April 13, 2011 • 19 mins
Surveys show that women may possess more of the skills necessary to be a good boss, so why do employees prefer male bosses? Tune in as Molly and Cristen talk about how stereotypical gender traits can affect women hoping to take control of the office.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom? Never told you?
From house top works dot Com. Hi, welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. On a scale
(00:20):
of one to ten, how would you rate your workplace stress?
My workplace stress will depends on the day. Let's just
take today for instance. It's ten, really stressful. Yeah, and
I don't know, I'd give it a six or seven.
It's pretty high. Am I stressing you out right now?
(00:41):
A little bit? With whenever I have to rate things? Yeah,
I got little well tense? Well, did you know? I mean,
don't blame it on me. This level of stress that
you're feeling might be due to the fact that your
boss is a woman. Can you believe that? Well, I
can't believe it because I read it, but it is
it does seem that that does seem like such a
(01:02):
strange thing to say. But that came from a two
thousand five survey that researchers at the University of Toronto
did where they were evaluating the stress levels and physical
health problems of men and women and the men and
women either had one male boss, one female boss, or
a male and a female boss. And according to the results,
(01:23):
women who only had one female boss reported more psychological distress,
which included trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety, headaches,
stomach pain, and heartburn. And women who only worked for
one male boss. But what about the dudes in the situation.
Did they respond so negatively to having a single female boss?
(01:46):
You know, they single, as in only one of the
one of them not unmarried. That caused the stress of
another type. Um No, the men did not respond the
way the women did when they no matter which kind
boss they had, they had equal levels of the stress.
So maybe it's not about the bosses. Maybe maybe we
need to just chill out more at work. Well, you know,
(02:08):
the researchers kind of put in as a footnote that
the fact that a job where a woman has one
female boss might be something really stressful, like teaching or
nursing or social work. Um, but the headlines are all
like female bosses stress you out. Yeah, and especially if
the female boss to female subordinate relationship can get particularly tense,
(02:30):
certain studies have shown. But then you have other studies
saying that women make fantastic A plus bosses compared to men. Yeah,
you never find an article that sort of middle of
the road either female bosses are awesome, where female bosses
are stressing out their workers and people hate them. And
why are we even looking at this to begin with? Well,
of course, since the workplaces opened up to women and
(02:52):
we've been clambing up the corporate ladder is happening and
knock knock, knock, breaking on through with us letto heels. Uh. So, naturally,
business researchers want to know, well, how are the ladies doing?
Because leadership skills are often associated with stereotypically male traits,
(03:14):
such as being more aggressive and confident and a strong
willed Whereas we we we might think that, oh, well,
how can women bring along all these feminine traits of
care and nurture really drive a fortune company? For instance?
To the top right, it's very much darn if you do,
darn if you don't, because so many studies will show
(03:35):
that when women uh demonstrate those typically masculine traits, they
come off badly. Often they are referred to as a
word that rhymes with which female dog. If you haven't
still gotten it, then we just can't help you. Um.
And then on the other side, when they try and
bring these nice traits in the quote unquote you know,
soft traits of being a good teammate. Um. You know,
(03:57):
they they are seen as two weaks. So it's very
much what is a lady boss supposed to do? Um?
And then how do these traits actually, you know, affect
their underlings. So let's talk about the grab bag of
surveys that have evaluated men versus women in leadership roles
(04:18):
in the workplace, and by and large, women typically come
out on top. We've got an article all the way
back from two thousand in Business Week, and it says
studies show that women executives, when writed by their peers, underlings, bosses,
score higher than male counterparts on a variety of measures
from producing high quality work to goal setting to mentoring employees.
