Why does it so stubbornly remain the case that if you put a number of women together and make them compete, the outcome is more than likely to be a bitch-fest, with a bit of bullying and name-calling thrown in for good measure, rather than any kind of tangible result?

I ask because of The Apprentice. This is the BBC show in which Sir Alan Sugar looks for a sidekick by setting a gaggle of wannabe “business people” some tasks, which they cock up. He sacks the one who’s cocked up the most and eventually hires the one who’s cocked up the least. It’s the kind of show that makes people like me - that is, people who are barely numerate and struggle with basic adding-up - think we could run business empires, since the candidates (handpicked from tens of thousands of applicants) seem stupid, delusional, charmless, venal or all four.

The programme was particularly brilliant last week, involving Marrakesh, fully grown adults who didn’t know the meaning of “kosher” and seemed to think it meant “blessed by a Muslim” and an extremely satisfying double firing at the end. The firees were both women and both deeply unpleasant - one so monstrously craven that you didn’t quite know where to look, the other a sort of glacial freak whose ice-queen facade concealed stunning ineptitude. This didn’t stop either of them - Jennifer Celerier and Jennifer Maguire – spouting torrents of bile and lies whenever they felt themselves cornered, always at the expense of the other women in the room, most notably a rather sappy pair called Lucinda and Sara.

Lucinda is hated by the other women for wearing relatively pretty clothes, in colours other than grey or black, which apparently makes her some kind of hippie loser. Sara is despised because she is quite sweet and has big eyes and can be made to cry. Her earrings have come in for particular scorn (it’s tragic, really - when was the last time you saw captains of industry sniping about cuff links?).

The pair need to get themselves some extra backbone but are the only two female contestants who have not schemed and bitched - which, as you can see, causes me, along with much of the viewing audience, to find them a bit wet, even as I root for them in an underdog kind of way. Actually they’re perfectly capable, and wet only in context – that is, when surrounded by snarling hyenas. More to the point, they’re still in there, while the bitches drop like flies.

Which leads to the question, why do young women in “business” feel obliged to adopt a hackneyed, 1980s, Gordon Gekko-style approach? What is it that they think they are conveying by basing their whole professional personas on throwback fictitious characters? And why don’t men do this? The received answer is “because they don’t have to, since the business world is geared so perfectly to their needs”, but that doesn’t wash any more in the kinds of environments with which The Apprentice concerns itself. It is not harder to sell fish or buy a cactus simply because you are a woman.

Granted, the blokes in The Apprentice seem to hold the belief that doing well at your job needs to be accompanied by weird dinosaur noises, football-type chants, neanderthal joy-grunts and a lot of high-fiving (“Woah! Get in!”), none of which is especially attractive. However, they seem, despite their amazing self-infantilising, to have worked out the basic mechanics of coexisting with other people, including people they may feel threatened by. They may lose their temper in a normal sort of way, pointing out to X that they didn’t actually say or do A or B, but they aren’t keen on name-calling or on turning themselves into a pack and hunting for prey.

The women, on the other hand, may have dumped the playground sound effects but are very much still there in terms of their interactions with one another: she’s prettier than me, so I hate her; she’s cleverer, so she’s not joining in; her shoes are nicer, so I’ll just flush her head down the lavatory.

I always think that nasty adult women were terribly unpopular at school and have yet to meet one who disproves my theory - put it this way, I doubt Celerier found herself overburdened with invitations during her teenage years. However, while I can understand that being shunned as a pariah by your contemporaries would leave its mark and perhaps, rather poignantly, cause you to devote your adult life to getting one over on them, there has got to be more to it than that. Surely not every ambitious young woman in the country was a loathsome teenager? Does The Apprentice have a secret pool of them to pick its candidates from? Or do young women still think that bitching and backstabbing constitute their best chance of achieving success in their chosen field? Because something has gone a bit wrong if they do.

Women have a strange love-hate relationship with bitchiness. We hate being at the receiving end of it but aren’t entirely averse to doling it out: it makes us feel (oh dear) important and capable. We periodically reassure ourselves that bitchiness - being foul to other people and making them feel crap - is a marvellous and uniquely female virtue, one we must embrace and master, one that shows we are brave and fearless and mistresses of our own destinies. We may even hold the vague notion that there’s something rather laudably feminist about it.

However, there is nothing brave about being vile or grinding down your fellow woman just because you can. Au contraire - without wanting to get too Desmond Morris about it, attack is a basic animal response to fear: it’s fight or flight, and therefore says nothing whatsoever about confidence and a great deal about the lack of it.

Perhaps people confuse bitchiness with wit or with verbal dexterity to the point where entire generations of otherwise apparently intelligent women believe, stupidly, that Nasty Girls Finish First, despite the embarrassment of evidence to the contrary, both in the real world, where nasty girls seldom have enviable lives, and in The Apprentice’s version of it, where nasty girls get fired.

The only people who are in any position to do anything about this are the bitchy women themselves: surely it’s time the scales fell from their eyes? Bitchiness gets you nowhere - plus, everyone still hates you. Not big, not clever and not what anyone would call a result, within the boardroom or out of it.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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