"Queen Bee" is the term for female professionals who sabotage other female professionals which Peggy Drexler uses in her article on the subject in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
It's kind of an old-fashioned term which emerged when we Baby Boomers first got a shot at well-paying influential jobs in the late 1970s. From the get-go, although we didn't say much about it, we noticed that many women who had gotten ahead were not only not helping other women. They were investing lots of energy into destabilizing our confidence and even sense of a professional self. They did and will continue to steal our ideas and present them as their own without a blink of an eye.
And they were and are very successful in doing in other female professionals. That's because they, by nature and/or nurture, have access to emotional gadgets males don't know know to operate. Women can read other women, zeroing in exactly on insecurities, tragic flaws, and presentational weaknesses. Frequently men just can't pick that up. And even if they could, doing someone in through using it is not usually their game.
Only one male in my professional life enjoyed playing in that kind of Machiavellian sandbox. But he did it ham-handedly and it was visible. People bailed out of the organization he founded as soon as they got from it what they needed in terms of a credential.
Women, on the other hand, can exhibit genius in undermining other women and also men if they decide to extend their scope. Two years ago, on a wintry afternoon in North Haven, Connecticut I sat in a restaurant with a woman who was, it took me about six months to connect the dots, ambushing me. I felt like I was under heavy attack. However, the moves were so smooth and so artfully paced that I couldn't form in my mind the statement "This is a Queen Bee." Had I been able to do that I would have exited that field of force before I had been stung multiple times.
It's a tragedy the Queen Bee syndrome not only continues but grows. So many of my colleagues, both female and male, confide to me that very wrong political mindset: We'd rather work for a man.
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