(04:41):
And what was interesting about that particular study is the
researchers didn't set out to find out if female bosses
were better. They were just questioning, you know, people on
what made an effective boss, and it just the data
showed that the women were doing so much better on
these skills. You know, they're being seen as people who
could think through decisions better than the our bosses. They're
more collaborative, and they weren't always out for themselves. They
(05:04):
were less likely to seek personal glory and more likely
to give credit to the team. And just for another example,
this is also from that two thousand Business Week article. Uh,
there was a consulting firm that looked at a sample
of fifty eight thousand managers and found that women out
ranked men in twenty out of twenty three areas. There
(05:26):
was another survey in which women This is from a
completely different survey in which women bosses ranked higher than
men in twenty eight out of thirty one measures. Again
and again, we're coming out if we may if we
make a list of measures we want the best boss
to have. It seems like the women display more of
those skills and when they don't. Uh, these researchers are
saying that their weaknesses are less pronounced than a mail bosses,
(05:50):
you know, if if the boss, if the mail boss
you know is too aggressive. Uh, a woman who has
also ranked to aggressive is not faulted for that as
much as the manness, because you might have to think like,
if a woman has gotten to that point of leadership
within a company. You know, she is our she clearly
knows how to get the job done. But then she
also has all of these, um these additional traits that
(06:13):
that maybe men might not possess quite as or might
not access quite as uh naturally as women. They give
women a little bit of an edge. But we should
say that the gender differences are often very small, and
in large samples like the one that pulled the fifty
eight thousand managers. In large samples like that, um it
can it can kind of skew individual results. Of course,
(06:36):
that's what anyone who does want these surveys says that,
you know, it just depends on whether that person likes
their boss and liking your boss. It can be a
fifty fifty proposition. Some people have great bosses, some people
have awful bosses. And at the end of the day,
when someone's filling out a survey on whether they like
their boss or what they like about their boss, they
may not be thinking about gender first and foremost. So
(06:57):
let's fast forward to two thousand ten. We've been talking
a lot about all of these internal findings that women
are just as capable, if not more than men, at
being leaders and Hopefully in that ten year period we've
had more women reaching sea level positions and really showing
showing whose boss not Tony Danza. However, the perception of
(07:23):
women in leadership has not changed in line with those
those survey results of how how how we perform? Right,
because remember those first surveys we talked about the people
in the study didn't realize they were going to talk
about gender. That's just something the researchers pulled out. So
if they go to people and specifically say male or
(07:44):
female boss, which is better? Which do you want? By
and large, everyone male and female goes for the men. Anecdotally,
male bosses are perceived to be better at their jobs.
And Alice Eagerly, a social psychology professor at Northwestern says,
it's a general cultural phenomenon, the preference for men leaders
and bosses. And I think it just goes back to
(08:06):
that association of leadership qualities with typically male trade qualities.
But here's the thing too, when you break it down
by gender, like which boss would you rather have? If
you pull a group of women than pull a group
of men, more women are probably gonna say that they
want a male boss. Right, And you know, it's It's
something we've talked about in a few other podcasts where
(08:26):
you know, women don't really help women that much on
the job. It's like we don't want to see each
other succeed. You know, they've been says about whether female
bosses help their underlings or whether they just say, hey,
I made it, you're on your own. If I did it,
you can do it, And whether the underlings in return
support the female boss, you know, in a crunch time
or if you know someone's head has to be on
(08:48):
the line, who do they support? And so, yeah, it's
it's very weird to see so many women say that
they don't want a female boss. Now, is it a
female bosses obligation to tech and promote women in particular,
regardless of how they perform. Absolutely not. That is also
a form of sexism if women are just promoting other
(09:09):
women on the basis of they're possessing a vagina. Uh.
