This topic is old as the hills, but apparently it's still a touchy subject. When I ask some female lawyers about it, they snap at me like feisty turtles. Their message: Do not go there.

"I think it's a terrible, dangerous, retrograde topic," says a female partner at an Am Law 100 firm. "Really, please stop." She adds, "I don't think rivalries exist between women any more than between anyone else."

So add this to the list of verboten topics: How women still undermine women to get ahead in the workplace.

We'd like to believe that the bad old days of '80s-style mean girl dynamics are over, but is that true? (Remember how Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver slugged it out to win the top job and Harrison Ford in "Working Girl"?)

The topic is ripe for an update, and lawyers Andrea Kramer and Alton Harris do just that. In the Harvard Business Review, the wife/husband team writes, on the one hand: "In conducting research for our book, "It's Not You, It's The Workplace," we could find no empirical evidence supporting the notion that women are more mean-spirited, antagonistic, or untrustworthy in dealing with other women than men are in dealing with other men."

You probably know that already—that women aren't born with a catfight gene. Still, the backstabbing dynamic is there, they say.

"The popular press and books about women take the position that it is women's nature or the way we're nurtured that make us antagonistic and hostile to other women," says Kramer, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery's Chicago office.

But she points out that heightened competition between women is real, too, adding that it's "gendered workplaces that are run by men and suffused with masculine values, culture and norms that force women into conflict with each other for the few leadership spots it has."

Sadly, consciously or subconsciously, women still look up to men as somehow superior because, well, men are the ones with power. It's the kind of ingrained gender bias, write the authors, that creates "pressure on women to adopt a decidedly masculine management style in order to identify with the male in-group and distance or differentiate themselves from their female peers."

In sum, we're not as evolved as we'd like to think. And that might be why some women would prefer that we stop pointing out how brutal the competition between women still can be. Of course, we'd like to believe that the Working Girl world is gone—gone like those ungainly padded-shoulder power suits and the huge hair.

"If we assume that conflict is caused by women's nature and that the only way to combat the problems is for women to 'stop being mean to each other,' then women should stop talking about it," says Kramer. "But the problem is really the workplace environment, so we need to talk about it so that women can understand the dynamics, men can advocate for gender equity, and organizations can remove discretion from career decisions."

Hey, you can't disagree with that. But the fact that we don't want to talk about it is precisely why we should.

Contact Vivia Chen at [email protected]. On Twitter: @lawcareerist.