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Just as you can count on the return of the crocus each spring to cheer you up and remind you that the harsh winter weather is leaving, you can also count on a perennial workplace debate, "Why women in the workplace can't get along " to promote stereotypes that can be career debilitating.
This year the debate was triggered early with Peggy Klaus's New York Times piece in Preoccupations - A Sisterhood of Workplace Infighting.In the piece, Klaus contends,
...while women have come a long way in removing workplace barriers, one of the last remaining obstacles is how they treat one another. Instead of helping to build one another’s careers, they sometimes derail them — for example, by limiting access to important meetings and committees; withholding information, assignments and promotions; or blocking the way to mentors and higher-ups.
And if you are a woman and happen to have a female co-worker who is a bully, watch out.
As anticipated, the subject got some traction with bloggers.From Minding The Workplace to Leadership and Women Lawyers, bloggers are saying "Yes I had a horrible woman boss and isn't it terrible!"
I have come to loathe these articles and see them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not that I don't think there are bad female bosses. Of course there are. It just feels so narcissistic and self-defeating to continually retread all the sins of our sisters while not scrutinizing male bosses in the same way.
My belief is that across the board there is a lack of leadership in American business -female and male.I do not believe one gender makes a better leader than another. I do beieve women and men might lead differently but why are we judging women by the standards of male leadership?
I do believe we spend a lot of time talking about one gender's ability to lead. My hunch is if as much scrutiny and various studies were conducted spotlighting all the weaknesses of males bosses, a very different picture would emerge.
In August,Tara Parker-Pope writing for the Well Blog in the Health Section of The New York Times submitted a post with the provocative headline, If The Boss Is Young and Male, Watch Out.
But unless I'm simply not using the right keywords in Google Blog search, that headline was greeted with one great big yawn.
In that post Parker-Pope shared research conducted by the University of Toronto about American workers and personal conflict at work. Not only did they find that the biggest conflict in the workplace occurred when the boss was male and young --40 or under-- it also found that:
For women, overall conflict was lower than for men, and the age of a
woman supervisor didn’t have a pronounced effect on her reported levels
of interpersonal conflict.[...] “Overall, the conflict associated with authority is worse for younger
workers, but there is something about younger women that attenuates
that association,” said Mr. Schieman. “As others have shown, they tend
to enact these more cooperative orientations when they attain
authority.”
So what to make of these conflicting reports? My theory is that the mano a mano framework pitting female worker vs female worker has become a legend in our own minds. Women are so conditioned to think that having a woman boss means she will be inferior to a man that this concept becomes our belief .To say it another way, things that male bosses do that we shrug off as their boss-iness we do not tolerate in a woman boss.
Someone says women don't get along --implying that men do-- and women buy into it. For those people who have had a series of really bad women bosses I would say shame on the corporation for allowing that bad behavior and not providing a culture that demands smart leadership.
Unless your boss owns the business,someone else put your boss in that position of power and someone else is enabling that really bad behavior.That problem is a cultural problem and is probably systemic throughout.
Leadership can be learned and demanded. I'm neither an anthropologist or a psychologist but I do think songwriter Paul Simon captures the essence of the issue of Women Bosses when he sings " Maybe I Think Too Much."When it comes to women vs. women in the workplace I believe we are thinking way too much.
But now, as baby boomers look at the workplace environment facing the opposite side of the generation gap, they are on the attack -- focusing on everything and
