Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

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Wow. Did you ever try to go over her head and plead your case?

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I did. Before she fired me I got nervous and went to HR with a fully documented case. I also had a mentor in upper management who pleaded on my behalf to HR before and after the firing. I appealed for "wrongful termination." Conveniently, their HR department ruled that I was not wrongfully terminated.


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A write-up is rarely anything other than a formality so someone can fire you. If you want to save your job start CYA.

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QFT

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

Good post, FFK. Nice to get a real-world experience put down in the thread. I hope more females come in here and put down similar occurences, if applicable.

I also think it's funny that when you say Queen Bee out loud, or think it aloud, it can sound like a euphemism for Queen B*tch. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

I don't know, but in working at 5 Fortune 500 firms, the far majority working for women, [2 jobs ago my boss, her boss, and her boss were all women] I agree 110% with what you say.

90% of the women I encountered loved working with men over other women, and related better to male junior professionals, and tried to destroy any other woman on their level. I have no idea why this is so. Many women have commented similarly to me.

Frankly, I prefer working for women. They listen more.

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

I am continuing to find this topic fascinating, and when I brought it up in my philosophy of science class it created quite a stir as an example of the nature or nurture debate, or more specifically, how naturalists or humanists would argue the problem in the social sciences.

While discussing the problem, someone suggested something that made me look down a different avenue for why women would behave this way, or if someone has observed them behaving this way in a non-business context. I am also looking for animal models for the behavior, mainly primates, where the political jargon is going to be less than in human studies. While looking, I found this:

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One way women can compete without risking their safety or compromising their lives is through acts that ostracise, stigmatise, and otherwise exclude others from social interaction without risking direct physical confrontation. Such acts do not eliminate or physically injure the target, nor do they demonstrate the greater size, strength, or belligerence of the attacker. They do, however, inflict stress and diminish the opponent's reputation and social support. The target is attacked circuitously and the aggressor can therefore remain unidentified. This set of behaviours is referred to as indirect aggression (Bjorkqvist, Lagerspetz, & Kaukiainen, 1992) or relational aggression (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995). Girls exceed boys on measures of indirect aggression by the age of 11, and the sex difference continues to be present up to the age of 18. As male physical aggression diminishes with age, the sex difference in indirect aggression lessens and disappears in adulthood--at least among educated middle-class samples (Pellegrini & Archer, in press). These stigmatising and excluding strategies can have devastating effects upon the victim (Ahmad & Smith, 1994; Simmons, 2002).


Female competition: causes, constraints, content, and contexts
Journal of Sex Research
Feb, 2004
Anne Campbell

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Now, the article this comes from is about 10 pages long and I haven't had the time to go through it all, but regardless of the conclusions it draws, it does point the way to some interesting possibilities and some additional research opportunities.

I'm going to guess that based on the short paragraph above that Queen Bee syndrome is very real, but it's not voluntary, it's an adolescent behavior that the women who engage in it never outgrew. Maybe if I dig further, I'll change my mind on that, but with all the anecdotal information I seem to be gathering, there's certainly something at work.

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

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I am also looking for animal models for the behavior, mainly primates, where the political jargon is going to be less than in human studies.

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Unfortunately, the range of primate male-female interactions is huge. Everything from monogamous couples with dominant females (e.g. marmosets), small harems (e.g. gorillas) to large patriarchal societies (e.g. baboons). Even within the chimps there's a big difference between the common chimp (patriarchal society) and the pygmy chimp (matriarchal promiscuous). Also, human sexual behavior has a lot of anomalies (female orgasm, constant female receptiveness, menopause). All this makes comparative studies on male-female interactions difficult (although they do a good job of explaining the size of testicles!).

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

I saw a fascinating documentary about a small matriachal population of minorities somewhere in China that basically lived like bonobos when it came to sex. Well they were a little more discreet about it, but still it seemed like just about every male and female were getting together at some point. They had built up all these social mores too. Like for the males it was really shameful to fall in love and get hooked on your current squeeze. The men would basically just appear outside the woman's window every night and if she liked one she'd let him up. But he had to be out by morning.

If I remember right the women generally lived together in multigenerational households and never married. Of course the Chinese govt is forcing them to move toward the norm, and now they have to lie about their indiscretions.

Re: At Work: Women Against Women
 

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I saw a fascinating documentary about a small matriachal population of minorities somewhere in China that basically lived like bonobos when it came to sex. Well they were a little more discreet about it, but still it seemed like just about every male and female were getting together at some point. They had built up all these social mores too. Like for the males it was really shameful to fall in love and get hooked on your current squeeze. The men would basically just appear outside the woman's window every night and if she liked one she'd let him up. But he had to be out by morning.

If I remember right the women generally lived together in multigenerational households and never married. Of course the Chinese govt is forcing them to move toward the norm, and now they have to lie about their indiscretions.

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So you are saying they went to college?



Rimshot!