To not believe that female boss = bitch

[justwondering72]

Yesterday, while doing the ironing, I watched a Ted talk of Sheryl Sandberg talking about women in business. One of the things she spoke about was how men and women getting ahead are labelled differently ie that men are labelled as assertive, ambitious etc and women - while displaying the same types of behavior - are labelled as bossy, selfish etc. I nodded along.

Then I spoke to some people about it and was regaled with story after story of how mean and bitchy female bosses are! My SIL being bullied by two female bosses, a friend who felt that her female boss deliberately held her back to 'serve her time' in a position, while her male bosses were pushing her forward. Then to top it off, I went to a talk last night given by the ex-head of communications for a large EU body, a woman. Her attitude was that to get ahead she was 'one of the boys'. I asked her whether she felt it was possible to get to her very high level without being one of the boys... Her depressing answer was that she enjoyed working with teams of men and that most of the women she worked with at that level were unpleasant, difficult and seemed to feel that they had worked so hard to get where they were, they were not going to make it easier for anyone else.

So AIBU to agree with Sandberg, and to believe that women getting ahead in business are not 'bossy bitches', but rather they are labelled as such because they display ' male' characteristics of being ambitious and assertive?

I find it really disheartening how many women assume that other women and indeed girls are intrinsically nasty. School relationships, adult friendships, work colleagues, the school gate...the same assumptions of 'bitchiness' and nastiness come up again and again.

Maybe I'm just lucky but I know masses of really fantastic, supportive friendly women. (And quite a few who aren't as nice, obviously, along with blokes of all persuasions. )

So often women bosses can't win:

• showing emotion= emotional and not suitable for leadership;
• not showing emotion = ice queen bitch.

• anger at a mistake by a male boss = anger at a mistake
• anger at a mistake by a female boss = emotional, bitchy and unstable.

• dressing too feminine = not businesslike
• dressing in very formal suits = trying to be a man.

Then you have all the studies about how assertiveness in women is more often characterised as aggression than equivalent assertiveness in a man. How speaking the same amount as a man is seen as monopolising the conversation. The fact that some female bosses in particularly sexist organisations will have had to be tougher simply to get there.

On equal pay, it used to be the case that people said women were often paid less than men for the same jobs because they didn't negotiate so hard and push for pay rises. More recent research has often shown that women who try and clone that male model and push as seen as overly pushy, not getting the results that the men get from the same behaviour and labelled as nasty. I can't help but think that the same might often be true in female leadership.

I've had shit bosses of both sexes, but a lot more male bosses funnily enough. The best bosses have actually all been women as it happens.

I am unsurprised but depressed by these attitudes.

A couple of years ago at my company there were redundancies in one area and two senior managers sorting the whole thing out. The woman, who had only recently moved to that division, was universally blamed for being a bitch (I recruited her years ago, she was fab and quite lovely and overtook me very quickly!) whereas her male colleague got sympathy for having to make people redundant.

The problem with my female bosses has (in neither case) been to do with them not being nice or not being competent. There was just something about the relationship that was toxic and ill-defined. They were trying to fit me into other boxes in their life - treating me like friends or like children or like their nanny - and then apparently getting upset if I failed at the role. Only female bosses have presumed to have opinions on my hairstyles and on my childcare arrangements. FWIW - I would say that insecurity and poorly established behaviour expectations contributes more than gender - but IME it's definitely a 'thing'.

Garbage.

My boss is female and not 'a bitch'. She can be very 'difficult' because she is a senior figure with difficult decisions to make. She isnt there to be liked, she is there to head up a large team.

I've never had a female boss who was 'a bitch', to be honest. They have all been strong women making their way in largely male environments. Just using that language about females makes me angry, to be honest, and the expectation that women should be nice, touchy feely, empathetic souls when they are in senior positions annoys me.

Penguins - but that was totally why I didn't get on with BadLadyBoss #1.

She implied that I was aggressive and insufficiently feminine. I;ve spent 15 years in the workplace - and I do have a reputation for being serious - but she was the only one that expressly told me that I must smile more or people won't like me .

