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I had to deal with male manager an olympic champion in micromanagement and favouritism. I would not ascribe those qualities to women only.
Same. The worst boss I ever had was a man. The problem is not female managers- it’s the culture around management in general. We as a business culture don’t train or develop managers… someone gets good at their job and they go up, whether they’re a people leader or not.
This topic always frustrates me. If you're looking around and seeing terrible female bosses everywhere, have you considered why you might see it that way? A few thoughts:
• Men have been the "default" in management for a long time. I believe some of the flaws people call out in female bosses are actually just style differences, but change is hard and we have unconscious bias to overcome.
• We talk about bad female bosses in an infantilizing way that we don't do so much with men ("mean girls", "playing high school games", "cliques"). Male bosses do many of the same things; we just don't call it out with the same type of language. Again, maybe some unconscious bias?
• We expect other women to "lift each other up" and provide support that we do not expect men to give us, and then we perceive the women negatively if they don't do that (even though they're behaving no worse than a man). We need to hold everyone to a higher standard but not hold women to an unreasonable one.
It's just always disappointing to me to see this kind of thing. I try my best to be a good manager but it's very hard to be assertive but not so much that someone calls you "bossy", supportive but not "playing favorites" to anyone, firm but not a "mean girl"...
All very fair points for myself to consider. Thank you for your input.
Continued. Now my husband is dealing with nothing but female leaders of which he is older than. Yet they treat him as if he is a recent college graduate. If we as women want to truly be the change of the world/society, why are we playing the same type of games we did in high school? Shouldn’t we be doing better? Being better? Don’t we have more pressing things to handle than micro manage and play favorites? Shouldn’t we be raising up others (fellow females, and our teams in general) as opposed to beating them down?
Is it just me? Is anyone else seeing or dealing with this?
I'm not sure you're really a feminist.
How do you figure? That’s why I have internal conflict btw. Because I don’t like women that treat people like crap? Im not ok with men doing this either. I just have worked for more women than men which is why I’m sure my view is a little skewed. The men I have worked for have been amazing (minus 1). Im sure this really is just lack of true management experience and it comes off as a shitty petty mean girls attitudes but that’s how I feel about it.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by the women treating your husband as a recent college grad? I’ll note that just because someone is older doesn’t mean they’re beyond criticism if they’re not performing as they should be. Could you be over-generalizing here?
Similarly, “lifting up fellow women” doesn’t mean we can’t critique or call each other out when needed. Women are people—we do good and not good things.
Re: your husband’s new bosses
1) I know long-tenured women (myself included) who are constantly asked by others to act as secretaries. In my experience, these asks are more often from men than women. Point being, I think this is incredibly common and not necessarily due to having a woman boss. (I agree it sucks and feels belittling.)
2) There are always inter-departmental power dynamics, and his boss may not have the final decision as to who does what. As a department leader, I sometimes have to get on board with things I’m not necessarily 100% behind, but complaining about that to my team would not be constructive.
It could be these women feel threatened by his experience, but I’d encourage him to consider: what if it’s not personal? Is there a bigger picture he has yet to observe?
Remember the incidence of sociopathic behavior in senior managers. It's a huge increase from the normal population. Now imagine what those women have had to do in order to get to where they are at. It doesn't excuse the behavior but may help you understand it. Those women have not had the security that their male counterparts did in order to get here. Be the kind of leader you want to see in the workplace. Try not to threaten those women who already have threats coming from all sides.