Many of us have been wondering whether women can or want to work with other women.

It is very common to hear that women don’t want to cooperate with other women, and many studies confirm that. A Pew survey is so devastating, considering that more women than men don’t prefer to work with women. Pew asked 2,002 people if they would prefer to work with men or women. Most—78 percent of men and 76 percent of women—said they didn’t care. But for the 22 percent who did have a preference, “it’s men who get the nod from both sexes by about a 2-1 margin,” Pew’s Rich Morin writes. In fact, more women said they’d rather work with men than men did.

When the results are broken down by generation, workers who were born between 1925 and 1942 were most likely to say they prefer working with men (21 percent), and Millennials (born in the 1980s and 1990s) were least likely to (11 percent). But from there, the percentage doesn’t track with age. In fact, more workers from Generation X, who are closer in age to Millennials, said they’d prefer to work with men (19 percent) than did the middle-aged Boomers (16 percent).

Moreover, Millennial women than men (59 percent versus 19 percent) said being a working parent makes it hard to advance in a job, and fewer Millennial women said they aspired to become managers.

There are several opinions about how women feel working with other women. Many studies (Pew and Gallup) indicate that women face difficulty having female partners and prefer working for or with men than women. Women are afraid of the judgmental attitude that women have against subordinates. A 2009 study published in the journal Gender in Management found, for example, that although women believe other women make good managers, “the female workers did not actually want to work for them.” Although women had been in the workplace, they don’t want to have a female boss.

Joyce Benenson, a psychologist in Emmanuel College of Boston, believes that it is in the nature of women not to cooperate with other females. Her research indicates that women and girls are less willing than men and boys to cooperate with lower-status individuals of the same gender; more likely to dissolve same-gender friendships; and more willing to socially exclude one another. Although many other studies show that the critical attitude of women is not a natural feature of them, but rather a product of the difficult working reality that women face.

At this point, we should cite the meaning of Queen Bee. It’s a phenomenon first defined by C. Tavris, G.L. Staines, and T.E. Jayaratne in 1973. Queen bee is a derogatory term applied to women who have achieved success in traditionally male-dominated fields. These women are in positions of authority that are more critical of female subordinates. It is ubiquitous for women bosses to be more strict and demanding, especially towards other women. This phenomenon hasn’t been reduced, yet research in the British Journal of Social Psychology replicated the 2004 results indicate that senior-level female professors still believe their female graduate students are less committed than their male counterparts.

We should say that queen bees believe that they endure all the gender discrimination and succeed; that’s why the other females should do the same. In that way, they want to emphasize that they are strong enough and different from other women to manage the fields that only men dominated. They can’t handle the fact that other women could have different career paths, and not all work the same way.

Naomi Ellemers is one of the current study’s coauthors and a social psychology professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Based on her own research along with others in this area, she believes that in evaluations of subordinates, the women take into account their own experiences, “including the realization that they had to overcome gender bias, did not receive much support from the organization and had to make many personal sacrifices to be successful.”

Therefore, she says, “These women know they had to show exceptional commitment to be successful, and this makes them less certain that other women should be willing and able to do the same.” In other words, she says that the more senior women realize that younger women need to be “super committed” in order to have a chance at success. In addition, another way women treat their subordinates differently is that they function in a more masculine way.

They believe that the only way to succeed is to behave like men since, for many years, there was a belief that masculinity and success are synonymous. Possibly, women with masculine behavior reach the top more easily and therefore maintain such behaviors, considering that it is the only way to success.

The researchers make it clear, “the queen bee phenomenon is not a cause, but rather a consequence of gender discrimination that continues to prevail in academia.” In fact, they think “queen bee” may not even be the correct term to describe a woman who is doing her best to adapt and survive in male-dominated environments. Carol Tavris, a coauthor on the original 1974 study that coined the term, told The Atlantic she regretted giving such “a catchy name” to such a complex pattern of behavior. She explained that the term queen bee is often misinterpreted and may have a negative impact on initiatives to help women at work. The current researchers agree, suggesting a new term, “self-group distancing,” be adopted instead of “queen bee.”

Laurie Rudman, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, found that some women’s disparagement of other women can be explained by what’s called “system justification,” a psychological concept in which long-oppressed groups, struggling to make sense of an unfair world, internalize negative stereotypes.

We conclude that women who hold leadership positions in their work have to overcome many obstacles. In essence, they play a role, the role that society with all gender stereotypes has set. Ellemers sums up that solving the queen bee problem can’t be “achieved by fixing the women, but requires that we fix the organizations.” In other words, eliminating gender bias in our organizations is the only way to eliminate this phenomenon. It makes a lot of sense for women to try to imitate behaviors that equality has shown will lead in one way or another to a successful career. Women tried and worked very hard to succeed in their work, making many sacrifices.

We would say that many of us have been victims of this separation between men and women and have lost some of our boundaries. In fact, many people do not accept it, and it seems terrible to them when a woman becomes a tougher boss than she needs, unlike a man. At the same time, there are still signs of jealousy towards women who have succeeded professionally.

Of course, we also understand the need for women to break stereotypes and in order to get out of a situation that puts pressure on you, you have to go to extremes in order for balance to come.

For this reason, women have to be stricter just because they can’t show any sign of weakness or sentimentality, but this is a mistake of our society since women are still severely judged if they behave according to the stereotypes that indicate that women are sensitive and weak. Thus, we conclude that the woman is constantly judged whether she acts with masculinity or femininity, which is a stereotypical leftover. We don’t need to judge people, women or men, for their masculinity or femininity, but for their behavior towards their colleagues and employees but also their actions towards their work.

Nevertheless, women need to understand that this makes it difficult for them to work with other women, and we have reached a point where we do not need to create additional barriers for other women trying to rise professionally because, in essence, we are reproducing the same problem that we have been trying to escape from for so many years. We have to accept that women and men can be equal and contribute to the success of work in their own way. Imitating and reproducing negative stereotypes can only cause collaboration problems, as we saw above.

Resource: The Atlantic, Forbes