12
One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
—George Santayana, philosopher and writer1
Imagine you’re a young female employee in a male-dominated workplace. You’re ambitious, hardworking, and have aspirations of reaching the C-suite. So what’s the best strategy to befriend senior managers and boost your career? Even the top levels of male-dominated corporations are not completely female free, and there are often at least a few women at the senior levels of management who could serve as friends or mentors. Perhaps you could bypass the sex partition altogether and just seek out other women to befriend. Unfortunately, the small numbers of senior women may not be the only problem you’d encounter in your attempts to establish same-sex friendships. Research suggests that another issue, competitiveness between women, may complicate your attempts at friendship with female management. Female competitiveness can hinder the development of same-sex friendships between women, particularly when one woman is more senior in the organization.
Competition between women is well-documented,2 and the term “queen bee syndrome” was coined to describe successful women who undermine the success of other women as a result of competitiveness with these women.3 Several interesting studies provide evidence for the queen bee syndrome. In one such study, participants read a story about a successful female leader.4 Half of the participants were given the opportunity to penalize this fictional leader by giving her poor ratings, and the other half were not. Both male and female participants took the opportunity to penalize the successful female character when given the opportunity. However, for the female participants, their own self-confidence received a boost when they were able to penalize the successful woman. The men’s self-confidence was not impacted by their ability to penalize the fictional woman. In other words, for women only, those who were able to put down the fictional female felt better about themselves.
More evidence of queen bees comes from a study where faculty members rated the commitment of doctoral students in their department.5 Although the male faculty members perceived male and female doctoral students as equally committed to their careers, female faculty members perceived the female graduate students as less committed than their male counterparts.
Basically, some women tend to devalue other women to make themselves look better. The interviews in Susan Barash’s book Tripping the Prom Queen illustrate just how this competitiveness and undermining can play out in the workplace. One of her interviewees, Tori, a forty-five-year-old woman in sales described her experiences with women at work:
There is this mentality where women are jealous on every level, and then we are competing for clients. If you make money, if you have a good marriage, if you wear nice clothes, if you are younger, and most of all, if you are good at work, the other women sort of hate you. Nothing is said, but it can be felt.6
Maureen, a thirty-two-year-old internist gives the perspective of a younger woman trying to establish a connection with her older female boss:
I see that Lillian, my boss, who is in her fifties, is envious and jealous of me. I think that she keeps important work from me because she is afraid that I will get the credit for doing a good job. She leaves me to figure things out for myself when it would be so much easier for her to simply tell me how she has done it in the past. I know that it wasn’t easy to get here and that twenty-two years ago it must have been even rougher. But I am so willing to learn from her and so eager to get the benefits of her expertise. It’s a shame it has to be this way.7
Instead of banding together, some women seem to be distancing themselves from other women. In my own research, women describe how competitiveness between female employees led them to prefer male management.8 Some of these women thought that competitiveness between women was particularly harsh in male-dominated environments. Others thought the female competition stemmed from jealousy and was more likely to be directed at attractive women.
Those who report to queen bees may be correct that they’d be better off working for men. Working for queen bees can be so stressful for women that physical and psychological problems can ensue. Women who report to female managers are more likely to show up for work experiencing physical ailments such as headache, stomach ache, neck pain, muscle aches, and suffering more psychological symptoms such as anxiety, trouble sleeping, and difficulty focusing.9 We don’t know for sure that the negative reaction to the female boss is a result of queen bee syndrome, but it’s telling that men don’t have these issues. Indeed, men’s levels of physical and psychological symptoms were the same regardless of whether their boss was female or male.
Why are women so harsh toward other women? Some have suggested that these women are strategizing to escape the bias against female leaders in their organization.10 Instead of challenging the bias they encounter, they choose to distance themselves from women as a group to improve their own chances for advancement. As a result, these women typically emphasize how different they are from other female employees in the organization. “I’m not like the other women, so you shouldn’t discriminate against me.” Unfortunately, this strategy can involve criticism of their female colleagues and lack of support for others of their own gender.
