Being a Queen Bee, Sister, or Crab?

Abstract

Gender inequalities and deeply rooted gender stereotypes create enormous challenges for women in working life. Female academics in Turkey face these challenges and try to overcome them. The current study focused on female leaders' experiences in academia about these challenges. The findings showed that in order to survive in the male dominant working life, some female academics establish sisterhood with other women and enjoy solidarity behaviors, and others try to cope with the hardships via showing crab and queen bee behaviors. Thus, the study presents a portrayal of these three metaphors, queen bee, sisterhood, and crabs in a barrel in academic circles in the country.