Bureaucratic experiences are like dreams: profoundly affecting, but very boring to hear about. This tediousness sometimes has consequences. In “The Utopia of Rules,” a polemic about bureaucracy published last year, the anthropologist David Graeber wonders why paperwork is not the subject of more inquiry by his colleagues. He decides that, despite its importance, the subject is simply too boring. “There just aren’t that many interesting things one can say about it,” he writes in a chapter called “Dead Zones of the Imagination.” Looking for fictional representations of bureaucracy, Graeber comes up with a small list of writers who have tackled the subject: Franz Kafka, Stanislaw Lem, Joseph Heller, Ismail Kadare, David Foster Wallace, José Saramago. All of them are men, the reader notices. Most of them are dead.

Most of them are also familiar from other essays dealing with fiction about the white-collar workplace. In 2014, Nikil Saval concluded that “few institutions have offered themselves as less promising for the novelist than the modern office.” Saval ties his essay to “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s locus classicus of clerical work. And like Graeber, Saval names Heller and Wallace as some of the writers who write about work—adding to them Joshua Ferris, Ed Park, and a handful of others. But what literary efforts there are on the topic, Saval argues, tend to focus on “office politics”—“manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status”—instead of “the work that is done in offices.” (He considers Wallace’s novel about an I.R.S. employee, “The Pale King,” which not only engaged with the tax code but dramatized the awful majesty of the federal government, a rare exception. It is largely concerned with boredom.)

But there are office politics and office politics. Surveys like Graeber and Saval’s routinely leave out an entire class of workplace fiction: the books written by women. It’s an ironic omission given that the majority of clerical jobs pioneered by men in the nineteenth century—jobs that were central to the formation of modern bureaucracy—are now performed by women. Male novelists of the workplace depict female characters, of course. Ferris’s “Then We Came to the End,” which is narrated in the first-person plural, features a mother whose young daughter has been murdered and who spends her lunch hours in a McDonald’s, crying in a ball pit; an unmarried, high-achieving boss who faces breast cancer alone and eventually dies; and a woman who becomes pregnant with the child of her married co-worker. Wallace’s “The Pale King” has a few female characters; one of them, Ms. Neti-Neti, gives a new employee a blowjob on his first day, as a matter of bureaucratic protocol.

With plots like these, one almost begins to wonder whether a strain of latent chauvinism has male authors warning women away from the workplace. Except that if you turn your attention to female novelists, you’ll discover that the men don’t know the half of it.

The last two decades have seen a boom in workplace novels written by and mostly marketed to women, from books put out by major publishing houses, to cheaply produced small-press books, to self-published titles. If the author is a woman, workplace fiction is also domestic fiction, easily disguised as “chick lit,” “girlfriend literature,” or even “erotica.” Regardless of the packaging, these books provide mapping, contextualizing, and rich illustration of women’s working lives. They form a kind of counter-tradition of office literature, dealing with the same bureaucracies and white-collar doldrums that have inspired male novelists but reflecting the particular challenges and preoccupations of women in the workforce.

One of the newer contributions to this counter-tradition is Helen Phillips’s “The Beautiful Bureaucrat,” which was published last year, and which takes on the formal challenge posed by Graeber’s paperwork-clotted utopia. Phillips’s protagonist, Josephine, is a woman in precarious financial straits, relieved to finally obtain a job entering information into a database. In a surrealist twist, Phillips eventually collapses Josephine’s data entry with her efforts to start a family—the database, it turns out, is a kind of book of life: the clerks’ notations determine who dies and who is born. While the income from Josephine’s bureaucratic job is necessary to support a child, the very performance of the job dramatically precludes the possibility of procreating.

Not surprisingly, biological matters tend to butt up against bureaucratic ones more often in office fiction written by women. Helen DeWitt is often left out of office-fiction surveys, but her second novel, “Lightning Rods,” is both an office novel and a feminist skewering of the white-collar workplace: in it, a bumbling door-to-door salesman gets rich by training a corps of temporary, highly skilled female administrative workers who double as human glory holes, the use of which will allegedly mitigate sexual-harassment suits. When selected by an algorithm, they rise from the desk where they are productively administrating and hit the disabled-access restroom, inside of which is a secret panel where they disrobe and present their nether regions. There, a “top earner” can relieve his sexual urges by copulating with their disembodied lower half from an adjacent stall. The program is presented as a boon to working women.

DeWitt’s wonderful first novel “The Last Samurai,” which was recently reissued, can’t justifiably be deemed an office novel, but it thrums with the feminist possibilities inherent in the literature of work. The protagonist, a single mother, works from home at the most mind-numbing data-entry job to support her savant child. She is pulled by three warring needs: to teach and nurture her offspring, to stoke the fire of her own intellect, and to transcribe six decades of issues of The Poodle Breeder for £5.50 an hour before tax so that they can eat.

Motherhood is an animating force in women’s workplace novels—some of which are explicitly positioned as horror stories. “Everything and Nothing” is described in its marketing copy thus: “A family near breaking point hire a nanny with secrets of her own.” The back-cover tagline for “The Creepshow” is comically ominous: “Wanda Julienne was the perfect employee. Until she had a baby.” Fay Weldon’s “She May Not Leave” features a new mother just returned to her publishing job in London. A conniving nanny brings order to the home like a malign Mary Poppins; she fattens Hattie up, and eventually manages to take possession not only of Hattie’s partner but also of her house and daughter. In “Jillian,” Halle Butler’s 2015 novel about two women who occupy clerical roles in a medical office, the titular Jillian is a single mother who can’t make ends meet. She develops, first, delusions about her prospects of opening her own business, and then an opiate addiction. Her fate is unclear when we reach the end of this claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing book, but we fear the worst for her son (and the dog she has adopted in a fit of deluded optimism).

In all of these novels, there is impossible math—sometimes of money, always of time. There’s a clear subcategory of women’s workplace novels that describes high-achieving, usually white working mothers from the upper classes who just can’t take it anymore. In “All Fall Down,” Jennifer Weiner creates a harried mom and full-time blogger; she’s of a significantly higher socioeconomic class than Jillian, but she likewise develops a crippling opiate addiction and has to be sent to rehab. More often than not, these books have a comic tenor, although they are tinged with desperation brought about by the collision of family and corporate life (evidenced with cutesy titles like “At the Corner of Wall and Sesame” or “Opening Belle”). The ur-book among them may be “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” Allison Pearson’s acrid, tragicomic 2002 account of a high-income Englishwoman, Kate, who works in financial services in London. After the exigencies of her stressful, sexist workplace precipitate an emotional affair and a trial separation, Kate’s come-to-Jesus moment finds her leaving her job to spend more time with her family. Kate eventually starts her own business as a manufacturer of doll-house furniture, using the skills she once brought to the management of hedge funds. Stella Payne of Terry McMillan’s earlier novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” is a high-earning black woman who likewise works in financial services. While that novel is written in a more romantic tenor—a fling with a much-younger hunk—entrepreneurial independence is part of its happy ending. Laid off from a finance job she doesn’t enjoy, Stella can finally slow down to spend time with her son and entertain the possibility of an artistic career she abandoned long before.