Come On, Do Men Really Make Better Bosses?
Male bosses are competitive and strategic thinkers, writes Forbes, while women are team-builders and energizing. So who do employees prefer?
Men, apparently—at least according to fans of “Forbes Woman” on Facebook. They asked readers, “Would you rather work for a man or a woman?” and the majority replied, in the words of one reader, “A man—any day of the week.”
Does that mean men actually make better bosses? Of course not. But it does mean something is wrong. As Forbes put it,
It’s not just anecdotal that male bosses are perceived to be better at their jobs. “It’s a general cultural phenomenon,” says Alice Eagly, Ph.D., a social psychology professor at Northwestern University.
In the most recent Gallup data, from 2006, 34% of men preferred a male boss while 10% preferred a female boss, while 40% of women preferred a male boss and 26% preferred a female boss. (The remaining respondents of both genders had no preference.)
So, what gives? There’s of course the idea that this preference is deeply ingrained in us—we trust men more, whether they be politicians or bosses or the men steering our commercial flights safely home. But we’ve also heard, from young, progressive, men and women like us, that female bosses are harder to deal with, screechier, less direct. (And female-boss on female-employee relationships can be even more complicated—especially in firms with few women at the top.)
But here’s the bottom line. Even in 2010, women, in the corporate world, must still ascribe male traits to succeed. They must be bold, direct, assertive—and thus, “bitchy.” As one woman, the head of the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard’s Kennedy School, tells Forbes, when she worked her way up the corporate ladder at Sony, “They thought I wasn’t assertive, and so they sent me for assertiveness training for women, called ‘guerrilla war tactics for women in business,’” including how to lower and project your voice.
As long as women have to act like men at work, employees will prefer men to women. And as long as there are so few women in power at work, women will have to act like men. Do we sound like a broken record?
