Navigating the Gendered Labyrinths and Managing the Mean Girls and Queen Bees within the Academy: A Dialogue between Two Women Assistant Professors

Using labyrinth as a metaphor suggests that a woman's path within an organization is paved with biases, discrimination, and other obstacles. In this article, we describe our experiences as women on the path from graduate school through positions as advanced assistant professors, and in particular, our interactions with women colleagues along the way. Utilizing duoethnography, we engaged in dialogic conversations to generate our data. We characterize the findings, or our interactions with some women colleagues in the academy, as gaslighting, bait and switch, smoke and mirrors, and oh the irony.