Queen bees - those who fail to fit the feminine stereotype of being nurturing and more forgiving than men - are everything negative that the press wants to paint about women in the echelons of power. They are the women in high positions who do not support other women or who conform more closely to a male boss, as bitches and abusers. This type of reporting, ironically by women themselves, falls into the gender trap, where senior women seem out of place. People often read these messages on the way to work and the next time their female boss asks why they are late, or gives feedback they do not want to hear, that woman becomes the Queen bee rather than the boss. It doesn't need a professor to tell you that this label is sexist and reinforces the glass ceiling.
One way of explaining why this happens is that society holds a widely shared set of mental associations about women, men, leaders and manager. Senior women managers have shaped their approach to survive in male dominated workplaces.
These assumptions of whether women have a place in senior management, result in a clash between two sets of associations called agentic and communal behaviours according to Eagly and Carli (2007).
Agentic behaviours include assertion, control, forcefulness, self-reliance, confidence, aggression, independence, individualism, ambition, dominance and objectivity. Communal behaviours include kindness, helpfulness, friendliness and empathy. Agentic behaviour tends to be associated with masculine behaviour and effective leadership while communal behaviour tends to be linked with feminine behaviour and non-leadership. This leads to the stereotype of linking agentic leadership with men and communal non-leadership with women. These stereotypes, in turn, evaluate the performance of women leaders.
Despite some men being more feminine than women and some women being more masculine than men, studies have shown that employees link men more with leadership. But what happens when women do not conform to gendered associations?
Women with masculine behaviours are not a social norm and cause many a jolt of assumptions. Women are expected to be helpful. Men reap approval for being helpful. Women are expected to be warm and considerate. Warm and considerate men are considered ‘impressive.' Self-promoting men are accepted but women are expected to be modest even if they are high performers.
Prejudice appears in the way staff resist women's management and leadership; there is still great uncertainty about women's abilities to perform at senior levels. The clash of assumptions comes to the fore when the average person confronts a woman in management. Male bosses are bosses, female bosses are ‘women'; female bosses are ‘women behaving like men'.
When women encounter female managers at work, their expectations are different because they don't fit the gender stereotype of a boss. It is ‘almost proper' for a man to be in a senior role, leaving it to be ‘almost improper' for a woman.
Given all this, it is no surprise employees are more resistant to women senior managers. The Queen bee label describes women with agentic masculine behaviour.
There is no male version of a Queen bee. Bad behaviour from men in senior roles is often expected, accepted or ignored. It reinforces the rightful place of men as bosses. Men who do not support each other are not blamed by other men, nor are senior men expected to support women in management or blamed when they do not; so why such expectations of women?
This is not an easy question to answer, but we should all be aware of, and challenge, our assumptions to stop negative evaluations. We must sop using the Queen Bee stereotype and focus action on challenging overall stereotypes, gendered cultures and structures in business.
Women are achieving representation in middle management - the next step is for women to be naturally accepted as senior leaders of corporate business.
Professor Sharon Mavin is associate dean (research and consultancy) at Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University
