[rayiner]

Poor delivery, but there is definitely something to her first point. Women do generally have less power within organizations than men do. So measures designed to help women succeed, like pairing them up with women mentors within the organization, can actually be counter-productive because those women are statistically less likely to be the ones with real power in the organization.

That being said, much of what is often cynically ascribed to "cattiness" between women is better understood as a reaction to the power dynamic. My wife used to hold the same opinion as the author--she hated the idea of working for a woman. She held this idea until she worked at an organization where her department had a critical mass of powerful women, from the top with women partners that brought in their own business, down the ranks to women who were senior associates and ran their cases, etc. She discovered that there was very little friction between the women in the organization, and indeed a lot of camaraderie, because women were not in the minority within the power dynamic. When the women who had seniority also had real power within the organization, when they were no longer the self-conscious minority, they were freed to become good mentors without having to constantly worry about protecting their own turf.

This is one of the reason I'm quite skeptical of people who argue we should be "gender blind." The fact that women are a minority in many fields is something that by itself perpetuates the disparity between men and women. In this context, affirmative action measures are not sexist because they don't help women because they are women, but because they are in the minority within the power structure.