Does A Sexist Work Environment Create "Queen Bee" Bosses?
LatestThe Leiden University in the Netherlands asked 63 senior female employees at police departments in three Dutch cities to take an online questionnaire designed to gauge how important their gender identity was at work and whether or not they felt they identified with other women in the police force:
Half of the participants were then asked to write about a situation in which they either believed that being a woman was detrimental to them at work, were discriminated against or heard other people talking negatively about women. The remaining participants wrote about a time when their gender was no issue at all and they were valued for their personal abilities.
All of the women were then asked about their leadership style, whether they thought they were different from other female employees, and whether they felt that gender bias was an issue.
The researchers noted that the women’s answers to these questions depended on the strength of their gender identity at work. The participants who wrote about their gender bias experiences answered the final survey like queen bees — but only if they had started out by saying that they identified weakly with other women at work. These queen bees indicated that they had a masculine leadership style, were very different from other women and that gender bias wasn’t a problem.
So it would seem that one of the final scenes in Mean Girls may hold true for senior professional women as well as teen girls in that everyone seems to silently agree that there is a problem with gender bias, yet many of them are under the impression that it’s a jungle out there and fear it may be a case of “every woman for herself.”
The less-bad news is that there is also a flip side to the results of the study: