When women turn against women: Understanding and healing Queen Bee Syndrome

We often talk about toxic male leadership. However, there’s another kind of toxicity that’s harder to name, and even harder to call out, when women undermine other women. It’s called Queen Bee Syndrome, and while it’s rarely discussed, it quietly damages cultures, careers, and confidence across workplaces everywhere.

Queen Bee Syndrome describes women in senior roles who distance themselves from or even sabotage other women. They may withhold support, micromanage, or compete with female colleagues instead of lifting them up.

It’s easy to judge this behaviour, but the roots are deep. In truth, many Queen Bees are shaped by patriarchal systems that rewarded them for toughness and punished them for empathy.

As one study notes, some women “prefer to stay away from and avoid supporting female subordinates to suppress feelings of inadequacy and exclusion” – wounds inflicted by years of navigating male-dominated environments.

When support turns into competition

Early in my career, I worked alongside an experienced female executive who had spent decades in banking. When she moved into education, a field full of younger women, her attitude was: my team don’t know what they’re doing. She ruled by command, demanded obedience, and refused to support her team. The result was predictable – people took stress leave, others resigned, and the culture became one of fear.

With me, she competed rather than collaborated. When I was later asked to hold her accountable for her behaviour, she responded with anger and victimhood, verbally attacking me to undermine my credibility. Her behaviour didn’t just damage relationships, it eroded trust and performance across an entire division. Despite the obvious harm, her impact went unacknowledged. It’s a pattern that’s all too common.

Years earlier, I reported to another female leader in the technology sector. Image was everything to her. I’d been hired for my expertise, but rather than drawing on it, she isolated me. I couldn’t speak to stakeholders without her permission, and every project report had to show a perfect “green” status, with no problems allowed. It was micromanagement on steroids. Truth became secondary to control.

I learned she repeated the same behaviour in her next role. Fear-based leadership had worked for her; she kept rising, while the talented women beneath her kept leaving.

Fear in disguise

Both these women led from fear, not strength. In my book The Heart-Centered Leader, I write that fear-based leadership creates “anxious, hesitant employees who operate in survival mode”. Micromanagement, blame, and image management are all symptoms of the same wound, and the belief that control equals safety. In reality, control destroys trust.

Queen Bee Syndrome is, at its core, survival behaviour. It’s what happens when women internalise patriarchal rules and believe that there’s room for only one woman at the top, that emotion equals weakness, that collaboration threatens authority. Over time, these beliefs turn empathy into armour.

What begins as self-protection soon becomes self-sabotage. Instead of challenging scarcity, Queen Bees perpetuate it. They replicate the very systems that held them back.

The cost to culture and progress

The cost is enormous. Teams fracture. Psychological safety disappears. Brilliant women leave, often doubting their own competence. Innovation and trust evaporate. Organisations lose talent and integrity.

The tragedy is that these outcomes are avoidable. When women support each other, everyone rises. When they compete from fear, everyone loses.

The heart-centred alternative

Heart-centred leadership offers another way. It rejects competition in favour of connection, and control in favour of trust. It’s leadership built on transparency, empathy, vulnerability, and genuineness.

A heart-centred leader doesn’t see others’ success as a threat but as evidence that the system is working. They create space for truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. They listen to understand, not to respond. They share credit, build capability, and lead with courage rather than fear.

Heart-centred leadership is not the easy option; it’s the brave one. It takes bravery to be genuine in a world that rewards performance. It takes strength to choose vulnerability over defence. It takes heart to dismantle the ladders we once had to climb alone.

Breaking the cycle

We heal Queen Bee Syndrome not by blaming, but by leading differently.

For women leaders, that means noticing when fear or ego drives our decisions and replacing them with empathy. It means mentoring instead of competing, sharing knowledge instead of guarding it. For organisations, it means dismantling the scarcity mindset; expanding opportunity, rewarding collaboration, and building cultures where psychological safety is real, not rhetorical.

Queen Bee Syndrome thrives in silence, but it dissolves in awareness. When women rise together, workplaces transform. Fear gives way to trust, control to confidence, isolation to belonging. When women lift each other, we lift entire cultures.