What every manager should know about the Queen Bee myth

The idea of the “Queen Bee” has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. You’ve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone.

It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just don’t support each other. Maybe the problem isn’t the system; maybe it’s . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely.

A zero-sum world

The term “Queen Bee” was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasn’t framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness.

In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasn’t that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to “blend in” with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her.

The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because they’ve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice.

When identity becomes a liability

A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term “Queen Bee” has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is “self-group distancing,” which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employees—anyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a “woman problem.” It is a scarcity problem.

And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a “Queen Bee,” I often ask a single question: “How many women are in the room where decisions are made?” The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, “I am not like them.” It is not pretty, but it is predictable.

What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being “the only one,” the motivation to distance evaporates.

‘Too soft’

To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was “too soft” and “not decisive enough,” feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards weren’t meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see.

For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized.

If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating women’s behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace.

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