The Queen Bee Syndrome

Image: Anthony Canamucio I serve on the senior appointments and promotions committee (SAPC) of a medical school. Over the years, I've realized that male basic scientists, as a group, sail through the SAPC effortlessly. Many of these men work in fields that include probably 10 other individuals in the whole world, half of whom are their mentors, or former fellow graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. These are their peers, and we can readily obtain laudatory letters of recommendation from them, establishing that candidates have accomplished national and international recognition. This confederacy ensures their promotion. In contrast, female candidacies provoke far more discussion, which often leaves me depressed and upset. The issue of women as faculty members, especially in basic sciences, is complex. I suspect that the problem reflects fundamental differences between the way women and men approach science as a microcosm of life. It is sad indeed that the most stringent adherents to and enforcers of the male paradigm are the rare women who have attained success in the male world and serve on the SAPC. Their opinion seems to be, "I have made it, why can't she?" There was surely a time when women's reproductive realities and commitment to their families were seen as liabilities, and eschewing family and children was the only way a woman could prove her commitment to the glory of science. I do hope that there will come a time when there are enough women in science that a greater diversity of female role models are represented in these august committees that make decisions about life and career. Perhaps then there will be greater sympathy for and empathy with the needs, impulses, and behavioral differences between women and men, and a greater appreciation that the male paradigm is not necessarily the only one within which to live life and excel in science. Most of my fellow male faculty members are not the muscle-bound, testosterone-driven, "Italian stallion" types, but in this particular aspect of their lives, namely their scientific careers, they display two aspects of typical male behavior that is bizarre. The first is the compulsion to be the first on record to establish completely trivial facts about science. As I age, I'm no longer sure why that is so important. Most young faculty members seem to have this obsessive need that everyone in his laboratory work seven days a week, 20 hours a day to make sure that the competitor is beaten to the punch. This particular aspect of science does not seem to drive women in quite the same way. The second is the patricidal impulse that is perhaps the least admirable and atavistic of the primal impulses that persist in some archaic parts of our brains. The idea that one must somehow supplant one's mentor--cast out the previous generation on ice floes to make oneself the leader of the realm--seems to obsess men. Women scientists seem to behave far more collegially. There is a certain male senior investigator at my own institution, one of the nicest, sweetest, and most accomplished investigators, one of the few for whom I still have respect after dealing with him for the last decade at this institution. He is surrounded by and works with a group of young women whom he has mentored. Most of them are bright, creative, and productive in their own rights, but they do not seem to see a desperate need to dissociate themselves from him, establish their own kingdoms, and beat him at his own game. Perhaps I'm being overly simplistic, but I cannot help feeling this tendency to work together as a group is an innately feminine one. I cannot also help feeling that this mode of operation is, in the ultimate analysis, a far more productive one than the traditional male drive to leave one's parent penumbra and establish one's own identity and independence. Unfortunately, this is the only mode of behavior that is accepted in academia, where one of the unwritten laws, unquestioned by the SAPC, is that if one does not establish the holy grail of independence, one is not qualified to be promoted. Almost every time a female candidate comes up for promotion, her independence is questioned in a way that makes you wonder not only why this is an important question, but whether it is not insulting even to be asked this question. Many of the women that the SAPC has considered over the last few years have chosen to work either in a group with their mentors or with their husbands, who often work in the same fields. In most of these cases, I happen to know that the women are as smart as, if not smarter than the men, and that they generate as many of the ideas as their male colleagues do, even if it is the men who go to the meetings and present the group's work. The SAPC looks askance at this kind of behavior, but this seems to me to represent more unbridled male ego and the all-too-common feminine impulse to accommodate, than any deficiency in creativity or independence. T.V. Rajan, MD-PhD (rajan@neuron.uchc.edu), is chairman, Department of Pathology, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Conn.

The Queen Bee Syndrome

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