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The teenage girls described in Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabees are so brutal Tina Fey simply called them Mean Girls in her fictionalized film version. In both accounts, these adolescent vixens use their top tier status and mean girl tricks-of-the-trade to suppress the lowly, female minions they see as potential competition. Often, these queen bee behaviors honed in high school will carry on with them into adulthood. Thus, the young queen bees who once terrorized teens will grow up to be adult queen bees, just as quick to kick around coworkers.

The queen bee toolkit, for both young and old, holds a variety of manipulative weaponry. Typically, teen queen bees keep competition at bay through acts like slur texting, social vexing, and competitive besting. Adult queen bees serve up their brand of suppression in similar style. For example, while the teen queen may spread the ever-popular slut slur via texting, the adult queen may plant the same seed in the office rumor garden through subtle innuendo: Guess who I saw out with yet another guy?! Not quite as overt as flat-out calling a girl a hoochie, but it gets the job done just the same.

Identifying the Workplace Queen Bee

References to queen bees surged in relation to Wiseman’s book and Fey’s film, but the term, in reference to adult queen bees, had been coined decades before. In their 1973, twenty-thousand person study, psychologists Staines, Tavris, and Jayaratne first identified the buzz of Queen Bee Syndrome. The term was used to describe top level women in organizations who are so protective of their self-carved niche they are intent on keeping other women from joining them. They want to remain the only queen in a hive of drones.

A workplace queen bee is one who has successfully climbed the patriarchal ladders and, so, believes other women should just quit their whining and work, work, work to do the same. However, since the queen bee enjoys the cache of being the main female, she really prefers that her sister bees simply stay put. Instead of lashing out at the patriarchy which made it so difficult for her to reach the top, she will often begin associating with it and abandon her association with the plight of the lass class altogether. All this talk of The Man keeping us down and it’s The Sister doing the suppressing!

Share the buzz, not the sting!

According to psychologist Naomi Ellemers, when an individual perceives a confrontation to her social identity she will enlist a strategy to cope with that attack. The discordance between a woman’s social identity as a female and the patriarchal tilt to many organizations causes just this type of confrontation. A woman who leans light on the plight of sisterhood is likely to abandon her ties to the women in her workplace altogether and wholeheartedly accept her boys’ club membership card. However, women who strongly identify with their female identities will instead enlist strategies that help not only themselves but other females in her workplace and womankind as a whole. These women will not adopt the queen bee personality. Instead, they strive to change the rules that benefit men at the expense of women and will work with, not against, fellow women to bring the whole group up as one.

Adult women and young girls are often more similar than we’d like to admit. Sure, the teen queens may behave more brutally, overtly wapping one another with their libel munitions and class manipulations, but you’d think the adults would have learned better. There may be a simple solution, though. The common denominator in queen bee literature is in the enlistment of female mentorship. Just as the teens need positive role models and guides for better behavior so, too, do the adults. With guidance, some would-be queen bees can learn that individual achievement does not hinge on the failure of others and in human life a whole hive of queen bees can succeed sans sting.