Are Women Queen Bees? The Truth Behind the Myth

There are so many popular myths and stereotypes about women and men. For example, you have heard people say women talk more than men. You know, “chatty Kathy.” When in fact, the study of turn taking in groups and who gets the floor, demonstrates that men get the floor more often than women, women are the recipients of more interruptions by both men and other women and when men get the floor, they keep it longer. It is always a good idea to take a hard look at some of these myths.
Here is another one: women are the queen of gossip and they tend to be more catty than men which produce Queen Bees. Recently, in the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant addressed the complexity of this interpersonal and widespread held belief. Adding insult to injury, many people believe that the biggest enemy of women is a powerful woman.

Ouch! So much for sisterhood, right?

In my own research on the Queen Bee syndrome I found that some powerful women who make their way to the top are not interested in helping other women climb the latter. According to Queen Bee theory, a female senior manager should have a more negative impact on other professional women. When strategy professors studied the top management of the Standard & Poor’s 1,500 companies over 20 years, they found what they thought support this notion- when one woman reached senior management, it was 51% less likely a second woman would make it. On closer examination, the person blocking the second woman’s advancement wasn’t a Queen Bee; it was a male executive. When a woman was made chief executive, the opposite was true and woman had a better chance of joining senior management than when the chief executive was a man.

The popular idea is women are not supportive of other women who are attempting to move up the professional ranks. Sandberg and Grant claim otherwise and, of course, Sandberg herself is one of the most powerful women in corporate America as COO of Facebook and can speak from personal experience.

Queen Bees exist but they are far less common than we think.