Office queen bees hold back women’s careers

FORGET “jobs for the boys”. Women bosses are significantly more likely than men to discriminate against female employees, research has suggested.

The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one.

They were also prone to mark down women’s prospects for promotion and to assess them as more controlling than men in their management style.

The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.

“Female and older participants showed more prejudice against the (idea of a) female leader than did male and younger participants,” said Rocio Garcia-Retamero, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and lead author of the report.

Women bosses are significantly more likely than men to discriminate against female employees, research has suggested.

That's because most women bosses are catty b*tches to their female subordinates.

I'd much rather have a man as my boss.

I think it's trying to say that some women tend to discriminate against other women purely because they want keep their rivals at bay. Not because they're making 'poor' decisions per se, but because they're making them based more on emotion than anything else. Which some would probably say makes them poor by definition, but there are plenty of men who also do that. Also, men are more competitive with each other than probably any other creatures on the planet. So, I don't know. Forget I said anything. :)

Female bosses tend to be totally paranoid about a male getting anything over on her and they're threatened by any woman with a wisp of aptitude. The effect is that they hate and distrust EVERYBODY and they make life hell.

From what I've seen of women in the workplace, most of them are at each others throats. It's no surprise to me that they establish a reign of terror against the other women once they get into a position of power. Being a man-hater is accepted and encouraged, so they're just continuing the status quo there.

After 30 years in HR I've about seen it all.

My best boss was a wonderful woman and my mentor. We also had a female attorney that I considered highly competent and also a mentor.

However, my worst boss was also a woman. Clinical bi-polar, unmedicated. Divide and conquer. Paranoia. Don't want to go there. Had to quit that job because of her. Eventually she was fired (after the men she was playing up to finally started thinking with the right head and figured her out).

I'm just saying that many (though certainly not the majority) of men's selections of women over better qualified men don't have to do with qualifications for the work on the job, but more of a kneejerk reaction to "T&A" and because such women will often tell them what they want to hear rather than the truth.

The women some of the other posters are describing (pros at manipulation and office politics) probably got their jobs by the above method. That WAS their qualifications.

And, having been HR advisor to a large number of female supervisors over a good many years, I haven't really found any more "rivalry" among them and their subordinates than with men and men. Of course, it does happen among both, and there is also crossover between the sexes.

Now the micro-manager thing, yes, I think a lot of female managers engage in that and mostly for the reason I stated above: bosses are more apt to beat up on the females (verbally) when things go wrong whether it's their fault or not, while they are more apt to side with males.

What were Monica's qualifications?

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