Band conductor Emily Moss described to me how, in her experience, female mentors were hard to come by. Band conducting is notoriously male dominated, and Moss had to seek out mentorship from men. She was inspired by her own mentors, and although she enjoys mentoring other women, she finds that isn’t the case with all her female colleagues. She described to me:
I have really had to navigate being a woman in this field on my own, but I love, love, love that I can be that for other up-and-coming women who want to be conductors. Unfortunately, I know some of my female conductor colleagues do not necessarily feel that way. They don’t want to be “the female conductor” who has to be a role model for everybody. I think it’s they just want to be known as a “conductor,” not a “female conductor.” They’re afraid if they accentuate the “female” and talk about it, then somehow people will judge them differently.
Sad but true. Some women think their best career strategy is to become one of the boys. As a result, they often turn their back on up-and-coming women who need help. One study found that women were reluctant to hire other women into prestigious positions.11 Why? They’re afraid that a poorly performing female will make all women look bad, and they fear that a highly qualified woman will steal the spotlight. Whether good or bad, the female candidate doesn’t stand a chance.
As a rule, queen bees typically propose that the forces holding women back are not structural and, instead, are based on women’s lack of skills or ambition. Sound familiar? In her book Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg claims women just need more confidence, ambition, and commitment to reach parity with men in the workplace. Like many women at the top of their game, Sandberg shares the perspective that women, themselves, are partially to blame for their own lack of progress at work. (Interestingly, research indicates that women who hold one of the top two positions in their organization and who hold an advanced business degree are more likely to suggest that women’s inequality stems from a lack of motivation.12 Sandberg earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and holds the number two—COO—position at Facebook.)
Just relax. I’m certainly not calling Sandberg a queen bee. Sandberg should be lauded for reigniting a discussion on women’s lack of advancement in the workplace. She clearly cares about helping women advance, and her book offers great suggestions for both men and women. Her “lean in” circles encourage women to network and help other women. But we need to keep her opinions of what holds women back in perspective. There may be psychological phenomena that led Sandberg to analyze the performance of other women differently than she would other men. Even if men and women are equally reluctant to “lean in,” Sandberg may have been more likely to notice this deficiency in women.
In fairness to high-level female execs, these women have every reason to think the current system is just. Since their own hard work and motivation paid off, it makes sense that they’d believe a similar strategy should land every hardworking woman a spot in the C-suite. Unfortunately, many qualified women who have been repeatedly denied promotion don’t share the same view. Unfortunately, disparaging the motivation and commitment of female colleagues also exacerbates the sex partition by making it more difficult for these colleagues to develop mentor relationships at work. After all, who wants to serve as a mentor for an unmotivated and uncommitted employee?
Nowhere is women’s lack of support for other women more evident than when you ask women which gender they prefer to work for. As I mentioned previously, my own research revealed women’s (and men’s) preference to work for male bosses.13 So strong is this preference that we couldn’t find any category of women who preferred female leadership. Those women who currently report to a woman, women who currently report to a man, women who have never reported to a woman, women who have never reported to a man, women who were employed in female-dominated workplaces, and women in male-dominated workplaces—they all want to report to a man. Most shockingly, even women who were managers themselves stated a preference for male management. That’s right, of female managers who had a preference for the gender of their boss, 75 percent preferred to work for a man, and only 25 percent preferred to work for a woman. Got that? Three-quarters of female managers say they prefer male managers to female managers. How can women expect to get ahead if women don’t want to work with their own gender?
Women clearly need to step up and start supporting their own. If the sex partition challenges friendships between men and women, we can’t create any more barriers for women at work. In fact, women should be going out of their way to help other women. Although this book has focused on obstacles to cross-sex friendship, it seems we can’t even take same-sex friendships for granted.
