co-written with Rachel Dempsey
Once a year or so, a study or trend piece comes out about why women are bad to work for. Like Good Morning America's "Bad Female Boss? She May Have Queen Bee Syndrome." Or The Daily Mail's "Men are the best bosses: Women at the top are just too moody (and it's women themselves who say so)." Or Oprah Magazine's "When Good Women Make Bad Bosses." And then there's popular culture: from "Working Girl" to "The Devil Wears Prada," the evil female boss is almost as tired a trope as the prostitute with a heart of gold.
The most recent addition to the canon comes in the form of the article "Not One Legal Secretary Preferred to Work with Women Lawyers," published on the ABA Journal's website. Based on a study of legal secretaries by law professor Felice Batlan, the story created an uproar, as women's groups and activists protested that the article perpetuated stereotypes of women lawyers.
The response was understandable: these articles do perpetuate stereotypes. But the solution is not to ignore the issue altogether, but rather to recognize this storyline as illustrating one of the most pernicious and overlooked types of gender bias. When women experience bias in the workplace, it can often turn into conflicts between women, a phenomenon we call gender wars.
One of the reasons legal secretaries prefer to work for men is obvious: in most law firms, men hold the power. (Nationwide, only 19% of law firm partners are women.) A secretary's prestige is likely higher if she works for a powerful partner. So the fact that many women secretaries prefer to work with men proves not that women lawyers are difficult but that secretaries are rational actors functioning in a sexist environment.
That's just one of the dynamics at work. Women are also frequently stereotyped as too emotional. Said one secretary: "I just feel that men are more flexible and less emotional than women." Another described female lawyers as "too emotional and demeaning." It's possible that these particular secretaries worked with bosses who were actually too emotional. But studies suggest that men's anger is likely to be seen as legitimate, while women's is seen as irrational or hormonal, so it may also have been a matter of different interpretations of similar behavior. Although the secretaries interviewed were women, that doesn't make them immune to bias against women.
In some ways, the fact that the secretaries interviewed in the study were women actually makes them more susceptible to bias against women. Women lawyers fill a traditionally masculine role, while their secretaries fill a traditionally feminine one. All professional women find themselves walking a tightrope between masculinity and femininity, and when people choose different approaches to how they walk the tightrope, conflict often breaks out. "Secretaries are expected to engage in traditionally feminine behavior such as care giving and nurtur[ing], where[as] women attorneys are supposed to engage in what is stereotypically more masculine behavior. Given these very different expectations and performances of gender that occur in the same space, the potential for conflict is enormous," Batlan concludes.
As a result of this bias, women need to provide more evidence of competence than men, a pattern that the secretaries themselves observed. "It would seem as if female associates/partners feel they have something to prove to everyone," noted one secretary. "Females are harder on their female assistants, more detail-oriented, and they have to try harder to prove themselves, so they put that on you," said another. Because women's mistakes are noticed and remembered while men's are soon forgotten, women partners may feel they have more to lose if they, or their assistant, make a mistake, and may as a result be harsher with their secretaries.
As is always the case with gender wars, both groups of women are disadvantaged by gender. Secretarial jobs are undervalued, underpaid, and have little or no career track -- the classic ways women are disadvantaged when they do "women's work." Women lawyers are disadvantaged by gender in different ways, as explained above. Gender wars arise because each group of women is disadvantaged in different ways that pit them against each other. Note that we are not faulting either the attorneys or the secretaries. Probably the secretaries need to become more aware that women can engage in gender bias, and attorneys (male and female) need to become more aware of the gender bias that causes them to devalue the important work secretaries do.
The key message is not for individuals, but for organizations. Automatic bias is built into the automatic, everyday-ness of workplace interactions and identities, and will persist until it is identified and organizational structures are put in place to correct it. Organizations that face gender wars need to recognize them not as evidence that women would progress if only they could get along, but as a particularly sensitive indicator that gender bias is built into their business systems. Any organization plagued by gender wars has work to do if it intends to give a fair shake to women -- both lawyers and secretaries.
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Second, more generally-- I get that the evidence presented in these "studies" is anecdotal and overblown. The news media has never been renowned for its ability to tell good statistics from the Disraelian variety. But where are the (reputable) social-science studies refuting it? Bad evidence is, well, bad-- but it's surely better than no evidence at all.
I also believe there may be another factor at work, however sub-conscious it may be: women can't use their female charm and sexuality to get ahead with other women. That tactic is completely taken out of the female employee's arsenal, much to their frustration. So they blame it on the boss who is "unreasonable" or "just doesn't get it".
And I can't tell you how many female clients I had in my career who preferred dealing with male account managers for the reasons stated above. Even within the company, if you didn't play the low-cut blouse game in dealing with male managers, you were labeled as "not a good people person" or simply replaced by a woman who did. Insane. But reality, I'm afraid.
I found women overall to make better employees in that they were less emotional, had better temperaments and had fewer ego needs and better judgment than males.
I think this business about nasty female bosses is mostly a patriarchal myth.
Just my experience in that woman, for the most part, drive harder for success then the male. I hope others have not had this experience.
Nonetheless, I have been both an employee and employer and have supervised females and males. The Labor Department and I agree that female employees are often preferable. In the male the ego and the need for hierarchy and competition is strong; the ego thing results in conflict rather than cooperation. Additionally, men too frequently bring sex into the workplace in an inappropriate or illegal way. Men too often create disharmony and an unpleasant atmosphere in the office and cause personnel problems. Obviously, there are exceptions and this does not apply to all males.
Women are taught to be people pleasers and this often makes them wonderful employees. They strive to keep the bosses and the clients happy. And the office atmosphere in a workplace populated by bright optimistic creative women is most excellent. Tasks get completed without a lot of drama, with humor and good energy and cooperation.
Those are my general conclusions. While overall my preference is for working with and hiring women, it is also clear that the individual personality and character are most important and my teams work much better when I have been able to do the hiring than when I have been assigned to manage a team someone else hired.
Where if that is the case with men, they actually like you...
and it is not sexism but just reality!
And women having been brainwashed with this dichotomy that is throughout all of society their entire lives have internalized it. They therefore often treat other women with disdain and reserve all their respect for men. Women have to be willing to be NOT "feminine" if they are too succeed. And just brush off the inevitable attacks that they will get for their disobedience.
Women who treat other women badly should be judged poorly by other women at the least. Why don't you tell these mean bosses to stop abusing their employees and show some support for these legal secretaries. It's sad how elitist women would rather blame men than take on each other. The original article was written by a women who considered herself a feminist and she laid out the realities of the work place. The men are simply nicer to their legal secretaries and that is the issue. It was very well detailed in the piece.
If you keep telling women they can do no wrong then don't be surprised when they abuse each other. Treat them like whole adult human beings that can be fully accountable for their actions. That's is equality, not hiding behind overplayed sentiments of victim hood and man blaming.
Just goes to show you can't fight sexism with generalizations.
Lots of random speculation being thrown around, and virtually no hard evidence to back it up on any front.