But at the same time, like why, I just yeah,
I'm very um mystified by this prickly relationship between female
bosses and female subordinates that often comes out. And I
would also be interested to see how that breaks down
by size of office, Like if that's reflective of just
(09:34):
like large corporate settings or if it's really um, if
tensions rise when the office gets smaller. Well, you know,
one interesting thing, uh that I found on Live Science
was something about how people look at their female bosses,
and we talked about the soft quote unquote feminine skills
versus the masculine skills, and the study found that a
(09:56):
female boss was expected to be mother like you know. Yes,
workers were ranking her on whether she listened to them,
if she was forgiving of the fact that they had
to leave early to pick up a kid, um, if
she was if she was touchy feely, basically, if she
supported them um, and if they didn't do that. If
the if the female bosses were more quote unquote masculine,
(10:18):
then the workers ranked her poorly. But when they did
the same for the male bosses and asked them, you know,
does your male boss support you? Can your male boss
tell when you're feeling down? They didn't care. They only
cared if the female bosses were being touchy feeley, and
the male bosses were not expected to do that. So
it's another sort of you know example of how you know,
these female employees who don't want a female boss. Maybe
(10:41):
it's because they want the wrong thing out of a
boss and they know what they can get out of
the male boss. And I think it's telling if we
um if we toss out these specific competencies that were
analyzed in the Harvard Business Review in two thousand one
when they were evaluating male versus female bosses. They were
looking at traits including envisioning, energizing, designing and aligning, rewarding
(11:04):
and feedback, team building, outside orientation, tenacity, and emotional intelligence,
and not a huge surprise, female leaders rated higher on
every single one except for envisioning, which is recognizing new
opportunities and trends, which might be a little bit more
of an aggressive or typically male trade. And I hate
(11:24):
to always like boil this down to gender stereotypes, because, uh,
there is evidence that the quote cultural model of leadership
is becoming more androgynous. Basically, the more women we're seeing
in management and higher positions than the more it's shifting
our concept of what leadership really is away from this
(11:46):
male model to more to embracing both male and female
typical traits. Right, But to boil it down to gender stereotypes,
let us turn to the Daily Mail. Oh, Lord, because
this was a Daily Mail the as best and my
best I mean worst, because you know we've tried to
I think we've been pretty good. Christen saying stereotypically masculine,
(12:07):
feminine and knowing that there's not sort of one way
to go. That's just sort of how society has coded
certain traits. The Daily Mail just goes for it and
basically says that women have periods, they have hormones, they
get p ms, they are a mess to deal with
at least once a month, if not more, because they
might be upset about a boyfriend or a girlfriend or
(12:28):
just someone who is mean to them in the elevator,
and says that men are the best bosses because women
are too moody. Yeah, and this is I mean, we
can't Daily Mail didn't cook this up entirely. This survey
came from the online recruitment firm uk jobs dot net,
but it does make some some interesting points, like incredibly
(12:48):
both men and women are in total agreement that men
make better bosses. Was sixty three pc of women and
seventy three percent of men wanting a male boss. I mean,
I don't know that sixty three and seventy five is equal.
But yeah, the the male assets. There was a sidebar
on male assets and the number one is straight talking,
easier to reason with, less likely to suffer from mood swings,
(13:11):
able to leave their private life at home. And this
was the best no time of the month. So it's
it's I don't I mean, Molly, I don't know how
how we podcast when we are menstruating. I mean, and
Lord knows me. If there's any menstrual synchrony going on,
you can probably tell on the podcast because it's probably
a hot mess. Maybe they should just isolate us in
(13:33):
this booth so that we don't interact with the rest
of our workers when our menstruating. Yeah, I'm surprised we
haven't shut on the internet yet. So, I mean, that's
that's sort of the range. We've talked sort of about
a wide range of reasons why women might not get
the top job or why they might have difficulty being
accepted by the workers once they get the top job.
And it goes from the really simple stupid reasons or
I hope we can all agree they're kind of stupid
(13:55):
that women have a period once a month, maybe, and
um all the way to whether you know an aggressive
woman comes off poorly, I mean, straight talking and more reasonable.
