Homophily or the Queen Bee Syndrome

Abstract

Nontraditional and traditional women were placed into groups, with both nontraditional and traditional women as leaders, and assigned a simple sorting task. Results indicate that (a) nontraditional women evaluated female leadership in general more positively than did traditional women, (b) traditional women responded more positively to their own experience of traditional leadership than did nontraditional women, and (c) nontraditional women responded more positively to their own experience of nontraditional leadership than to traditional leadership. This study failed to substantiate the hypothesized higher evaluation of traditional leadership over nontraditional leadership among traditional women, lending some support to the Queen Bee Syndrome theory offemale competition. The significant results of this study suggest the validity of distinguishing between women who reject traditional sex roles and women who accept traditional sex roles when examining gender in communication research.