So if the queen bee syndrome challenges friendships between women, and the sex partition makes it more difficult for women to befriend men, what’s an ambitious female employee to do? Fortunately all women do not succumb to the queen bee syndrome, just as all cross-sex friendships are not hindered by the sex partition. There are many female managers who are fabulous mentors to junior women. I’ve had a few of my own. By describing the importance of male friendships, I certainly didn’t intend to minimize the value of these important same-sex female friendships. Women can help women in the workplace in ways that men cannot. It is essential to establish friendships and network with both genders to achieve your full career potential.
Race and the Sex Partition
If barriers to friendship exist between the sexes and between women, what about other groups? Do other groups face similar barriers in establishing friendships? The short answer is yes. In general, people like those who are similar to themselves, and humans have long preferred to socialize with similar others. This preference for similar others is nothing new. Plato wrote in Phaedrus, “Similarity begets friendship,” and Aristotle noted in Nichomachean Ethics that people “love others like themselves.” Often labeled “homophily,” we just want to associate with others who are like us. Our marriage partners, our close friends, our acquaintances, and our workplace networks most often consist of others who we find similar to ourselves.
Gender is just one of many attributes we use to determine similarity. Race, ethnicity, age, religion, education, and occupation are other attributes that individuals use to determine who is similar.14 It turns out, the more similar you are to your friend, the happier you’ll be with the friendship.15 In the workplace, homophilous ties tend to be stronger, more intimate, and more sought out in times of stress.16 It’s not hard to figure out why we prefer similar others. Similarity makes communication easier, makes our friends more predictable, and results in us trusting our friends more.17
Therefore, gender is not alone in creating obstacles to friendship, and other attributes, such as race, age, and sexual orientation, may also pose barriers to friendships at work. Many have argued that one explanation for the underrepresentation of minorities in management positions is their exclusion from social networks. Similar to women, racial minorities tend to receive less support from their coworkers. One study examined only managers with high potential (that is, managers who were particularly effective in their organization and with potential for future advancement). It turns out high-potential minorities had fewer high-status people in their networks than high-potential white managers.18 Furthermore, larger networks provided more support for white managers than for minority managers. Yet another study found that black employees received more support (such as receiving direction, guidance, role modeling, affirmation of ideas) from same-race mentors and sponsors than from similar cross-race relationships.19 This suggests that racial minorities must overcome a race partition in order to establish cross-race friendships.
The race partition and sex partition share another commonality. Just as the sex partition is exacerbated by sexual harassment training, the race partition may be exacerbated by racial-sensitivity training. Black and white police officers involved in racial-sensitivity training were studied in order to evaluate the training. Shockingly, the white officers became more prejudiced toward blacks after the sensitivity training.20 That is, the training that was designed to improve the communication and relationship between the black and white officers resulted in the white officers having more negative attitudes toward their black coworkers. The researchers suggest that the white officers resented the fact that the program was initiated for the benefit of black officers. Just as men often resent attending sexual harassment training, the white officers resented being required to attend training for the benefit of black officers.
Age and the Sex Partition
Race and gender both play a role in friendship development, but what about age? A sixty-nine-year-old retired professor recently explained to me how age can construct its own barriers to friendship between the sexes. Although the potential for sex creates a barrier between men and women, it also binds them. How? Younger women tend to get noticed by male employees. Granted, it’s not necessarily for professional reasons, but nonetheless, they get noticed. However, once a woman ages past the mid-fifties, the retired professor claims that women fall completely off the radar of male colleagues. She told me, “Once one is too old to be a serious sex partner for most of the organizational ‘male players,’ men simply don’t notice older women. In recent years, I’ve had young guys actually bump into me, because I was just so off their radar screen.” Men physically bumped into her as if she wasn’t there. I’m certainly not advocating that women use their sex appeal to break down the sex partition, but aging women may simply disappear from awareness.
Older women face other barriers as well. The same professor described how older women don’t get taken seriously as organizational players. “In the last half dozen years while flying back and forth between two homes several times a month, people would ask me if I was going to see my grandchildren while my partner (who has white hair, a beard, and is in his seventies) was always assumed to be traveling on business.” While her husband could establish new business contacts on his flights, it was unlikely her business travel would result in a new contact.
