Queen Bees
Imagine you’re a bee.
Oh come on, play along.
Imagine you’re a bee, wafting around in all your yellow and blackness, annoying a few people, landing on a few flowers and vibrating in a generally irritating, buzzy kind of way. At the end of the evening, off you fly on your merry way to the hive, and behold! There she is, on her throne of honeycomb (do we reckon they have thrones?), humming away in all her glory – the Queen Bee.
She’s dazzling, she’s regal, she’s practically…okay fine, but I do have a point – today’s topic is…*drum roll*…the Queen Bee Syndrome! (See where I was going now?)
Many women would love the idea of being at the helm of their very own hive, not for the honey, but for the power, the status etc etc, yes, we have those ego fantasies too. When we’ve smashed through the glass ceiling (with no help from the glass escalator) and managed to stop ourselves falling off the glass cliff (I can feel an irrational fear of glass developing…), you’d think we’d be sympathetic to our sisters who have yet to begin their glass-riddled journey.
Apparently this is not so. Case in point – Margaret Thatcher. I don’t claim to know a lot about her, but what I find most interesting, is that for all her time in office, she did very little to improve the job prospects of women. The Queen Bee Syndrome suggests that when powerful women get to the top, they don’t want other women to follow suit, and will sometimes actively discriminate against their junior female colleagues – you remember the female boss of whom I speak…
…it’s okay, you’re in a safe environment, deep breaths.
But while I was musing on the possible misery the Queen Bee Syndrome could pose to my future career, I came across a recent article looking at the Queen Bee Syndrome in a workplace in Italy. Due, in part, to Italy’s greater freedom for women in corporate settings, there was virtually no evidence of Queen Bees; in fact, working women were very supportive of each other. So, perhaps as the circumstances change around my generation’s transition from female graduates to working women, Queen Bees will become a thing of the past. No rolled up newspaper needed.
As for me, I’m off to clean Judy’s car with a toothbrush.
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