Why ‘women supporting women’ is not enough.
We’re often quick to diagnose difficult people, but less inclined to spend time diagnosing the environments that produce them.
There is an uncomfortable phrase that’s starting to appear regularly in conversations about women and leadership: “Queen Bee Syndrome”.
It describes a familiar enough story. A woman succeeds in a workplace where relatively few women have reached senior positions, but rather than opening doors for those coming behind her, she distances herself from them. She may be more critical of junior women, reluctant to sponsor them, or protective of the territory she has fought hard to occupy.
The easy, and most tempting conclusion here is that “women need to do more to support other women”.
Yes, there’s some truth in that. Leaders should be expected to develop others, and gatekeeping, bullying or deliberately obstructing someone’s career should not be excused because of the environment in which it occurs.
But it now prompts a more interesting question about whether workplaces themselves create the conditions in which Queen Bee behaviour emerges.
What does an organisation teach people about success when opportunity is scarce, hierarchy is powerful and the cost of reaching leadership has historically been high?
That takes us somewhere much more useful.
Research behind the Queen Bee phenomenon is more nuanced than the popular stereotype.
In an influential review published in The Leadership Quarterly, Belle Derks, Colette van Laar and Naomi Ellemers argued that Queen Bee behaviour should not simply be understood as a cause of gender inequality. It can also emerge as a response to it.
Their research describes women in male-dominated environments distancing themselves from junior women, assimilating to prevailing organisational norms and, at times, legitimising the very inequality through which they progressed.
Importantly, the authors argue that this behaviour is linked to experiences of discrimination and social-identity threat rather than being some inherently female leadership characteristic.
That shifts the conversation from “what is wrong with this woman” to “what has this organisation taught successful people they need to become in order to survive here”.
Healthcare should be particularly interested in this question.
Our sector is strongly hierarchical. Career-defining opportunities can depend on training positions, references, acting roles, committee memberships, influential sponsors and the judgement of relatively small groups of senior people.
Australian healthcare research has repeatedly shown that women’s progression into leadership is shaped not simply by capability or aspiration, but by organisational culture, career structures, flexibility, visibility of opportunities, mentoring and systemic barriers.
So, imagine the lessons a woman might have absorbed while progressing through such a system over 20 or 30 years.
Don’t complain. Don’t appear difficult. Don’t ask for flexibility if you want to be taken seriously. Learn how the existing leadership culture operates. And prove that you deserve the seat.
Then the organisation changes. A younger generation arrives with different expectations.
They ask why a leadership position cannot be flexible. Why caring responsibilities should limit advancement. Why an unnecessary hardship is still treated as a rite of passage. Why an opportunity was never advertised. Why leadership must continue to look like the leadership model of 20 years ago.
And sometimes the response from those who survived the old system is: “I had to do it.”
Those five words can tell us more about organisational culture than we realise.
Surviving a difficult system does not necessarily prove that the difficulty was necessary.
Yet once hardship becomes part of someone’s professional identity, changing the system can feel surprisingly personal. If I sacrificed enormously to reach this position, what does it mean if the person behind me can arrive without making the same sacrifice? If I had to wait 15 years for an opportunity, why should someone else receive it after seven?
We rarely say these things aloud. But organisational cultures are built as much from unspoken beliefs as written policies.
And this is where the Queen Bee conversation begins to connect with another cultural phenomenon I’ve previously written about: Tall Poppy Syndrome.
Tall Poppy Syndrome is usually discussed in relation to what happens while someone is rising. Someone becomes more visible, more successful or more ambitious and the surrounding culture begins to regulate that success. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t become too confident.
Queen Bee behaviour raises a different question: What happens after someone survives that environment and reaches the top?
There may be a connection between the two that deserves more attention. A scarcity-driven leadership culture can teach the person who survives that there are very few places here. Protect yours.
And yesterday’s barrier can quietly become tomorrow’s leadership expectation. This is how cultures reproduce themselves without anyone explicitly deciding to preserve them.
Related
The real issue may be scarcity
This suggests that healthcare leaders should pay attention to what might be called the organisation’s scarcity architecture.
Not simply how many leadership positions exist, but how opportunity flows through the institution. Who hears about an acting role before it is advertised? Who gets invited onto the important committee? Who has someone influential saying their name when they are not in the room?
If opportunity is experienced as scarce, informal and personally controlled, it should not surprise us when people begin protecting access to it.
Why another mentoring program may not be enough
Healthcare organisations continue to invest heavily in leadership development and mentoring.
Both matter. Published work describes mentoring as an important evidence-informed component of advancing women in healthcare leadership.
But mentoring cannot compensate for an organisation whose underlying opportunity structure remains unchanged. A mentor can advise someone how to navigate a system. But not help them ask why the system still needs to be navigated in that way.
It’s possible to have an excellent women’s leadership program operating inside an organisation where the most career-enhancing opportunities remain informal. It’s possible to offer mentoring while flexible work carries an invisible career penalty. And it’s even possible to celebrate female leaders while expecting those leaders to conform to a model of leadership designed by legacy culture.
What should healthcare leaders actually examine?
We may need to stop asking only whether our organisation supports women, and look more closely at the evidence embedded in everyday decisions that actually demonstrate this.
Some revealing questions:
Where does opportunity actually flow? Not what the policy says, but how acting positions, committee representation, training opportunities and succession prospects are distributed in practice.
Is flexibility genuinely career-neutral? A policy offering flexibility tells us very little if those who use it end up quietly disappearing from the leadership pipeline.
Are leaders accountable for producing other leaders? We often judge executives on operational performance, financial results, and workforce metrics. Should another measure of leadership maturity perhaps be the strength and diversity of the leadership capability they leave behind?
Who is sponsored rather than merely mentored? Advice matters, but advocacy matters differently. Whose names are being suggested in rooms they have not yet entered?
What happens when someone challenges the prevailing model of leadership? Do we become curious about a different way of working, or interpret difference as the wrong “fit”?
These questions tell us considerably more about culture than another statement committing the organisation to diversity.
There is an important danger in the label itself
None of this means individual accountability disappears.
Women can bully women. Men can bully men. Leaders can become territorial, exclusionary or destructive. Calling everything “the system” can be as intellectually lazy as blaming everything on individual personality.
The research gives healthcare leaders reason to resist that simplicity. The Queen Bee phenomenon has been described as a response to discriminatory organisational environments and is not regarded as a uniquely female pattern of behaviour.
Look at your own garden
Recent discussion around the Queen Bee Syndrome ultimately argues for changes to organisational structures rather than relying solely on women to behave differently towards one another.
That is an important message. We’ve spent years encouraging women to become more confident, seek mentors, develop networks, apply for leadership positions and support one another. All of those things have value.
But the burden of changing leadership cannot sit indefinitely with the people trying to enter it. Sustainable progress requires organisational and system-level change alongside individual development.
And lastly, there is an even broader lesson.
Tall Poppy Syndrome asks us to notice what organisations do to people who rise. And together they point toward a more interesting leadership possibility: Perhaps healthcare leaders need to spend much more time looking at their own gardens.
Dr Sidney Chandrasiri is the CEO of the Australian Institute of Health Executives.
This article was first published on Dr Chandrasiri’s LinkedIn feed. Read the original article here.