Cold In Their Shadow

Cold In Their Shadow – Episode 2
The Queen Bee Dynamic

Welcome back to Cold in Their Shadow. I'm Gail Quarter Fischer. In episode one we talked about the territorial wars men wage. When a woman starts winning in a space they've claimed as their own. That conversation was uncomfortable, but it isn't the hardest one. The hardest one is the one we're having today. Because if I'm going to be honest with you, the whole point of ever worth and this series is that we're going to be honest, the wound that cuts the deepest in a woman's professional life often isn't dealt by a man.

It's still by another woman, usually a woman with more years, more title, more access. A woman who, by every reasonable expectation, should have reached down and pulled the younger one up. She did it. And we need to talk about why. Let me say something at the outset here, because this topic is loaded. I am not here to bash women.

I have been mentored by extraordinary women, and I've watched extraordinary women lived entire generations of younger ones. They exist. They are out there. Some of them are listening right now, and you know who you are. But anyone who has spent 30 or 40 years in business has also watched the other version. The senior woman who guards the door instead of holding it open.

The one who gives the harshest reviews to the most promising young woman in the department. The one who introduces every man in the room to the partners and forgets to introduce the woman standing next to her. It happens. Researchers call this the queen bee phenomenon. The shorthand is unfair because it makes it sound like a personality flaw, like some women are just born difficult.

The actual research tells a much more interesting story. When sociological sociologists like Robin JLI at Harvard started studying this, they found something important. Queen bee behavior is not a fixed trait. It shows up in environments where senior women are scarce, where a company has, say, 1 or 2 female executives at the top and 25 male ones. In those environments, every other ambitious woman becomes a threat, not because the senior woman is cruel, but because the system has convinced her there is exactly one seat and she is sitting in it when you have abundance eight, ten, 20 senior women, the behavior largely disappears.

Structural scarcity creates the dynamic. Take away the scarcity and you take away most of the bite. That doesn't excuse the behavior, though. It does explain it and it tells us where to aim. So what does it actually look like? Let me name what I've seen and what most professional women I know have felt at some point in their careers.

First, the withheld introduction. You're at a conference with your senior leader. She knows everyone. She walks you up to a circle executives and introduces the men on her team, not you. You stand there for 90s before someone notices you and ask who you are. It happens once, then it happens again, then again. Second, the credit shave off. You build the analysis.

You write the presentation deck. You find the insight. She walks into the boardroom and presents it. Sometimes your name appears in tiny letters at the bottom of slide 32. Sometimes not at all. When the chairman compliments the work, she smiles and says, thank you. I'm glad it landed. She doesn't lie, she just does it correct. Then the harsher review the men on the team are rated developing on a core competency in their review.

You get needs improvement on the same composition for the same behavior. When you ask, for example, the examples are vague. Style presents Polish words you cannot argue with because they don't actually mean anything. Now the quiet bad reference you apply for a stretch role. The hiring manager calls her off the record. She says you're talented, but not quite ready.

She doesn't say what you would need to be ready. She doesn't tell you the call even happened. You don't get the role. Six months later, a man with less stellar accomplishments and two years less experience does.

Then the exclusion from the room. The senior leadership or board dinner, the off site planning session, the Sunday brunch where the partners decide what next year looks like. You weren't told by the time you hear about it, the decisions are already made. In my case, exclusion from the room took a more deliberate form. My board formed a second board, secret meetings.

Without me to conduct the real business of the official board. They pulled in my own subordinates. They built coalitions against me from the from above and below, inside companies I had co-founded where I owned 50% and where I served as chief chief compliance officer, and where I had co-led the build of these companies over decades into global power houses.

Yet it happened to me, this influential woman on my board was a woman I had personally fought hard to put there. She said to me, I know it's hard to watch the companies you built change from the sidelines. Well, yeah. What she failed to grasp and it closely held private company. Much of what they were doing wasn't just exclusion.

It was illegal. And it breached ironclad contracts between my ex and me. That dictated in writing exactly how those companies were to be managed between the two of us. Then the loyalty test. She asked you to do something a little outside your role, staffing her personal calendar, smoothing over a conflict she created, taking the blame for a decision she made.

You did it because she was powerful. Then she asked again. The price of her sponsorship is that you carry water. She wouldn't dare ask a man to carry. Then the style policing your hair, your clothes, your laugh, the way you hold the glass at a client dinner. She tells you to be more polished than more relaxed, more confident than less aggressive, more approachable and then more authoritative.

The goalposts move because the goal was never really the goal post. The goal was to keep you below her. And lastly, the most painful one the public distance. She makes a point in front of male leadership of distinguishing herself from the women who complain. She rolls her eyes when bias comes up. She tells the room she never had any of those problems, even though both of you know exactly what she had to climb through to get where she is.

See is buying her continued seat by trading away the next woman's chance. Now let me say something honest. Men do most of these things to the behaviors aren't unique to women. What's different is the wound. When a man undermines a younger woman, she is hurt but rarely shocked when a woman does it. If the betrayal is layered because she was supposed to know she was supposed to remember.

And on some level, the younger woman believed without ever saying it out loud, that being a very capable woman should be enough to earn her a hand up. It isn't. It never was. And we have to stop pretending it should be. The book by Nancy Eckhoff, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, entitled survival of the prettiest that I introduced in episode one, gives us another piece of this puzzle.

She points out that female on female competition has its own evolutionary signature, where men historically fought for status through direct displays strength, dominance, public combat. Women fought through indirect means, reputation, social exclusion, gossip, alliance management, quieter, more deniable, often more devastating. Cross-Cultural research finds that women, when they compete, tend to compete this way, regardless of culture or industry.

It is old wiring. The boardroom is just a new arena. Combine that ancient wiring with modern scarcity. Only so many seats for women at the top and you get a perfect storm. The senior woman isn't broken. She isn't responding rationally to a system that told I'm sorry. She is responding rationally to a system that told her there was only room for one.

So what do we do? There are three things. First, name it without shaming it. If you are a younger woman watching this happen to you, stop interrupting it as personal failure or personal cruelty. It is structural. It is ancient. It is not about you. Knowing that doesn't make the wound stop bleeding, but it stops you from picking at it.

Second, if you're the senior woman, ask yourself a hard question. When the next ambitious young woman walks into your office, does your gut tighten or open? Do you reach for the door handle to pull her in, or to make sure it's closed behind you? You don't have to answer me. Answer yourself. Then act accordingly. Be the senior woman you needed 20 years ago.

Third, and this is the one that matters most. Refuse the premise that there is one seat when you get to the top. Your job isn't to defend your one chair. Your job is to drag in another five chairs and start filling them. The fastest way to end the queen beast dynamic is to make sure every queen has company.

In episode three, our final episode, we'll talk about the rebuild, what you do when you've been frozen out, pushed aside, edited out of the story you helped write. How you reclaim your light, your warmth and your ground. That one is personal for me as well. Pour yourself something good. We'll need it. Thank you for listening to Cold and Their Shadow.

If this episode made you think of someone, a woman who lifted you, or a woman who didn't share it with her. Both kinds of conversations matter. Thank you so much. Goodbye.