I have a female acquaintance who is something senior in a big media company. She's pushy and brash and I don't like her much. I bumped into her the other night and she told me how she had just been taken to one side by her boss and told that she was pushy and brash and that some people didn't like her much.

It's outrageous, she said. No one would ever treat a man like that. I replied: "Oh dear, how awful. Poor you."

But what I was thinking went like this: it's not outrageous. You are unpleasant and abrasive and your sex has nothing to do with it. Your outrage is ludicrous and unattractive.

Even more unattractive is the outrage of a still more successful media woman: Tina Brown. In a recent interview in the Sunday Times, she complained about the roasting she had been given when her magazine Talk failed. "It became a blood sport," she whined. "I became target practice. There's no doubt it's more fun to bring a woman down - and a blonde - than a man." Not only was she claiming it's rough to be a woman, but that it's rougher to be a pretty one. Which is such nonsense one hardly knows where to begin.

It isn't tough being a professional woman. This group has had a better time of it than any other group in society over the past two decades, and it's time to stop complaining.

Or is it? Over the past three days, I've seen three pieces of research that have made me wonder if I should stop being such a hard ass to my sisters.

First was a study in San Francisco suggesting that two million workers in the US quit their jobs last year because of perceived unfairness on grounds of race or sex. Nothing illegal, just covert beastliness that eventually sent them to the door.

Last week in the UK, figures from the Chartered Management Institute showed that female managers quit jobs more readily than males and that their pay is still considerably lower.

Finally and most depressingly, is the cover story of this month's Harvard Business Review, a 10-page rant about how senior women have never had it so bad.

It is exactly 20 years since the phrase "glass ceiling" was coined, and the authors argue that we have been pursuing the wrong metaphor all these years.

Women don't just face a ceiling that we must break through to get to the very top. Right from the start, we are in a labyrinth, in which there are large numbers of complicated things that prevent us from reaching the centre. We face prejudice from men. Our views are not taken seriously. Our management styles do not fit, and if we try to be tough like men, we are damned (like my acquaintance). Our pay is worse. We have problems at home. We have few networks.

Some of this may be true. But by looking at only the negative, a ridiculously distorted picture emerges. In the past 20 years, companies have fallen over themselves to help women.

There is legal protection. There is huge social pressure to promote women. There are women's networks galore. Most companies offer flexible working. Most places women can swan off home for sports day with no questions asked.

Yes, pay may lag, but that is often because women aren't good at asking for more money. I'm hopeless at this myself, but I expect we'll all get better at this in the future. I'm planning to.

In this storm of doom, positive things get ignored. In last week's UK report, there was evidence that women are being promoted faster than men, which was surely the true story. Yet that got swamped in all the gloom on pay and the presumed unhappiness of women. Such gloom doesn't help us at all.

It makes us look for unfairness and almost to expect it. And if we expect it we will find it - as did my friend and Tina Brown and two million others. I'm not saying that all two million of the US workers were deluding themselves. I'm sure lots were treated unfairly.

But I'm also sure lots weren't - they simply found it easier to claim subtle prejudice than to blame themselves for any lack of progress.

And on the subject of unfair treatment, I would like to announce right now that I have been treated unfairly consistently throughout my career. I have been singled out and given chances denied to white men of similar ability.

I was given my own column, promoted and more recently made a non-executive director of a public company. I might or might not have had similar advantages to a white male, but I would have had to push harder. And from my one-woman focus group: do I find my fellow board members don't listen? When I say something bone-headed, they may do some polite paper shuffling. But if I have something halfway sensible to say, they seem willing to hear it.

On one matter, I am in agreement with the Harvard Business Review. The very small number of women in the "C-suite" does take some explaining and the glass ceiling doesn't do it. But then neither does the glass cliff. Or the labyrinth.

My chosen metaphor is the glass stool (and I don't mean the type you fall between, though there may be some of that, too). I think most women who have got close to the C-suite are repelled. They find they don't like the smell. If this is the truth of the matter, there may be rather less to worry about.