Why I'd Rather Work For A Man Than A Woman(forbes.com) |
Why I'd Rather Work For A Man Than A Woman(forbes.com) |
I'm not in a position to give this a proper analysis either, but what the hell, it's the internet after all.
I work in insurance, which is a female dominated field (at least until you look at the top) and am married. My wife openly admits that she prefers male bosses. Personally, I've had as many good female managers than I have male. Here is what I have noticed though:
Women hate each other. With a passion. Even their "friends". I also think women have a very under-developed (okay, let's concede "different") idea of conflict, at least when compared to men, and I think it is evolutionary.
Men seem to me to be able to "team bond" almost instantly, perform a high level of conflict engagement with very defined "rules" (whether on the sports field, the boardroom or even combat itself). Within this arena, men are ruthless assholes at the best of times, and downright immoral at the worst. But almost always in support of the team - those that act otherwise are ostracized. After the conflict though, men revert to a rest state where the actions of the conflict are almost immediately discarded to a simply won/lost equation. Strangely enough, women that either prefer or can adapt to this environment seem to excel.
Women though in almost every case seem to approach this situation in the exact opposite fashion: team bonding takes forever, and can be shattered by something as simple as a perceived slight at first introduction, women limit their actions within the arena, and the events that occur during the conflict are remembered almost forever. I've seen 10 year friendships end over something as simple as not properly crediting someone enough during a boardroom presentation.
I think it all goes back to the caveman days - men needed to find allies fast to tackle that mammoth, or "enemy of my enemy is my friend" when the threat was more human. Women needed to be much more guarded - everyone who wasn't a long term immediate family member was a threat to the tribe, and even then you advance by being with the alpha male, so getting him is the main objective, your sister be damned.
But this is just my 5 cents. It's really nothing more than an opinion on the internet. So don't read into it too much.
Here we have a person who refuses to work for a person for no other reason than she is female. That is an unjust reason. It's no better than refusing to work for someone who is black, or gay, or any other non-relevant trait.
A woman certainly can be a satisfactory supervisor. I work for a woman who is an excellent boss. Come to think of it, she's probably the best manager I've ever met.
Also, if the author is an independent contractor and discriminating against clients for reasons of gender alone, there might be legal concerns in addition to the obvious moral ones.
That being said, much of what is often cynically ascribed to "cattiness" between women is better understood as a reaction to the power dynamic. My wife used to hold the same opinion as the author--she hated the idea of working for a woman. She held this idea until she worked at an organization where her department had a critical mass of powerful women, from the top with women partners that brought in their own business, down the ranks to women who were senior associates and ran their cases, etc. She discovered that there was very little friction between the women in the organization, and indeed a lot of camaraderie, because women were not in the minority within the power dynamic. When the women who had seniority also had real power within the organization, when they were no longer the self-conscious minority, they were freed to become good mentors without having to constantly worry about protecting their own turf.
This is one of the reason I'm quite skeptical of people who argue we should be "gender blind." The fact that women are a minority in many fields is something that by itself perpetuates the disparity between men and women. In this context, affirmative action measures are not sexist because they don't help women because they are women, but because they are in the minority within the power structure.
If you want a concrete example of a woman that blows away men in the criteria that the author chose, consider Margaret Thatcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher)
That said, although I like the sentiment it was a pretty rubbish article, if you could even call it that.
It's also quite clear that gender has little to do with it aside from the likelihood of a particular gender to have the more positive traits in question.
Spoken from someone with a limited imagination and adherence to gender-based stereotypes.
Identifying common traits of a group, if those those traits are correctly identified, doesn't conflict with the possibility than not all members of a group may have those traits.
We on HN commonly discuss eg, the entrepreneurial culture of the US vs other countries. I don't see this as being significantly different.
I'm not opposed to articles that aren't "PC" but seriously, if you're going to make these types of claims based on "fifteen years of experience", you need to go into much more depth and tie into secondary sources.