Shop is these male assets in i uh, in the
daily mail. But you know, if a woman has seemed
straight talking, then would it just be that she doesn't
(14:16):
listen to others that she's too you know, forward with
her ideas. Every sort of trait that is deemed you know,
great for men can be turned around and said, oh, women,
what are you doing? Well? I just think that this
is a perfect example of how even though women have
numbers wise broken in to the workforce and even dominate
(14:37):
some industries, and we've broken into the higher ranks of
of businesses, but it takes even though we can do that,
it takes a while long time for culture and our
cultural mindsets to catch up. But there is a light
at the end of the tunnel. And this comes from
an article released only a couple of weeks ago, and
(15:00):
the headline is study shows exposure to female managers increases
their popularity. And I think this speaks to that point
about the leadership ideal becoming more androgynists. The more women
we see, the more normalized that behavior becomes, and the
less we uh disassociate like women with these like masculine
(15:22):
male traits like they can't they can't all be together. Yeah.
I do think there's this disconnect that will hopefully, you know,
shut down, and that these surveys show that women are
really great with leadership traits, but that doesn't mean that
the women get the top job. And so hopefully as
more of them do, you know, thanks to the survey
from a few weeks ago, then maybe we won't have
to worry about you know, does a female boss check
(15:43):
off so many masculine trades versus so many feminine traits?
Does she ask, you know, are you feeling sick? Is
she the office mom? And it just will it will
cease to matter. And since we have brought up so
many stereotypes, I think it's it's good to maybe end
on this quote from one of the study authors on
on this UH study on exposure to female managers, who
(16:04):
said that there's a need to create awareness of role
models who contradict the stereotype. Organizations and managers can try
to reduce the impact of gender stereotypes by acknowledging the
fact that they do exist. Yeah, so I think that's good,
good food for thought. We all have gifts to bring
to the table, whether we're menstuating or not exactly. I
(16:24):
want a T shirt that says that we can work
on that. So in the meantime, let's read some listen
to your looks. Well, I have one from our listener,
Galen phrase. We don't often we never actually say listeners
last names, but it's important to know her last name
in this example, because she wrote a book that she
(16:47):
thinks the sminty audience will love. It's called Grailing Cross,
and she especially thought that you guys would like it
because her characters were blurbd as the Paranormal World Thelma Mloise,
So it's got really strong female characters. It deals with
a lot of subjects that have shown up in our
past reading list of like magic, the supernatural, the paranormal mysteries.
(17:13):
It looks really good and again it's Galen phrase. The
book is Grailing Cross. You can find out on Amazon,
or she told me Cobo books dot com. All right, well,
I've got an email here from Aaron in response to
our podcasts on beer. She writes, I just finished listening
to your Winded Beer Become a Boy's Drink podcast, and
while you were fantastic as always, thank you, Aaron. They
(17:36):
were also kind of drunk. I was surprised that you
neglected to mention one of my favorite historical facts about
women and beer. Doctors used to recommend that nursing mothers
and wet nurses drink beer is a way to increased
breast milk production, since beer was a convenient source of calories.
Some people believe that certain stout beers were developed specifically
for this purpose, and guinness was often prescribed to lack
(18:00):
teating women. I thought it was worth a mention since
this lady specific and certainly flies in the face of
today's accepted practices. So that's a fun fact. And also
wanted to read this email as a thank you to
Aaron for writing it, because I turned it in to
a blog post for the day, So see your We
we love getting these emails. They are very important to us.
(18:21):
And if you'd like to read the blog posts, it's
over at stuff. I never told you that how stuff
works dot com in case you haven't checked it out,
and I would really, I mean, I like it if
you wouldn't mean a lot to me. And you can
also leave comments and like us and do all sorts
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us at mom Stuff Podcast. So there you go, and
(18:42):
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(19:07):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom? Never told you?
From house top works dot Com. Hi, welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. On a scale
(00:20):
of one to ten, how would you rate your workplace stress?
My workplace stress will depends on the day. Let's just
take today for instance. It's ten, really stressful. Yeah, and
I don't know, I'd give it a six or seven.
It's pretty high. Am I stressing you out right now?
