Before Ariana Huffington, before Brené Brown, I had one professional role model. I wanted to be Tess McGill in Working Girl.

It’s a classic underdog movie. We love Tess because she’s passionate, talented, brave and trying to make her way in a world – and a workplace – that favours the privileged. She struggles, as a woman in a man’s environment, but she thinks she’s found an ally in her new boss, Katherine. But Katherine betrays her, dismissing Tess’s brilliant idea, then stealing it. When I first watched it, the message was clear. Sure, men might dismiss you and hit on you, but other women in the office simply can’t be trusted. They will actively try to manipulate you and hurt you.

I still love Working Girl, but fortunately my feminist ideas have developed since I first watched it. Now, I understand the bitchy female boss is another 1980s trope. I’ve been very lucky in my career, and mostly worked for women who are brilliant, not bitchy. Still, after years in publishing, and working in offices where almost all of my colleagues are women, I’ve started to feel a sneaking sympathy for Katherine. All-girl offices can be the happiest places on earth – until they aren’t.

Grace*, 36, manages an all-woman team at a nonprofit that focuses on health and, ironically, female empowerment. She says: “I went to a single-sex school, and I definitely feel more comfortable connecting with women. However, when work is stressful and my team are being difficult, the dynamic is exactly the same as a bad day at school. There is bitchiness, and there is tension. It’s impossible to talk about it without feeling like a bad feminist. The women who work for me are so talented, but they’re insecure, and they put themselves under an enormous amount of pressure to excel. In other offices, where the demographic was mixed, everything was more chilled.”

The trouble is that the culture is confusing. In 2016, Donald Trump made a derogatory comment about Hillary Clinton, calling her a “nasty woman”. The term spawned a movement, with lots of us fighting to reclaim the pejorative. At the time, embracing our “nastiness” was about rejecting the pressures of traditional femininity. Women should be encouraged to seek the spotlight, without having to be sweet, good or obliging. Beyoncé led a campaign asking us to #banbossy – Sinead O’Connor released an album called “I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss.” We know there are double standards at play. Men are encouraged to put themselves forward, women who do the same are criticised for being pushy. However, lots of us are still struggling to work out the difference between being “nasty” and just unpleasant.

Ria*, 41, works in advertising and explains that she’s struggled with some female colleagues. “I manage someone junior, and I think she’s great. Really talented, but a bit timid. In an appraisal, I said that I’d like to see her being more assertive, and the next thing I knew she’d made the intern cry. I felt terrible. It was very difficult to make her see the difference between being assertive and being actively unkind.”

Executive coach Bonnie Markus explains how “if we lack the confidence in our innate talent to help us reach our goals, we are more competitive and anyone is a potential threat, especially other women in a workplace that fails to offer sufficient advancement opportunity.” If Ria’s colleague was already feeling insecure, she may have received Ria’s feedback as nonconstructive criticism and felt bullied – and then taken those feelings out on someone even more junior. It’s easy to see how quickly an office atmosphere can turn toxic. But how can we spot the signs, and stop them before things get out of hand?

In my novel, Careering, I explore the connection between two colleagues at separate stages of their careers – Imogen, the ambitious, talented and frankly desperate young woman who has just been promoted after years of interning – and her boss, Harri, an older woman at the peak of her professional powers, who is dealing with grief, stress, and a toxic boss of her own. A lot of the tension in the novel arises when Imogen and her colleagues are too obsessed with their own progress to have any perspective on what Harri might be going through.

Perhaps we should be mindful of the fact that we’re collectively suffering from a Lean In hangover. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg, then Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, published her book, Lean In. At first, working women everywhere devoured Sandberg’s message, advocating for themselves, asking for promotions and pay rises, making sure their achievements did not go ignored. However, soon the backlash began. Critics of Lean In pointed out that the advice Sandberg gave would only work for an elite group of women who already had plenty of privileges and that the book put the onus on women doing all of the work and didn’t address issues of structural inequality.

Slowly, women’s working culture is changing for the better. However, it’s still far from fair. Professionally, we expect ourselves – and each other – to be able to do everything men do, backwards, in high heels. When we fail, we feel frustrated, insecure and resentful. In Working Girl, Tess has found a role model she can relate to and it hurts especially hard when Katherine lets her down. She holds Katherine to a higher account than most of the men in the office. Similarly, Grace says: “For me, working in an all-woman team comes with joy and pain. I definitely feel a deeper connection with my female staff, and I instinctively relate to them more, but subconsciously I expect more of them too.”

Maybe we need to start by lowering our expectations. Feminism is all about equality. It doesn’t mean you have to get on well with every woman you work with. We can dislike each other, without letting the side down. However, we can start to unpick the “bitchy woman” stereotype with curiosity and compassion. We can acknowledge that if someone seems difficult, they might be secretly struggling. We can respect each other’s ambition, and admit that we still sometimes feel threatened by each other. Working together is hard. If we embrace our similarities and our differences, we can make it a little easier.

Daisy Buchanan’s new novel, Careering (Hachette, €18.90) is out now.

Main featured image: Daisy Buchanan by Sarah Kate Photography.