Female colleague hates that all top positions in out workplace are also female

[MeatPotatos]

One of the things I most like in my job is that I work with strong, intelligent, capable, assertive women who makes thing happen

All the way to the top, the most important positions are held by females and our organisation is one of the best in the sector

In my small team of only 3 people, all female, we were talking about our workplace organogram and colleague said that she hates there are no men at the top as women are controlling, bitching, have too much attention to detail

The she realised she was talking to us and said ‘not you guys’

But except from the attention to detail (which colleague has very little of / and how is that a bad thing anyway?) nobody in our workplace - men or women - are controlling and bitching

In fact she has said in the past that this is the job where she has been least micromanaged (she comes from a industry heavily male orientated)

I despaired, started talking but decided to shut up. My manager was astonished.

This is the original thread for those that are interested. It's a few years old so there may be more recent studies out there. Lots of interesting anecdotes from posters about their experiences with other women in the workplace and plenty of less than sisterly interactions - i.e. thread became a proper bunfight. 😂

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3080265-Women-prefer-working-for-male-bosses

Note, in the first post the OP mistakenly says 'the majority of women prefer female bosses' when she actually means male bosses (this is clear from the links and rest of what she says).

Some of what you're saying doesn't make sense. For example the 'boys club' which is made up of men drinking, playing golf and otherwise networking while excluding women. In fact there are/were all male networking clubs.

I said boys not men, though. The 'boys club' isn't literally made up of young boys. Adults learn to regulate their behaviour but I've defo found women on the whole can tend to be more cliquey and prone to taking offence over minor things. That's just my personal experience and one that's born out by the type of threads we see on here about MILs/SILs/colleagues/etc.

You can put into Google 'research that shows...' and pull up desired results on almost any topic you want.

When the search engine returns results from the Daily Mail, I would take it with a grain of salt and would I would trust it as much as a piece of research Jordan Peterson is citing.

If you read it though you'd see that it wasn't actually the Daily Mail that conducted the studies. It was a number of universities. There's even a quote in my OP from the female Harvard professor who was one of the study’s authors.

However this is absolutely not the case where I work unless her experience with seniors are different than mine BUT seeing that she is outgoing and social and I ‘like to keep to myself there to work not make friends’ mindset what I see is that she is much closer to the female seniors than I am.
But maybe it is just perceptions

@SidhuVicious

Thanks for the studies. I'm not sure if the first one really counts as it was just over 1,000 people in the States.

The second one had more people which was better. All they demonstrate is that misogyny and sexist stereotypes are alive and well.

If we swapped woman for gay or black, what would you think?

Nearly 40 per cent of white workers in America would rather be led by a black person a Gallup survey found.

It comes across as completely arbitrary and disregards individual circumstances. There are 3bn women in the world and they're not all the same in the workplace.

Women tend to be judged far more harshly than men. This includes traits which are seen as positive in men that translate as negative for women such as assertive or frank. Women are more likely to be judged as aggressive or rude.

Women continue to be discriminated against by both sexes. A woman is held up as an example of all women, whereas a man is not.

This is especially notable with female politicians. The same names are trotted out all the time regarding women in power: Truss, Thatcher, Patel, Braverman. Whereas you wouldn't have space to cite all the awful male politicians and worldwide, the homicidal maniacs.

In threads on here about women, people speak of a couple of bad experiences with women and their dislike of all women because of it. Yet they'll have had countless bad experiences with men and judge them as individuals.

Regarding your second post, yes I know what you were referring to and my point stands. Boys are also capable of bullying in the same way as girls, however aggression in boys is not as discouraged as girls.

Many users of this site will not click on a Daily Mail link and contribute ad revenue to a company that stokes division in society.

You would strengthen your argument if you linked to the actual research reports. The Daily Mail is unrivaled in its ability to misinterpret research to create clickbait.

If we swapped woman for gay or black, what would you think?

I get your point but it's never really viewed the same in reality. Like, there's currently a 'jokes about men' thread on here. It wouldn't still be up if it was 'jokes about gay/black people'.

That's because it's seen as bad form to punch down. I was making a point about how arbitrary it is to say you prefer a certain sex as a colleague.

Good ol patriarchy. She absorbed it well as a child and is a misogynist.

No offence, but I don't really believe all this 'punching up' stuff and I'm not convinced most people do tbh. For sure, you only ever hear it used by people looking to justify things they're saying about another demographic - generally not complimentary things.

Most people IME would agree that you should treat other people how you want to be treated. However, it's obviously not all equal and some demographics have historically trangressed against others to the point that their behaviour arguably carries more subtext/impact.

But the problem with class analysis is that it turns individuals into vague amorphous groups. If a stranger is rude to me on the basis of things committed by somebody else of the same colour/sex/etc as me, despite me never having done a thing to them, then quite frankly they can get fucked. Especially if they're justifying it with things that didn't even happen to them personally (i.e. I wasn't the perpetrator and they weren't the victim).

@SidhuVicious

We obviously understand punching down differently. IMO punching down refers to class, power and privilege.

Making fun of someone's disability, their poverty, their abuse or difference is generally frowned upon.

Free speech means you can punch down, some comedians such as Jimmy Carr make a good living out of it. I don't find rape jokes particularly funny, but some do.

It's not seen as positive to contribute towards someone's oppression.

It's not because they're women. It's because they've been bad.
I've had brilliant women bosses and terrible male ones.

I'm talking more about the type of view that says, for example, black people can't be racist to white people because <insert something about power structures/oppression/punching up>.

Humans have always exhibited tribalism/prejudice and just because one demographic were a lot more successful in manifesting it doesn't IMO mean that others get a free pass to exhibit the same behaviour. If I call somebody a 'white bitch' or something similar it's not justifiable because her ancestors did something to my ancestors prior to either of us existing. It just makes both situations wrong.

Like I said, we have a different understanding of the term

What's your understanding of it out of interest?

I also understand it to refer to class/power/privilege but I just disagree that these are justifications to indulge in behaviours that would otherwise be seen as unacceptable. I feel that generally something is either acceptable or not, maybe with the exception of people poking fun at their own demographic (because it's unlikely to be a veiled attempt to discriminate against themself, unlike when done to others).

I feel that generalisations don't really work in most cases when applied to real life situations and we can end up with people getting away with things due to their perceived lack of privilege. Like with the Rotherham scandal and the sexual assaults on NYE in Germany. Both were downplayed by the authorities who admitted it was for cultural sensitivities, and yet in both cases the perpetrators were the ones holding the power - middle aged Asian men abusing white teenage girls from the care system and huge crowds of immigrants surrounding and sexually assaulting lone women.

In these cases the perpetrators were somewhat protected by their perceived status (or lack of) on the privilege scale which would've been less likely to happen if they were judged principally by their actions.

It's a mixed bag but I do find that previous bosses that were female are actually less supportive- in general.

I've had an amazing female boss who should be an exemplar to everyone, but also had another who I knew would stab any female colleague in the back as she views them as "competition".

I think being a female boss is quite a challenging role due to the stereotypes based on misogyny that people have unconsciously accepted.

I gave my interpretation yesterday at 22:37.