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HERE IS AN IDEA ...

14/05/2019 00:10:00 The Editor

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Sir,

Women are taught from a young age to be cautious of their female friends and to view them as threats and competition. Competition can be healthy but being taught to compete for men, or who is prettier, has a better hairstyle or is more popular, that is no healthy competition at all.

Competition that matters should be something worth celebrating that ‘win’ for something that will contribute to the economic, political and social advancement of society. But even though socialisation teaches women to compete, when women decide to succumb to societal expectations, they are labelled with names. Competitive women are often referred to as Queen Bees, mean girls or catty. What is the derogatory name for competitive men? It doesn’t exist.

Examine

But let us examine this Queen Bee theory more closely. In the professional world, there are fewer women who were mentored by men, than those mentored by women.
At home, there are more female relatives (mother, aunts, grandmothers) than male relatives who are willing to help out other female relatives, especially when it comes to caring for children. We rarely ever hear anyone saying ‘my children live with my father’ or ‘I grew up living with my uncle’.

It is usually a female relative offering to help financially or provide shelter for children of relatives. And during funerals, it is always women sitting around the bereaved woman. When a new baby arrives, it is other women who bring gifts and even teach the new mother how to care for the young one. So where exactly is this myth ‘women can’t support each other’ coming from, and who started it?

Impact

According to the Queen Bee theory, a female senior manager should have a more negative impact on the other women trying to climb into professional ranks.
A study done by strategy professors, over a period of 20 years, revealed that when one woman reached senior management, it was 51 per cent less likely that a second woman would make it. But the person blocking the second woman’s path wasn’t usually a queen bee; it was a male chief executive.

When a woman was made chief executive, the opposite was true. Queen bees exist but they’re far less common than we think. Women aren’t any meaner to women than men are to one another. Women are just expected to be nicer. We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind.

So, in reality, queen bees aren’t a reason for inequality but rather a result of inequality. This ‘Queen Bee’ behaviour isn’t inherently female. It’s a natural way we react to discrimination when we belong to a non-dominant group. Fearing that their group isn’t valued, some members distance themselves from their own kind.

Cultural

They internalise cultural biases and avoid affiliating with groups that are seen as having low status. That is why black people prefer speaking very bad English with other black people instead of speaking their own language. Because English is associated with Caucasian, and Caucasian is associated with ‘superiority’.
That is also why strong women even consider themselves to be ‘manly’ because they are trying to associate themselves with the gender considered ‘superior’. This mentality can only be unlearned by un-teaching women all these bad messages about themselves.

It’s time to stop punishing women and minorities for promoting diversity, and it’s time for all of us to stop judging the same behaviour more harshly when it comes from a woman rather than a man. Women can disagree, even compete, and still have each others’ backs.

Nomsa