Women Bosses (and One Man Who Hates Them)

Written By BaldHiker

Women cannot be bosses. They should never be given supervisory power over anyone in the workplace, because they really don't seem to be able handle it. In almost every case I've seen, they get a little taste of power and it turns them into monsters; ready to deal death to all those under their control. It’s as if they’re trying to make up for not being invited to the prom by the high school quarterback, and all shall suffer for it!

Right now, a woman reading this is thinking "you misogynist bastard, how dare you?" Which - in some ways - is quite correct, but I have my reasons. A perfect case-in-point, I currently suffer under a supervisor who has absolutely nothing positive to say about anything that I do. She is constantly finding fault with my work, and sends me bi-weekly e-mails to that effect. Well perhaps I'm just no good at my job, you might say? I'm going to go with "no". This is a supervisor who, nearly seven months ago, came into my office, sat down, and cried about how the man-hating lesbian (her words, not mine) who thinks she runs the place was treating her. That’s right. My boss - the person I report to - sat in my office and cried to me.

This was the first time I’d ever encountered such a situation. Now, being a decent fellow, I tried to be conciliatory and supportive. That backfired however, when only two weeks later she decided to throw me under the bus and blame me for everything that was not quite up to snuff in this department. That's some reward right there.

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed such unprofessional behavior from women in the workplace. I could tell stories of another female supervisor who decided she didn’t like the way I did things. Or I could talk about an incident that happened four years ago, when a woman came in to take over the "team" I worked for at a medical center - a woman who, within two months of arriving, was writing up every male member of the team on a regular basis. Then there was another female boss who was one of the worst people I've ever known (in fact, this was over twenty years ago and to this day my friends and I still talk about her!). She took over the mail room at a large downtown law firm I worked at and proceeded to hunt down and destroy anyone she didn’t like. She was a carbon copy of the pretty, power-suited, gym junkie, phony office women I’d only previously seen in movies. I didn’t realize they really existed! Turned out she was also sleeping with one of my coworkers. The ended up married, but for less than a year.

These are my personal experiences, but I’ve always wondered... does this happen everywhere? Is it just me or do others feel this way as well? I decided to do a quick search on the Internet to find out. Here are some interesting facts:

In an article written for "The Huffington Post" in April of 2010, Ella L.J. Edmondson Bell PhD, an associate professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, asked her class of men and women how many would prefer a male manager. "Ninety percent of the women raised their hands", Edmondson Bell wrote. But when she asked the same question concerning a female manager, only two women raised their hands. She’d begun the article by mentioning raising a glass of champagne over the fact that women now surpassed men in the workplace. But after her student’s responses " I felt like somebody had thrown that celebratory champagne right in my face." She mentioned that one of her female students went on to say that "women don’t take the time to develop other women, they’re also not nice. Women tend to be critical and don’t have empathy or compassion. They’re the mean girls from middle school all grown up.
An article in ForbesWoman Views written by Meghan Casserly that same month, referred back to the Edmondson Bell piece and put the question to their readership. Of the 25 women who responded, 19 said that men make better bosses. Some went on to comment on female bosses, stating "women can be conniving and backstabbing while giving you the nice-nasty smile" or "I’ve had one good female manager, but most of my spectacularly bad managers have been female" and "A man any day of the week…. they do not have those female catfight instincts".
The Daily Mail in the UK published an article by Liz Hull in August 2010 for which 3,000 men and women were polled as to whether they preferred to work for a man or a woman. "Two-thirds of women said they preferred a male boss because their straight-talking, 'get to the point' attitude makes them easier to deal with". According to the article, the research had been conducted by David Brown of the recruitment firm UKJobs.net, who found that "forty percent said men were more able to distance themselves from politics and bitching and fourteen percent found them more reasonable than women".

I could go on, but you get the idea. Most workers do not want a female boss. If someone wanted to look at this argument as sexist, or even misogynistic, then let’s look at the practical aspects. What happens to a private business or an organization in the public sector if they have to continually hire new people and train them because the current employees can’t work with the female boss in charge? Doesn’t this cut down on effectiveness? Don’t profit margins fall when looked at both yearly and quarterly, since so much money is now being spent on recruitment and training of replacements? Doesn’t it also affect the quantity and quality of the work being produced? And what about the overall morale of the work site if there is constant turnover?

Why, then, are these types of situations allowed to continue? The answer, of course, is political correctness, which has been insidiously inserted into our societal zeitgeist by feminism. You can no longer simply fire a female employee based on a bad performance record for fear of being sued for sexism. You can, however, do this to a man and that person will have little or no recourse. Fire a woman, and all hell breaks loose. Fire a man and no one cares. If women demand equal pay for the same work done (which I completely agree with, by the way) then why can’t men demand equal treatment from their bosses, be they male or female? If you need to fire a mid-to-upper-level manager based on their continual, daily mistreatment of your workforce, that person’s sex shouldn’t matter. But it does.

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"On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women." -- Henry Louis Mencken.

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