women bosses more likely to discriminate against women
Sunday Times (London) - December 31, 2006
Office queen bees hold back women’s careers Roger Dobson and Will Iredale
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.
Garcia-Retamaro said the findings showed that many people adopted a
stereotypical view that leadership was a masculine notion. “(This)
leads to a bias against a female candidate’s promotion to a
leadership post,” she said.
Nicola Horlick, the City financier nicknamed “Superwoman” for
combining a demanding job with a large family, said some women looked
on other women as a threat and preferred to surround themselves with
men.
“It is called the ‘queen bee syndrome’,” she said. “I have seen women
in managerial positions discriminating against other women, possibly
because they like to be the only female manager or woman in the
workplace.”
Recent cases that have illustrated this problem include that of Helen
Green, 36, a Deutsche Bank employee from London. In August she was
awarded nearly £800,000 in damages after two years of bullying by
four female colleagues that eventually led to a nervous breakdown.
The research, carried out by Garcia-Retamaro and her colleague Ester
Lopez-Zafra, has just been published in the journal Sex Roles.
They used 705 participants living in southern Spain to evaluate the
credentials of a male and female employee of a make-believe
corporation who were proposed for promotion to a managerial position
as a production supervisor.
After reading a description of the role and company, the participants
were told to read each potential leader’s CV and imagine their
characteristics and likely success by evaluating them on several
issues related to the job.
This included looking at the likelihood that the candidate would
receive an increase in salary, whether they had the right skills and
if they would win the acceptance of colleagues. They also assessed
how likely they might be to receive promotion and were asked to take
into account stereotypical traits of men and women such as
sensitivity or aggression.
The study says: “Female participants had a stronger tendency than
male participants to view the female candidates as less qualified
than the male candidate . . . they also thought that the female
candidate would fare worse in the future in her job than the male
candidate.”
It adds: “Female participants predicted that the male candidate would
show a more laissez-faire leadership style than the female candidate
would.”
Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society which campaigns for
sexual equality, said stereotyping was more important than female
rivalry in holding back women’s careers: “Stereotypes about what is
an appropriate role for women are still very strong in people’s minds
and there is still a cultural barrier to women making it into senior
positions.”