It genuinely was less that I felt that she had to be a certain way - and rather that she felt that I should be her protégé due to shared gender.

Procrastreation - My male boss had far more opinions on my childcare than my female one. I'm not sure you can generalise on that.

Procrastreation - But that is a very specific case. A rubbish female boss whose rubbishness is directly related to buying into stereotypes about female bosses. That's a self fulfilling cycle isn't it - and one of the reasons we should debunk this stuff.

This is total crap. Anecdotal, I know, but the one female senior manager I have had was brilliant - forward-thinking, decisive, friendly and willing to listen/spend time with workforce, yet able to take punitive action when required. She left and since then we have had a series of crap male managers who have consistently failed to make any decision where possible, and if forced, have chosen the worst possible decision. They have been unwilling to engage with staff and have promised the earth and delivered nothing.

At a lower level, there are 2 managers in my team. Both are nice people, but the female one gets things done where the male one waffles and gets sidetracked.

The worst manager for stab-you-in-the-back treachery I know is a man.

I work in the public sector, in an area which is very male-dominated. There are very few female managers - think 40 men to 3 women. There are a lot of crap managers amongst the men!

My male bosses have been more role-focussed. They will hold me accountable for what I do - but be totally oblivious to how I do it.

Re: the female bosses - the negative examples have been 2 out of 4 - but those have been really weirdly, intrusively bad. It got personal and emotional in a bewildering way.

Btw - I don't see this as 'women shouldn't be bosses'.

I see this as: we now have role models for successful and unsuccessful women in leaderships. I am squirelling away examples of constructive behaviour so that when I am a female boss, I'll be:

• supportive without being intrusive
• keep a professional distance at work
• not project my insecurities onto my team
• seek out senior mentors in order to give me support
• be studiedly blind to things that I may notice in a friend, but which are not relevant to the job
• Accepting of difference without viewing it as a criticism of my choices.

But why even think when I am a 'female' boss? All the behaviours that you would like to emulate are as likely from a man as from a woman.

I've had a few managers and worked closely with a number of senior leadership teams, I don't particularly look at the women and think I'd like to be like/not like them. I look at all of the people as individuals. There is no reason why your role models should be exclusively female, and there are likely to be as many differences between any two random women as between a random man and a random woman.

Ive had good and bad bosses of both sexes, but the only one that was a proper psycho was a woman. I wouldnt generalise from that though.

OP here

I could kind of understand where the speaker was coming from (she was in her late-60's, retired, had worked her way up through the organisation in the 1970's and 80's). Her solution had been to become one of the boys at work - she chose to have one child only, her husband stayed home with the child as she was the higher earner - and not having to make that work / family choice. And she was a self-confessed 'blokey' kind of person anyway, a real tomboy when she was younger. She clearly saw her working persona as an extension of that - wanting to be a boy and do the fun stuff that boys were allowed to do when she was a child, never wearing skirts or make up etc. Basically she was allowed to fit in with the boys as long as she played by their rules and didn't draw attention to the fact that she was, in fact, female. I guess it's one tactic for women to get ahead at work.

What really saddened and irked me was that when she spoke about how difficult, picky, unhelpful etc women could be (compared to the direct 'boys' way of getting things done) loads of other, younger women in the room nodded along! This was a group of professional women, networking to find ways to make progress in their careers - and basically agreeing that women have to be like men if they are to get ahead - but not too much like a man or you'll just come across as bossy and aggressive!

Made me want to weep too. is this still the message our daughters are going to be getting?

Motherinferior:

"I find it really disheartening how many women assume that other women and indeed girls are intrinsically nasty. School relationships, adult friendships, work colleagues, the school gate...the same assumptions of 'bitchiness' and nastiness come up again and again."

It's not an assumption, people are going off their personal experiences. I've always found male managers to be more easy going, straight forward and simpler to understand. If someone makes a mistake I've found male managers tend to tell them off for it then move on. I've consistently seen female managers holding grudges for ages after, acting cold towards people, blanking them, being snappy with them, punishing them indirectly with extra work, even discussing the member of staff in a negative light to other colleagues on their level!

