Queen Bees Are a Myth, Men Still the Ones Blocking Your Way to the Top
Latest

Put your satin girl gang jacket back in the closet: A Columbia Business School study looking at 1,500 companies over two decades has found that the concept of the queen bee—the woman who hustles her way up the corporate ladder only to block other women from ascending behind her—is pure myth. The only thing keeping women out of the boardroom is other dudes.
If that’s hard to believe, it is probably because we have all grown so inured to the stereotype of female in-fighting across all aspects of human life that we’ve stopped questioning the idea that groups of women all blend into one giant bitchy resting face. Over at The Guardian, Viv Groskop dutifully notes that the notion of the mean girl and all her attendant mean-girl hierarchies—a social framework said to sprout in middle school and grow more vicious over time—is so common now in popular media (Mean Girls, Heathers, Clueless, Devil Wears Prada) that it has far surpassed the original notion of the corporate queen bee, which comes from a 1973 study. The mean girl narrative, she writes, has burrowed into our most deeply held notions about what it means to be female at any age. Then she lays her problem bare:
Worst of all, it has been accepted as some kind of truism: that given half a chance, women will be bitches – and in any given group there will be one bitch who is the biggest bitch of all. This makes for great drama. It is not so fun in real life. It’s also a dangerous mindset which keeps women in their little box, afraid to trust others and constantly on the look-out for someone more “senior” who is going to knife them in the back.
Instead, this survey suggests, women are held back not by each other but by men who don’t want them in the boardroom. … This is conspiracy theory time. Have women been blaming and fighting each other while ignoring what’s really holding them back? Who is the real enemy: us or them?
While that is also a longstanding criticism of feminism—women too busy being bitches to each other to form one single cohesive movement and take down “The Man”—a little closer look at the results of the survey help illuminate that us-or-them question. In a companion piece at The Guardian we learn that the study found that “where women had been appointed chief executive, other women were more likely to make it into senior positions.” However:
But when a woman had been given a senior role that was not the top position, the likelihood of other women following them to executive level fell by 50%, the academics found.
The research team said: “Women face an implicit quota, whereby firms seek to maintain a small number of women on their top management team, usually only one. While firms gain legitimacy from having women in top management, the value of this legitimacy declines with each woman.”
What this means then is that often a woman or two will be promoted upward by men for the sake of diversity and appearances, but after that, women are pretty much shit out of luck, or only moved into positions where they can’t do much to help other women beneath them.