Express & Star

Do females really need to be as bitchy as The Apprentice girls to get ahead in business? Of course they don’t, say Black Country businesswomen. Women’s Editor Maria Cusine reports.Girls, girls, girls, calm down, it’s only a competition.

Now there’s no denying ladies can have a ruthless streak, but is there really any need to be so bitchy?

I’m directing my comments to the two Jennys on the Apprentice who were given their marching orders from the show last night.

Thankfully Sir Alan Sugar finally lost patience with the bitching and backbiting from the scheming duo and decided to make his first double firing of the show.

It was the Apprentice Abroad last night when the 10 remaining candidates were sent on a two-day business trip to Morocco to put their negotiation skills to the ultimate test.

They were given just one day to find 10 items in the hectic markets of Marrakech, famous for its canny traders.

Redhead Jenny Celerier’s bid to bribe a shop worker to try to scupper the rival Alpha team from being able to take some tennis rackets back into the boardroom backfired after she was sacked.

Celerier, who was on the losing team Renaissance, says today that the move had been a “survival strategy” and she thinks Sir Alan Sugar thought she was being innovative.

Oops, well that backfired as Sir Alan branded her a “a bit of a snake”on the BBC1 show.

She told Sir Alan it was her 36th birthday that very day - and unfortunately for her, the only greeting he could offer was “Jenny, you’re fired.”

“You know what, it seems to me that you hang on every word. I say you then turn it on your colleagues… No good. Sorry, same old story. Goodbye,” he told her.

There was more criticism for the redhead on the follow-up show You’re Fired on BBC2, when Vanessa Feltz told her: “You were older than the others, and you behaved despicably.

“You victimised other people, you were nasty, you were rude. And I think you swallowed some kind of manual that says that successful businesswomen need to be aggressive, abusive and unpleasant and that isn’t true. It isn’t necessary to be obnoxious to work in business.”

And lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone also chipped in: “Why is it that businesswomen feel they need to backstab and behave like this in order to get by?”

Those comments are echoed by businesswomen in the Black Country who certainly don’t feel women need to be aggressive or bitchy to succeed in the workplace.

Anna Stevenson from Dudley is one of the West Midlands’ brightest young manufacturers.

The 26-year-old boss of a metal pressings business is a big fan of The Apprentice but admits she is not a fan of the tactics used by the contestants.

“I do love the show. I watched it last night and laughed through it all. But I certainly don’t agree with the bitchy behaviour of some of the girls,” says Anna, who set up her own company Millennium Pressed Metal Ltd eight years ago.

“You won’t succeed by being bitchy or backstabbing. You can’t act like that in real life, you’ll never get on.

“At the end of the day you need to be honest to succeed and you need to work as a team,” she says.

Fashion boss Claire Priest of Kingswinford also echoes that view.

“You absolutely don’t need to be a bitch to succeed in business,” says Claire, the founder of Cradley-based fashion label Blessd, which caters for women with pear-shaped and hourglass figures.

“No-one gets on by being bitchy in the workplace,” says the 36-year-old.

“You may get short-term gains but in the long term it’s about building relationships and if you ruin the trust between you, the relationship is gone,” she adds.

Jacqueline Gold, one of Britain’s most successful women, also believes women don’t need to be aggressive to succeed.

The chief executive of Ann Summers told the Express & Star she was a fan of The Apprentice but not of the bitchy behaviour.

“I think it’s a shame that the show portrays women as being aggressive. Women don’t need to act like a rottweiler to succeed in business,” she said.

Wolverhampton’s own Apprentice star Ruth Badger, who became a household name when she appeared in the 2006 series, has enjoyed big success despite missing out on The Apprentice title. As well as becoming a star on TV, runner up Ruth set up her own consultancy business.

Straight-talking Ruth was a hit on the show with viewers and there was certainly nothing bitchy about her behaviour.