There are women who will actively not help other women. They don’t mentor them. They don’t sponsor them. They compete with them rather than collaborate. They hoard information. They don’t warn you about the landmine you’re walking toward. When you finally make it to a position of relative power, they don’t take your call.
The queen bee phenomenon is real. And it’s worth talking about, because the narrative around it is usually garbage.
The easy story is that these women are just terrible. They’ve got some kind of personality defect. They’re threatened. They’ve internalised so much misogyny that they’ve become misogynistic themselves. If they were just less selfish or less insecure, they’d help other women.
The true story is more interesting and infinitely more complicated. And until we actually understand it, we’re not going to fix it.
The queen bee usually got to where she is in an environment where there was only room for one. Not in theory, but in practice. There was one woman in the leadership team, or one woman at her level, or one woman who had the ear of the powerful men in the organisation. That was it. And she knew, at some level, that if another woman came along and was good, the story might become “oh, women can do this role,” but it might also become “oh, but this queen bee was special” and she’d lose the thing that made her valuable.
She might not have thought this through consciously. It might just live in her chest as a survival instinct. You come up in an environment where women are rare at the top and you absorb a certain kind of scarcity thinking. You learn that there’s only so much room. You learn that you need to be the right kind of woman, the kind that the men in power are comfortable with. You learn to watch out for women who might threaten that.
These aren’t excuses. They’re explanations. And they matter, because if you don’t understand where the queen bee comes from, you’re just going to blame her for being selfish and then feel morally superior when she doesn’t help you, and you’re not actually solving anything.
The thing about surviving in a male-dominated environment is that you make a lot of compromises. You learn to navigate systems that weren’t built for you. You learn to work with people who are, at best, indifferent to your success and, at worst, actively hostile to it. You might internalise the idea that you’re an exception. That you’re different from other women. That you somehow understand things that other women don’t.
This is a survival mechanism. It’s genuinely adaptive in hostile environments. And it often means that once you get to a position of power, you don’t see other women as allies. You see them as other women, which means you see them as people who remind you of the thing you’ve worked so hard not to be.
There’s also the factor of having paid an enormous personal price. If you’ve sacrificed parts of yourself to get where you are, there’s a certain kind of resentment that can come when you see younger women who won’t have to pay that price. Not that they’re actually paying a lesser price, but the price looks different and it looks easier and that’s infuriating.
And there’s the honest fear that if other women succeed, the narrative changes. Suddenly you’re not special anymore. You’re just one of many. The men who have been treating you as “not like other women” will stop. The power that came from being rare will evaporate.
The cost of queen bee dynamics is enormous. For the junior women, who get no mentorship, no sponsorship, no real support. For the organisation, which loses the knowledge transfer that comes from women supporting women. For the queen bee herself, who’s isolated by her own choices and missing out on genuine relationships and the satisfaction of actually helping someone.
But understanding the cost doesn’t make me blame the queen bee, and it doesn’t make me blame the junior women for not getting the help they need. It makes me blame the systems that created the scarcity in the first place. The systems that only have room for one woman at the top. The systems where being a woman is a liability that has to be overcome rather than just a thing that you are.
The fix is structural. You need more women in leadership so that the scarcity mentality stops making sense. You need women to see each other as allies rather than competition, which is hard when the environment has trained them to be competitive. You need to stop rewarding women for being “not like other women” and start building cultures where women can actually be women with each other.
But that’s slow. And while we’re working on that, you still have actual queen bees and actual junior women who need actual support right now.
If you’re a junior woman dealing with a queen bee: you’re not crazy. It’s real. And it’s not because you’re not good enough or not valuable enough. It’s because she’s trapped in a pattern of survival that doesn’t actually keep her safe anymore, and she hasn’t figured out how to let go of it. That’s not your responsibility to fix. Your responsibility is to find other people — women, men, allies, whoever — who will actually help you. And then, once you’re in a position to help other women, be the person the queen bee wasn’t.
If you’re a woman in leadership and you recognise yourself: this is worth examining. Genuinely. Where does the impulse to not help other women come from? Is it fear? Is it scarcity thinking? Is it resentment? All of the above? Once you understand it, you have a choice. You can keep doing the thing that got you here. Or you can choose to break the pattern.
The payoff of choosing to break the pattern is real. Women who have sponsors and mentors in senior roles do better. Organisations with strong networks of women supporting women are more innovative and more stable. And you, the senior woman, get to actually build something instead of just protecting something.
The queen bee narrative is usually pitched as “terrible women are terrible.” But the real story is much more human. It’s about smart, capable women who made decisions to survive in hostile environments and then got stuck in those survival patterns even after the threat changed. Understanding that doesn’t excuse it. But it does open up the possibility of something different. And we could use something different.