WOMEN WHO WORK FOR WOMEN

 

INTRODUCTION

Do women like to work for other women?  It’s a question that is too subjective to ask and answered.  It may well depends on the personality of the women themselves.  Each personality carries their own weightage as how women like working for women.  Thus, there is a need to understand the hierarchical behavior dynamics of women in the workplace.  Recent surveys showed a significant preference for male bosses rather than female bosses.

QUEEN BEE SYNDROME

Both women and men are likely to experience a woman as a boss at some point during their careers.  This mainly is due to the increase of women workforce everywhere in the world.  The term “Queen Bee Syndrome” has been coined to describe women who have been individually successful in male-dominated environments.  It is call the “Queen Bee Syndrome” due to the state where a female boss exhibits male assertiveness characteristics in order to meet the expectations of the leadership role.  Queen bees are found not to be supportive of female subordinates because of the fear that the success of other women may challenge their own positions of power in organizations.

WOMEN, EMOTION AND BEHAVIOR

Women feel that they must be assertive in order to compete; yet by asserting themselves too far, they depart from gender related norms of female compliance and non-competiveness which may backfire.  A study found that other women may devalue assertive professional women more than men because women tend to build their power bases through a network of interdependent relationships, and tend to avoid direct confrontation.

Another study found that women managers were evaluated more negatively than men if they openly express their anger.  It does not seem womanly of the manager to be out rightly expressing anger in public.  This display of such qualities will surely verify the unspoken bias qualities against women bosses.  Aggression in females is supposed to be culturally suppressed.  In some instances women are more likely than men to rate other women negatively.

The common perception that some women really do not like to work for other women may be true.  This has been said to be the situation in some cases.  It has not been widely studied empirically, but when asked formally and openly, answers are usually positive.  None will state otherwise due to ‘office politics’.  Social desirability usually is the tendency people have to present themselves in a favorable light, regardless of their true feelings about a given topic.  It is found that both genders of workers tend to devalue the performance of women in management, even in the presence of equivalent styles, behaviors, and outcomes.

Female respondents observed the female manager as being more emotional, nervous, and lower in self-regard than the male manager.  The belief in male bosses was much stronger for male workers than for female workers.  In their early years in the work force, women workers believed that women would make better bosses.  But this belief of actual preference for a female boss declines over the years and shifted in favor of male supervision.  This may be influenced by their work experiences over the time.

THE ODDS ABOUT WOMEN BOSS

The reality of female experience with female boss seems to be at odds.  Although females may believe that other women are good as bosses, yet they do not want to work for them.  The odds are as women spend more years in the work force, their preference for having a man as their supervisor increases, and a woman as a supervisor decreases.  Women’s work experience over time leads them to a declining overall impression of having another woman serve as their boss.

Female workers’ positive acceptance of other women in a management role does not contribute to a desire to work for a female boss may be influenced by a perception that female managers are dominant.  And the popular anecdotal negative attribute of female bosses is that they are too emotional.  Emotional as in when expressing opinions, when their view points are not being well accepted, and of course when expressing anger.  The study lends some credence to the comments about the difficulty that women have in working with other women.

CONCLUSION

Although women are accepted in management to an unprecedented degree, women bias continues to be against them.  For a woman to be successful in a leadership role, women need to rely more on her personal power than on her positional power.  Women may need to exhibit behaviors that society expects and associates with her gender role that is a combination of friend, mentor, sister, mother; plus the ablility to express emotional support.

References:

Renee Warning, F. Robert Buchanan, (2009),"An Exploration Of Unspoken Bias: Women Who Work For Women", Gender in Management: An International Journal, Vol. 24 Iss: 2 pp. 131 - 145