “There are all these women falling down because of this,” Fuller says. “It’s a real talent drain.”

As corporate America debates the policies of female CEOs such as Sandberg and Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer — both of whom pride themselves on being executives first and women second — it’s worth adding Fuller’s voice to the conversation, especially as women continue to outpace men in college graduation rates (currently by 25%). She argues for protocols that encourage more transparency and communication in the workplace, and, crucially, for women who are suffering to speak up: to a trusted colleague, to a boss, to impel their own companies to take action.

“We’ve got to change,” Fuller says. “Because what we’re looking at are organizational structures that are dying. They just don’t know it yet.”

mcallahan@nypost.com