Jealous Women: Sexist Myth Or Fact?
You can’t escape the “Jealous Woman” or “Queen Bee” trope. It figures in movies, books and boardrooms. It refers to the idea that women feel insecure and jealous of other women who are succeeding, and resort to pulling them down.
Actress Sydney Sweeney — lately in the news for a controversial ad — had called out the Hollywood culture of women proclaiming a stance of empowerment, while privately tearing down other women. She may have been responding to producer Carol Baum’s comments on her, terming Sweeney as “not pretty” and someone who “can’t act”.
Sweeney told Vanity Fair: “There’s one woman who can get the man. There’s one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything. So then all the others feel like they have to fight each other or take that one woman down instead of being like, Let’s all lift each other up…”
In a similar vein, many women do feel repelled by the idea of joining a women’s club because they have had bitter experiences of bitchiness and gossip from other women.
In fact, one of the reasons why we run our networking platform – Ladies Who Lead – is to change that perception.
In the research paper, The Myth of Jealous Women (2019), researcher Swati Desai spoke to working women of different age groups and seniority levels and did an extensive literature review. The findings indicated that workplace jealousy among women is not universally established, though gender stereotyping plays a role in how jealousy is perceived and the way women are treated. And more importantly, women benefit more from having their own inner circles and networking rather than competing with each other.
At Ladies Who Lead, we’re proud of the culture we’ve created, which is democratic — irrespective of the background — and inclusive of people doing different things and spanning various stages of growth. We do witness groupism (it’s human nature) and the occasional glitch (read: fight) but we nip it in the bud. We’re zero tolerance.
Having said that, there will always be the occasional fallout, perhaps once a year, which is sad but a decent statistic.
The fact remains that networking can lead to building power — and women can enable each other to do that. And it’s just as true that Sweeney gets the movies because she has built her personal equity, not solely on the basis of her looks.