Unfortunately, stereotypes of older women as grandmotherly and not relevant in the workplace persist. We regularly see older men in positions of power, so we have less bias against older men. Hopefully, as we become exposed to older leaders and greater numbers of older women assume positions of power, these stereotypes will diminish. Research indicates that exposure to counter-stereotypic examples leads to a reduction in the use of stereotypes. A Hillary Clinton presidency, for example, would help break down stereotypes of older women by providing an exemplar of an older woman in a position of power.
With regard to the sex partition, older women may face a mixed bag. A male manager may be less likely to fear that an older woman will misinterpret his friendliness as sexual interest. That is, he may feel more comfortable in a one-on-one meeting and on a business trip. However, he may be less likely to notice the older woman or to take her contributions seriously. Therefore, the sex partition is not stronger or weaker for older women, it’s just different.
Lesbian Women, Gay Men, and the Sex Partition
The sex partition may not impact all employees in the same way, and gay and lesbian employees may face unique issues in their workplace friendships. The sex partition argument is heterosexist in that many of the barriers that constitute the sex partition assume the friends are heterosexual. Cross-sex friendships between straight women and gay men may suffer fewer obstacles than those between heterosexual men and women. Indeed, one female dot-commer I interviewed mentioned that a gay male work friend was “no threat whatsoever” and that her friendship with him was similar to her same-sex friendships.21
Professor and friendship researcher Nicholas Rumens found that some gay men feel that entering into a platonic friendship with straight women was easier for them (relative to straight men) because romantic or sexual interest did not play a role in these friendships.22 Yet another obstacle is removed for gay men in their friendships with women, in that they consider themselves exempt from accusations of sexual harassment. One gay man told Rumens, “I enjoy a sexual intimacy with the women in the office that comes from having a sexual banter with them. . . . It would be difficult for a straight man to do that.”23 In fact, the gay men he spoke with describe how the ability to talk about sex and flirt without fear of misinterpretation helps them to establish and maintain friendships with women at work.
Although the sex partition may have less impact on the cross-sex friendships of gays and lesbians, these employees may encounter barriers to same-sex friendships. Just as concerns surrounding romantic or sexual interest of the friend impact cross-sex heterosexual friendships, these same concerns may impact same-sex friendships when one friend is gay. In one study of friendships between lesbian women and straight women, the heterosexual women expressed concern that their lesbian friends were going to “cross the sexual line,”24 and another study found that both male and female heterosexuals thought same-sex homosexuals were sexually interested in them.25
In a study of friendships at work, Rumens found that gay men often felt like outsiders in the masculine culture in their organizations. In some ways, this helped them create a bond with the women in the workplace, because they both shared this outsider role. One gay manager acknowledged, “Being a manager here is about being a man in the traditional sense, you know, all balls and bluster . . . so it’s nice to get some respite from all those hang ups by hanging out and making friends with the women.”26
Furthermore, the gay men in Rumens’s study reported more difficulties establishing friendships with men in the organization because men were more likely to be homophobic than women. What about closeted gay men? Unfortunately, gay men who feel forced to hide their sexuality at work don’t fare much better. Either through “counterfeiting” (pretending to be heterosexual) or through “avoidance” (trying to elude sexual labels altogether), these men try to fit in within their homophobic workplaces. As Woods and Lucas point out in their book The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America, in order to maintain their closeted status, gay men avoid establishing any real connections with their colleagues. The need to socialize and become one of the guys is essential to career success, and the gay men they interviewed cited substantial barriers to establishing these important friendships.27
Clearly, gay men and women face barriers to friendships in the workplace. The heterosexist nature of this book was not intended to diminish the significance of these barriers in any way. In many ways, the barriers facing gay men at work are similar to those facing women. That is, difficulty establishing friendships with the heterosexual male managers at the top levels of management may inhibit the careers of gay men, much as it does women, in the workplace. More work clearly needs to be done to break down these obstacles.