(00:41):
A little bit? With whenever I have to rate things? Yeah,
I got little well tense? Well, did you know? I mean,
don't blame it on me. This level of stress that
you're feeling might be due to the fact that your
boss is a woman. Can you believe that? Well, I
can't believe it because I read it, but it is
it does seem that that does seem like such a
(01:02):
strange thing to say. But that came from a two
thousand five survey that researchers at the University of Toronto
did where they were evaluating the stress levels and physical
health problems of men and women and the men and
women either had one male boss, one female boss, or
a male and a female boss. And according to the results,
(01:23):
women who only had one female boss reported more psychological distress,
which included trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety, headaches,
stomach pain, and heartburn. And women who only worked for
one male boss. But what about the dudes in the situation.
Did they respond so negatively to having a single female boss?
(01:46):
You know, they single, as in only one of the
one of them not unmarried. That caused the stress of
another type. Um No, the men did not respond the
way the women did when they no matter which kind
boss they had, they had equal levels of the stress.
So maybe it's not about the bosses. Maybe maybe we
need to just chill out more at work. Well, you know,
(02:08):
the researchers kind of put in as a footnote that
the fact that a job where a woman has one
female boss might be something really stressful, like teaching or
nursing or social work. Um, but the headlines are all
like female bosses stress you out. Yeah, and especially if
the female boss to female subordinate relationship can get particularly tense,
(02:30):
certain studies have shown. But then you have other studies
saying that women make fantastic A plus bosses compared to men. Yeah,
you never find an article that sort of middle of
the road either female bosses are awesome, where female bosses
are stressing out their workers and people hate them. And
why are we even looking at this to begin with? Well,
of course, since the workplaces opened up to women and
(02:52):
we've been clambing up the corporate ladder is happening and
knock knock, knock, breaking on through with us letto heels. Uh. So, naturally,
business researchers want to know, well, how are the ladies doing?
Because leadership skills are often associated with stereotypically male traits,
(03:14):
such as being more aggressive and confident and a strong
willed Whereas we we we might think that, oh, well,
how can women bring along all these feminine traits of
care and nurture really drive a fortune company? For instance?
To the top right, it's very much darn if you do,
darn if you don't, because so many studies will show
(03:35):
that when women uh demonstrate those typically masculine traits, they
come off badly. Often they are referred to as a
word that rhymes with which female dog. If you haven't
still gotten it, then we just can't help you. Um.
And then on the other side, when they try and
bring these nice traits in the quote unquote you know,
soft traits of being a good teammate. Um. You know,
(03:57):
they they are seen as two weaks. So it's very
much what is a lady boss supposed to do? Um?
And then how do these traits actually, you know, affect
their underlings. So let's talk about the grab bag of
surveys that have evaluated men versus women in leadership roles
(04:18):
in the workplace, and by and large, women typically come
out on top. We've got an article all the way
back from two thousand in Business Week, and it says
studies show that women executives, when writed by their peers, underlings, bosses,
score higher than male counterparts on a variety of measures
from producing high quality work to goal setting to mentoring employees.
