Chapter 15: When Women Lead: Cultivating Diversity From the Top

For too long corporate culture has been buzzing with the myth of the Queen Bee. The catchy but misleading moniker has circulated among business professionals since the 1970s, when a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published a study in Psychology Today (Staines, Tavris, & Jayaratne, 1974) examining the relational dynamics between women in the workplace. The researchers found that women who rose to leadership positions within male-dominated companies would sometimes inhibit other women from ascending to their level. Staines et al. (1974) speculated that such women became so obsessed with maintaining their authority that they would see more junior women as competition rather than mentees or successors. While these authors later expressed concern that their results had been misunderstood (Langfield, 2013) and asserted that Queen Bees are the exception rather than the norm, the myth persisted nevertheless. The original conclusion of these scholars, supported by survey results gathered from more than 20,000 readers of Psychology Today and related magazines (Staines et al., 1974), reinforced prevailing narratives about the cattiness of women-to-women relationships.