Understanding the meaning of queen bee syndrome from the perspective of women working in a public university: A descriptive phenomenological approach

The aim of this study was to understand the meaning and basic structure of the queen bee syndrome. According to the purpose of the research, Husserl descriptive phenomenological method based on eight-step Colizzi’s optimized model was used. The main question posed in this study was: "What is the structure of the queen bee syndrome from the perspective of people who have experienced it?". For sampling, considering the two criteria of Colizzi’s inclusion, non-probability purposive and snowball methods were used to select the sample. By asking screening questions, seven women working in one of the country's public universities with female faculty member managers were selected as the research sample. After in-depth interviews with these individuals and analyzing data, fifteen clusters were classified into five discovered themes. The themes that explained the meaning of the queen bee syndrome from the participants' point of view were: 1. Injecting and instilling a sense of despair, 2. Communication deadlock, 3. Unfair conduct, 4. Fake management style, and 5. The discriminatory context experienced. Based on the lived experiences of individuals, the basic structure of the queen bee syndrome is formulated as follows: "A combination of a sense of despair resulting from communication deadlock and unfair conduct resulting from a fake management style, to windows of hope for reform of discriminatory social and cultural structures and contexts."