22/09/2020
THE QUEEN BEE POLITICS
As Madeleine Albright once noted, there is “a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Of course, if she’s right, that “special place” must be awfully crowded.
When addressing women’s underrepresentation in business, there’s an often cited explanation: there aren’t enough women in the human capital wing. If only there were more women in charge of hiring, the conventional wisdom goes, women would hire other women! We’d support our own kind, right? Like lionesses in the pack (or some other noble, loyal animal — I’m not entirely sure on that one)
Just to dig deeper on this topic, we recently tried a quick study just to understand why women just don’t support each other that much and most especially at work places and business (The rivalry) you follow?, So we randomly asked 25 women why and here are the two highlights:
The first one is fairly simple. When you’re one of just a small handful of women in a working environment or in a business industry, the study shows, you’re more likely to be compared with other women. One of you is the “good one,” one of you is the “bad one,” so to speak. And while you’d think that’d be incentive enough to create a female community in the workplace, we found that few women want to be the first to take the plunge. After years of being outnumbered in competitive business environments, women are, not entirely unsurprisingly, a little paranoid.
“Competitive threat is the fear that a highly qualified female candidate might be more qualified, competent or accepted than you are,” One woman explained “female tokens” does say it all, doesn’t it?
This brings us to the second problem, COLLECTIVE THREAT. This rather menacing term can be summed up this way: You’re concerned you’re going to hire an idiot and look bad. And this really goes hand in hand with the favoritism threat, the fear that you might actually look as if you’re doing what you should be doing — hiring more women because it creates diversity in your workplace. The harsh fact remains that women are scared of appearing as though we’re looking out for one another. Call it the “I’m not a feminist, but …” phenomenon. You can be a fired up, pro-woman kind of gal in theory, but the label is frightening.
And research has proved this time and again. Women are more likely to suffer from stereotype threat in the workplace — and in one study, women performed less well on analytic tests when asked to think about their gender. Begging to be corrected women are somehow hardwired from childhood to fight with one another for attention and success.
At its worst, this anti-woman pattern leads to workplace bullying and shaming. And in case you were wondering, a huge amounts of studies have showed that female workplace bullies targeted other women about 70% of the time.
So is it our fault we’re geared to compete with one another? Not really, no. But with women outnumbering men at universities and pouring female entrepreneurs, let’s quit while we’re ahead.
