Are you being PC if you say you don't prefer a male or female boss?
by Elana Centor

The headline from the MSNBC.com read, "Men Rule-at least in workplace attitude." It was the first of a series of articles on MSNBC's and Elle Magazine's Survey on Work and Power  Survey. where they interviewed about 60,000 people.

Despite the potentially inflammatory headline, it did not create a blogging firestorm. In fact, it created somewhat of a blogging backlash.

Talkwench

, wasn't buying their argument.

So MSNBC have teamed up with their intellectual equivalent in all
things pretty and girly - Elle Magazine to conduct a survey on
attitudes in the workplace, "would you rather prefer a female than a
male boss" and the results of which were published in the article below
titled "In workplace - men rule". Reading that headline one would
naturally assume that the results must have been 90/ 10, or even 60/40
but no it was 39/ 50/ and the rest didnt care either way.

 

And from Women's Voices for Change:

"The smart Echidne analyzes the survey -- and the many negative comments about women that follow the story -- and pulls out what's truly important here:

[The] major message of it is that the gender of the boss does not matter for the majority
of the respondents. But because more people prefer a male boss to a
female boss the article then veers into the question of what might be
wrong with female bosses.

Note
that we don't really get a discussion anywhere on what might be wrong
with male bosses (or what might be good with female bosses), and so the
comments begin with the assumption (unstated) that male bosses are
good, and that all one needs to do is to point out the worst possible
characteristics of female bosses to compare them to the good male boss.
Although some comments later diverge from this, the topic is not set up
as a neutral one, and it is not surprising that we don't get a balanced
discussion.

Journalist Eve Tahmincioglu  writes about careers on MSNBC.com and is author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top. www.sandboxbook.com. She recently chatted with me about the survey and why she believes the 51% who said they didn't care if they had a male or female boss were simply being "PC."

Elana blogs about business culture at FunnyBusiness

Submitted by Elana Centor (view blog) on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 07:05

Comments

 

I've worked for... 1 man and

I've worked for... 1 man and 4 women, now starting with a 5th. In between... worked for me. Does that count as 6? If so, flunked that one. ;-)

Anyway, will say I like 'em all, though 3 in particular asbsolutely shine, one being the sole guy. People I learned lots from. The best of them all was my last, who left in December, though we stay in touch. Simply a special human being and manager everyone on this planet should have the chance to work with at least once.

In a department of 8, two of us dykes, one being me. Yet another came out as transgendered to the two of us and to our boss last fall. M will be closeted for the forseable future, yet when our boss learned of this... she showed up after the weekend having read a book on tg folk. She called my therapist to get insight on what she might read in case she could be of assistance to M.

We lost her to an unexpected recruitment. With extensive experience in the health field, an eye surgical center was led to her and asked her to run the place. She had already turned down an assistant directorship at a hospital... but she is surely in her element in health care.

There is no way on earth I could ever hope to work for someone better.

nelle

Submitted by nelle2nelle on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 18:20
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