(04:41):
And what was interesting about that particular study is the
researchers didn't set out to find out if female bosses
were better. They were just questioning, you know, people on
what made an effective boss, and it just the data
showed that the women were doing so much better on
these skills. You know, they're being seen as people who
could think through decisions better than the our bosses. They're
more collaborative, and they weren't always out for themselves. They
(05:04):
were less likely to seek personal glory and more likely
to give credit to the team. And just for another example,
this is also from that two thousand Business Week article. Uh,
there was a consulting firm that looked at a sample
of fifty eight thousand managers and found that women out
ranked men in twenty out of twenty three areas. There
(05:26):
was another survey in which women This is from a
completely different survey in which women bosses ranked higher than
men in twenty eight out of thirty one measures. Again
and again, we're coming out if we may if we
make a list of measures we want the best boss
to have. It seems like the women display more of
those skills and when they don't. Uh, these researchers are
saying that their weaknesses are less pronounced than a mail bosses,
(05:50):
you know, if if the boss, if the mail boss
you know is too aggressive. Uh, a woman who has
also ranked to aggressive is not faulted for that as
much as the manness, because you might have to think like,
if a woman has gotten to that point of leadership
within a company. You know, she is our she clearly
knows how to get the job done. But then she
also has all of these, um these additional traits that
(06:13):
that maybe men might not possess quite as or might
not access quite as uh naturally as women. They give
women a little bit of an edge. But we should
say that the gender differences are often very small, and
in large samples like the one that pulled the fifty
eight thousand managers. In large samples like that, um it
can it can kind of skew individual results. Of course,
(06:36):
that's what anyone who does want these surveys says that,
you know, it just depends on whether that person likes
their boss and liking your boss. It can be a
fifty fifty proposition. Some people have great bosses, some people
have awful bosses. And at the end of the day,
when someone's filling out a survey on whether they like
their boss or what they like about their boss, they
may not be thinking about gender first and foremost. So
(06:57):
let's fast forward to two thousand ten. We've been talking
a lot about all of these internal findings that women
are just as capable, if not more than men, at
being leaders and Hopefully in that ten year period we've
had more women reaching sea level positions and really showing
showing whose boss not Tony Danza. However, the perception of
(07:23):
women in leadership has not changed in line with those
those survey results of how how how we perform? Right,
because remember those first surveys we talked about the people
in the study didn't realize they were going to talk
about gender. That's just something the researchers pulled out. So
if they go to people and specifically say male or
(07:44):
female boss, which is better? Which do you want? By
and large, everyone male and female goes for the men. Anecdotally,
male bosses are perceived to be better at their jobs.
And Alice Eagerly, a social psychology professor at Northwestern says,
it's a general cultural phenomenon, the preference for men leaders
and bosses. And I think it just goes back to
(08:06):
that association of leadership qualities with typically male trade qualities.
But here's the thing too, when you break it down
by gender, like which boss would you rather have? If
you pull a group of women than pull a group
of men, more women are probably gonna say that they
want a male boss. Right, And you know, it's It's
something we've talked about in a few other podcasts where
(08:26):
you know, women don't really help women that much on
the job. It's like we don't want to see each
other succeed. You know, they've been says about whether female
bosses help their underlings or whether they just say, hey,
I made it, you're on your own. If I did it,
you can do it, And whether the underlings in return
support the female boss, you know, in a crunch time
or if you know someone's head has to be on
(08:48):
the line, who do they support? And so, yeah, it's
it's very weird to see so many women say that
they don't want a female boss. Now, is it a
female bosses obligation to tech and promote women in particular,
regardless of how they perform. Absolutely not. That is also
a form of sexism if women are just promoting other
(09:09):
women on the basis of they're possessing a vagina. Uh.
But at the same time, like why, I just yeah,
I'm very um mystified by this prickly relationship between female
bosses and female subordinates that often comes out. And I
would also be interested to see how that breaks down
by size of office, Like if that's reflective of just
(09:34):
like large corporate settings or if it's really um, if
tensions rise when the office gets smaller. Well, you know,
one interesting thing, uh that I found on Live Science
was something about how people look at their female bosses,
and we talked about the soft quote unquote feminine skills
versus the masculine skills, and the study found that a
(09:56):
female boss was expected to be mother like you know. Yes,
workers were ranking her on whether she listened to them,
if she was forgiving of the fact that they had
to leave early to pick up a kid, um, if
