ABSTRACT
Women and men live different lives and have different careers. It frequently takes many years of trial and error before an individual woman is able to recognise this and identify the implications for her own working experience. As men hold the authority in all professional organisations, the burden falls on women to make sense of the culture and its constraints and develop suitable coping strategies. The result is that women commonly find individualised means of survival (Marshall, 1984; Cassell and Walsh, 1993; McKenzie Davey, 1993), which gives rise to both the myth and the reality of the Queen Bee or ‘Female Barracuda’ (Ussher, 1990b; Morris, 1994). A self-fulfilling prophecy may be involved; to survive a woman has both to fail other women and isolate her emotional self from men.
