I’m going to get crucified for this. But sometimes women treat other women like something they’ve scraped off their shoe. It has to stop.

This valuable — and rather obvious — insight came to me, a feminist, as I was reading a magazine at my hair salon, pleased to find a good piece of prose rather than a punchy list of ambitious unguents women can put on their neck skin and scalp and salad.

“I’m going to get crucified for this,” Ken Whyte was telling then-Chatelaine editor Jane Francisco in a December feature/interview as he departed Rogers publishing for a Rogers online venture, the wonderful Francisco herself about to depart for Good Housekeeping and an ever more brilliant career. I guess the guy felt he had nothing to lose.

“I think there’s a lot of woman-on-woman violence in the workplace,” he told her, “more so than man versus man in my experience.”

What a load of old bollocks, I thought. That’s pre-feminist Ken, a man who has been kind to me, who I like personally, but so out of tune with the times he’s the Llewyn Davis of journalism, I bet his tablet works on steam and a foot pedal.

Meanwhile my mind idly started counting up the horrific acts of violence acted upon my mental person by other women in my work lifetime and my blood suddenly braked in my veins. Whyte was right.

Men have done terrible things to me in the workplace, usually involving soft threats masquerading as invitations. They’ve stalked me, true enough. Equally, they have told me to my face that they dislike women and don’t wish to hire them, curses be on the head of publisher who insisted on it. I never once thought a man would hit me though, not at work.

I have twice feared physical violence from female co-workers after life went well for me and a little less well for them.

Women — usually older women, even as I age — have gone after me from every angle and left me with sliced viscera, the floor slippery with office fluids.

They have barked at me in the hallways like dogs, actual growling, the kind you hear in ill-fenced parks. Female co-workers have micro-knifed me anonymously and shredded me like a cabbage for everything from my ankles (non-matching) to my allergenic perfume (but I wasn’t wearing any, I swear, dabbing wetly at my neck) to my words (criminal, insufficiently earnest, etc.). Some have blanked me for years (awkward in the office washroom).

I once spent a week in a courtroom covering the sentencing of a serial killer where the ongoing hatred of two female journalists towards me frightened me more than he did. It was a courtroom where a radio guy screamed at me for writing a feminist column, and I still feared the women more.

Women have hissed at me about the horror of other women — go ahead, I don’t snitch — which would be absolutely fine if they had ever found a male co-worker to deplore.

Feminism has been a warm companion all my life. Writing this is like voluntary defenestration.

Women are finally making it in newsrooms, naturally just as the industry struggles for survival. (It will inevitably win, although its form will change.) But they’re still working to defend their mere existence, under constant attack from hard-right male-run things like Sun News, the nearest TV journalism can get to bad breath (as the artist Lucian Freud said about painting and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, go Freud!).

And I get it from the hard left too, with “white privilege” used against me as a slur when I timidly suggest that extremist feminist jargon — sorry, “check your privilege” and “intersectionality” are not going to catch on — repels people who might otherwise befriend the cause.

We should behave like my favourite woman, Michele Landsberg — intelligent and warm, so generous to others — and instead we approximate the meanest Cheney daughter. Oh please stop, please.

Whyte had more to say, all hideously accurate. “Two things I’ve noticed about working with women: One is I find men are far quicker to put themselves forward for opportunities. The second is that a lot of the women have been more talented than the men, but they have not been as assertive in seeking leadership opportunities and in speaking their minds. I’m not the only one who’s noticed that … I think that women would benefit from a more supportive style of collaboration.”

Well, yes they would.

Sheryl Sandberg has told women to Lean In at work. I wish they would. It would be an improvement on leaning sideways and getting stabby at the woman at the next desk. I’m hoping young women lean from the best possible angle but something suggests this isn’t true.

It’s odd for me to comment on this since I compete with no one. I write full-time. Writers don’t get promoted, they’re just asked to write more, which I am fairly alone in being happy to do. But I notice it, with pain.

Tina Fey has said this: “You are not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”

“If you’re working for a jerk,” said Fey, “try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.” Over, under and through, she advised, which is how kids were apparently taught to crawl on Sesame Street. It has come to this. I am referring to women in the workplace as toddlers, which they are really. We all are.

Women at work sometimes remind me of that Louis C.K. joke, by the psychologist Paul Bloom in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. Bloom studies children and their concept of fairness.

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“My 5-year-old, the other day, one of her toys broke, and she demanded that I break her sister’s toy to make it fair,” C.K. told the audience. “And I did. I was like crying. And I look at her. She’s got this creepy smile on her face.”

I’ve seen that look on women’s faces.

In 1996, Nora Ephron said in her famed Wellesley speech: “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.” Note that she said “people.” She did not say “men.”

And then Whyte said it. When a man says something true about women, does that make it more true? That can’t be right.

This is all new to us. As the feminist Caitlin Moran has written, “Women have basically done f--- all for the last 100,000 years. Our empires, armies, cities, artworks, philosophers, philanthropists, inventors, scientists, astronauts, explorers, politicians and icons could all fit into a private karaoke booth … it just didn’t happen.”

This is true. Feminism is switching the train track on humanity’s future.

I am told that “stay-at-home moms” and workplace women are at each other’s throats. I don’t believe this since I think my function in life as I get older is to care for younger women and I can’t waste time on nonsense like that. I really only write this for the health of everyone’s daughters.

Women fighting over nothing, like bald men and their eternal comb? This is not my world. My children have long left home, I am running out of breath warning women never to give up paid work — never lose your independence, never accept alimony — and I have been married basically forever, which helpfully neuters me in mediating gender skirmishes.

I am out of the competition, which is fine with me. My point is that women should be competing for the same thing, a workplace where they are paid and treated fairly.

And we sabotage each other.

I once took a shot at Chatelaine’s website for a rather studious feature on how to boil an egg. First, apparently, you crack it. I found this idiotic. Francisco could have taken it personally, could have sundered and grazed on me. Instead she took me out to her club, chatted to me warmly, told me her life story and left me lost in admiration.

Be the heroine of your life, not the victim, Ephron said.

I am telling women to look forward, not sideways. There will always be nasty women in the workplace, just as there will always be nasty men and indeed nasty furniture and your weird self-hatred passed down to you from 100,000 years of failure.

But you still have to make a living in the company of your fellow women. Do it well. Do it with courtesy and feminist dignity.