There's an article at usnews.com headlined: "The Myth of the ‘Queen Bee’: Work and Sexism." It's subhead reads: "New study finds that, in the workplace, women are often held to a different standard than men." The article refers to a "new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."
(Full Disclosure: I haven't read the study, itself.) Without commenting on the truth of the headlines, I feel I must comment on the rationale of the writer of the article.
Baloney!
Putting aside any possibility of internal statistical or interpretive bias, let's look at the study as described by the writer of the article. It does not address "THE workplace" as announced by the headline. It addresses "A workplace" of a particular bureaucratic and operational character, a police organization.
If I understand anything from my past involvement with policing organizations, it is that they have an infrastructure characterized by an acculturation of their personnel toward the optimization of the use of force (physical or psychological) through the exercise of the police power of the State. Stripped to its fundamentals, the exercise of police power ultimately rests upon what goes on in the mind of a person who (literally or figuratively) has a finger on the trigger of a gun pointed at another person.
Any conclusions drawn from the study could be valid when restricted to that kind of infrastructure/culture. I make no other comment about their validity in that context. They are invalid, from the start, however, if extrapolated to any other workplaces not sharing a nearly identical culture.
Whatever merits it may have, when applied within the specific government sector workplace having been studied, this study cannot legitimately be generalized to the private sector workplace. It appears to have been ripped out of its proper context for the purpose of sensationalism.
Shame, shame, shame on the writer of the article
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