Bamsey, Lillie
At the age of sixteen, I became employed at a local pub in the kitchen as a KP. My boss, a middle-aged man, was the head chef and would often make inappropriate comments about me. Over the next year of being employed he would go on to make comments about my legs, get changed in front of me and more inappropriate comments that put me in a very difficult position that I did not know how to react to. When I consider this experience in parallel to my employment today, where I have a female boss and am generally treated with respect, it is interesting to see how my female boss is often considered “difficult” and “rude” for treating her staff memebers the same, and more often better, then her male counterparts. It leads me to the question: how does gender impact on how staff memebers feel about their bosses?
It is becoming a common occurrence that when discussing jobs and how women are treated at work, most women will have a horror story of how they were treated by a male boss. Take Caroline Miller Smith, who when she first started her job at Linklaters in 1993, she was told by her boss that she was not allowed to wear trousers in the workplace as a woman (Maitland, 2009). Even by today’s more modern standard there are still examples of women being fired or questioned in their role by male bosses who refuse to wear heels that they are told they must wear as part of their “uniform” (Khomami, 2016). Whilst these horror stories seem to depict a world where women would be more comfortable with women as their bosses, we can still find evidence in that higher job satisfaction comes from men in charge.
If we consider Artz and Taengnoi, who looked at whether women preferred female bosses, their findings imply that job satisfaction comes more often from male supervisors (Artz & Taengnoi, 2016). To test this, Artz and Taengnoi compared two data sets which allowed them to look at the relationship between having female supervision and job satisfaction, which has often been associated with high wages and respectable job hours (Artz & Taengnoi, 2016). When considering why there’s lower job satisfaction with women, they considered a list of reasons. Firstly, that female supervisors may be in particular industries that women feel “trapped” in; female dominated and often with lower pay (Artz & Taengnoi, 2016). Not only are they restricted by the lower pay in these industries but they often come with less opportunities to advance their careers, leaving them stuck and miserable (Artz & Taengnoi, 2016).
There is one all too common accusation that is always used against women in management roles; they are being “too masculine”. Whilst women are breaking into these roles, they are still outnumbered by men and means women must act in similar ways to achieve the same results. If women go after what they want or act “like men” instead of being respected they are made out to be rude and cruel (Billing, 2011; Artz & Taengnoi, 2016). Billing also agreed with these findings, discussing the impact of these management roles being constructed around male norms. It forces women to either take on these norms and risk being called a “bitch” or become trapped in traditional roles and jobs that are deemed more suitable (Billing, 2011). The words of Taylor Swift’s “The Man” have never rung as true.
There is some evidence to suggest, however, that whilst there is an overall preference for a male boss across genders, this could be as a result of more men in the workplace and that when looking at women only there is actually a preference for women (Butterfield, 2015). There is a pattern of preferring a same sex boss.
When reading about a topic of male bosses, it was fascinating to see what it was that made men aware of their privilege and thought they might have to invoke change. For many of them, it was having their daughters enter the workforce (Maitland, 2009). They claimed that once they saw their daughters trying to get a level footing in the work place, they soon realised that the women they had employed also deserved better (Maitland, 2009). Whilst it is always a positive to have women find more equal footing and better treatment from their male bosses, a woman is once again only seen as valuable in relation to a man, not of her own achievements. (Danilyuk, 2021) (Krukau, 2021)
Overall, women in the workplace will always have horror stories of how their male bosses treat them and may prefer a male employer, however there is strong implications this is due to the sexism already existing in the system.
Bibliography:
Artz, B. & Taengnoi, S., 2016. Do Women Prefer Female Bosses?. Labour Economics , Volume 42, pp. 194-202.
Billing, Y. D., 2011. Are Women in Management Victims of the Phantom Male Norm. Gender, Work & Organisaion, 18(3), pp. 298-317.
Butterfield, P. a., 2015. The Preference to work for a man or a woman a matter of sex and gender?. Journall of Vocational Behavior, 86(February), pp. 28-37.
Danilyuk, P., 2021. Pexel. [Online]
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Khomami, N., 2016. Receptionist ‘sent home from PwC for not wearing high heels’. [Online]
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[Accessed 11 March 2023].
Krukau, Y., 2021. Pexel. [Online]
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Maitland, A., 2009. Fathers & Daughters. Management Today, Volume November, pp. 34-41.