Female managers just tend to make things more personal and play more underhanded games. I'm not assuming. It's what I've seen over and over from working in countless jobs over the years in various sectors. Give me a male manager any day of the week.

hardly surprising this attitude though, both men and women are brought up to dislike women, it's ingrained in society. People are far more willing to overlook or ignore bad behaviour from men

I agree with SheSparkles. It's not that women are inherently bad bosses, they arent' BUT I think that things are made harder for them by male counterparts, ie. women aren't listened to, have their opinions 'labelled' as 'hysteric', get a little bullied themselves so feel unable to stand up for their staff... and the list goes on.

I have a female boss, I like her very much and have great respect for her but she buckles under all of the above because her boss is a giant, self-aggrandising arse when he's in a team setting. One on one he's very nice to work for (if you aren't directly under him).

So, if anything, Ceteris paribus (have always wanted to use that), I think women would do a far better job as a boss than a man if she were in equal numbers.

Birdo83 - I find that it is down to individual personality. One male boss I have worked with could be described exactly by your words "holding grudges for ages after, acting cold towards people, blanking them, being snappy with them, punishing them indirectly with extra work, even discussing the member of staff in a negative light to other colleagues on their level!". He would blow hot and cold and it was incredibly disconcerting. So I don't think it's down to gender and more down to personality. And the training/role models that person has had and the environments in which they have worked.

I don't really see myself as lobbying too hard for a particular view here, or evangelising. I mean, if any of you have only experienced great women bosses, then great. I can't really say what would be gained by trying to say, hey, but really you shouldn't have thought that, you should have hated them instead...

All I am doing is giving the truth of our experience, such as I found it. I would love to feel that men and women are all the same in the sense of having the same characteristics - but then again, some women on this thread may be thinking, bollocks, we're nothing like men! The idea that all cultures are basically the same, men and women all the same is a nice idea but I find it a kind of Starbucks mentality in some ways. But I guess no one can really be neutral on a thread like this, being either male or female.

We all know you get bad women bosses and bad men bosses - but I would argue that the tone/style will be respectively different.

But I can't think of too many great role models for women in public life unfortunately. Thatcher, forget it. A one-off, though if that Galloway quote is true his idiocy knows no bounds. Others like Condoleeza Rice, well, just wheeled in the cake trolley for her idiot boss, despite having several languages and being way smarter than him. Someone like Teresa May comes across well to me, but maybe they don't promote themselves too much, most do seem a bit guarded. Angela Merkel comes across very well however. Many seem to feel it's best to fly under the radar rather than have a big self-promoting personality. I mean, a posh daft as a brush woman gets her own sitcom (Miranda), a posh daft as a brush bloke gets to be Mayor of London.

Well, IME if female bosses use manipulative, sly, Machiavellian tactics in their work, it's labelled as bitching. If men do it (and plenty of them do) it's labelled politics.

Sadly bad management skills cross the gender lines. There are two bullies in our department, one male, one female. They have a lot in common (selfish narcissistic behaviour, shout a lot, inappropriate).

I've had excellent female bosses and, in the main, good male ones too. I am not managed very actively now but when I was lower down I had two great female bosses who I liked because they were very straight-forward and direct and we had a lot in common (primarily trying to juggle work/children and experiencing the sexism of our workplaces).

The only commonality I've noticed with female bosses that might be different than with some men is not something I've experienced myself but some women do seem to over-share their personal problems with junior staff who end up listening to their issues/divorce woes/health problems to the point that it is quite detrimental in the workplace (I don't mean a friendly chat about say your family every now and again). It's not really a friendship and I'm always glad my female bosses have been very professional and not muddied these waters.

Otherwise, I can't see why men would be exempt from being judged for dickish behaviour, some of the men at higher levels around us appear to be engaged in a permanent battle for supremacy as if their masculinity is under threat at all times.