Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman

[eridani]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/opinion/sunday/sheryl-sandberg-on-the-myth-of-the-catty-woman.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

The biggest enemy of women, we’re warned, is a powerful woman. Queen bees refuse to help other women. If you approach one for advice, instead of opening a door, she’ll shut the door before you can even get your foot in. We’ve often heard women lower their voices and confess, “It hurts me to say this, but the worst boss I ever had was a woman.”

But statistically that isn’t true.

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. When strategy professors studied the top management of the Standard & Poor’s 1,500 companies over 20 years, they found something that seemed to support the notion. In their study, when one woman reached senior management, it was 51 percent less likely that a second woman would make it.
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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. In those companies, a woman had a better chance of joining senior management than when the chief executive was a man.

[athena]

1. My own experience,

which is consistent with this article, is that a minority of women tend to see women as competition and are therefore cold and mean to other women; but if you want to see true nastiness toward a woman -- I mean, back-stabbing, career-destroying nastiness -- you will find that the perpetrator is invariably a man. There are some men out there who cannot stand a woman who is smarter or more competent than they are, and there are no lengths to which they will not go to destroy that woman's reputation and her career. People other than the victim seem incapable of noticing such men's obvious jealousy; they instead blame the woman for being unable to get along with all of her co-workers and for being involved in "conflict".

[prayin4rain]

2. My experience, too. n/t

[mythology]

3. I wonder if the study was actually finding that many companies wanted a "token" woman

rather than actually buying into the idea that women can and should be in positions of management. If they needed to get a woman on the board, or into senior management, but hadn't taken the step to actually incorporating equality into their corporate values, it would probably reflect in limiting the opportunity for other women to climb the corporate ladder. Where a company that actually did value women, would be more open as reflected in when a woman was able to make it to CEO, the company itself was more invested in promoting women.