“Bitches.” That was how one woman described her previous female bosses when she approached Andrea Kramer, a lawyer and author, after a talk Ms Kramer had given about women in the workplace. These bosses had been so awful, the woman said, that she would now only work for men.

When challenged as to why the women had been so much worse than male managers, there was silence. “I thought she was unconscious,” laughs Ms Kramer. In fact, the woman was experiencing an epiphany: she realised that the women had treated her just as the men did but she had judged them more harshly.

This was not the first time that Ms Kramer and her co-author and husband, Alton Harris, had heard such stories. Many women and men complained to them of “mean girls”. So much so that the pair decided to explore the alleged hell of other women in their new book, It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace: Women’s Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built It.