Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This week on the show, Miami Businesswoman and author Michelle Villabos talks about how badly women can treat each other at work, what we can do about it, and why the whole topic can be difficult to discuss.

Competition, female competition, in general, is something that happens under the surface.

It doesn't happen out in the open usually, the way male competition does, for example.

By the very nature of being that way, it makes it harder to talk about.

Coming up on the broad experience.

I have to admit, I feel pretty ambivalent doing a show about female nastiness.

After all, I spend a fair amount of time at networking events and conferences

where the vibe is all about women supporting each other.

This is also very much in the air with the whole female entrepreneurial movement

and with books like Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

I think another reason this makes me uncomfortable

is that the story of women being horrible to one another is one the media loves.

Tales of so-called catfights are one of the ways the media stereotypes women, and I hate to do anything to contribute to that.

But the fact is that many of us, myself included, have had at least one experience in our career where another woman or women made

our lives at work quite unpleasant, often in subtle, underhand ways. Michelle Villabos is the founder

of the Women's Success Summit in Miami and the author of a short e-book called The Stiletto in Your

Back, The Good Girls Guide to Backstabbers, Bullies, Gossips,

and Queen Bees at work.

Early in her career, she had a pretty awful experience working at a fashion magazine in Miami Beach.

She says it was the kind of job a lot of girls dream about, but the reality of mean girls

...