she was if she was touchy feely, basically, if she
supported them um, and if they didn't do that. If
the if the female bosses were more quote unquote masculine,
(10:18):
then the workers ranked her poorly. But when they did
the same for the male bosses and asked them, you know,
does your male boss support you? Can your male boss
tell when you're feeling down? They didn't care. They only
cared if the female bosses were being touchy feeley, and
the male bosses were not expected to do that. So
it's another sort of you know example of how you know,
these female employees who don't want a female boss. Maybe
(10:41):
it's because they want the wrong thing out of a
boss and they know what they can get out of
the male boss. And I think it's telling if we
um if we toss out these specific competencies that were
analyzed in the Harvard Business Review in two thousand one
when they were evaluating male versus female bosses. They were
looking at traits including envisioning, energizing, designing and aligning, rewarding
(11:04):
and feedback, team building, outside orientation, tenacity, and emotional intelligence,
and not a huge surprise, female leaders rated higher on
every single one except for envisioning, which is recognizing new
opportunities and trends, which might be a little bit more
of an aggressive or typically male trade. And I hate
(11:24):
to always like boil this down to gender stereotypes, because, uh,
there is evidence that the quote cultural model of leadership
is becoming more androgynous. Basically, the more women we're seeing
in management and higher positions than the more it's shifting
our concept of what leadership really is away from this
(11:46):
male model to more to embracing both male and female
typical traits. Right, But to boil it down to gender stereotypes,
let us turn to the Daily Mail. Oh, Lord, because
this was a Daily Mail the as best and my
best I mean worst, because you know we've tried to
I think we've been pretty good. Christen saying stereotypically masculine,
(12:07):
feminine and knowing that there's not sort of one way
to go. That's just sort of how society has coded
certain traits. The Daily Mail just goes for it and
basically says that women have periods, they have hormones, they
get p ms, they are a mess to deal with
at least once a month, if not more, because they
might be upset about a boyfriend or a girlfriend or
(12:28):
just someone who is mean to them in the elevator,
and says that men are the best bosses because women
are too moody. Yeah, and this is I mean, we
can't Daily Mail didn't cook this up entirely. This survey
came from the online recruitment firm uk jobs dot net,
but it does make some some interesting points, like incredibly
(12:48):
both men and women are in total agreement that men
make better bosses. Was sixty three pc of women and
seventy three percent of men wanting a male boss. I mean,
I don't know that sixty three and seventy five is equal.
But yeah, the the male assets. There was a sidebar
on male assets and the number one is straight talking,
easier to reason with, less likely to suffer from mood swings,
(13:11):
able to leave their private life at home. And this
was the best no time of the month. So it's
it's I don't I mean, Molly, I don't know how
how we podcast when we are menstruating. I mean, and
Lord knows me. If there's any menstrual synchrony going on,
you can probably tell on the podcast because it's probably
a hot mess. Maybe they should just isolate us in
(13:33):
this booth so that we don't interact with the rest
of our workers when our menstruating. Yeah, I'm surprised we
haven't shut on the internet yet. So, I mean, that's
that's sort of the range. We've talked sort of about
a wide range of reasons why women might not get
the top job or why they might have difficulty being
accepted by the workers once they get the top job.
And it goes from the really simple stupid reasons or
I hope we can all agree they're kind of stupid
(13:55):
that women have a period once a month, maybe, and
um all the way to whether you know an aggressive
woman comes off poorly, I mean, straight talking and more reasonable.
Shop is these male assets in i uh, in the
daily mail. But you know, if a woman has seemed
straight talking, then would it just be that she doesn't
(14:16):
listen to others that she's too you know, forward with
her ideas. Every sort of trait that is deemed you know,
great for men can be turned around and said, oh, women,
what are you doing? Well? I just think that this
is a perfect example of how even though women have
numbers wise broken in to the workforce and even dominate
(14:37):
some industries, and we've broken into the higher ranks of
of businesses, but it takes even though we can do that,
it takes a while long time for culture and our
cultural mindsets to catch up. But there is a light
at the end of the tunnel. And this comes from
an article released only a couple of weeks ago, and
(15:00):
the headline is study shows exposure to female managers increases
their popularity. And I think this speaks to that point
about the leadership ideal becoming more androgynists. The more women
we see, the more normalized that behavior becomes, and the
less we uh disassociate like women with these like masculine
(15:22):
male traits like they can't they can't all be together. Yeah.
I do think there's this disconnect that will hopefully, you know,
shut down, and that these surveys show that women are
really great with leadership traits, but that doesn't mean that
the women get the top job. And so hopefully as
more of them do, you know, thanks to the survey
from a few weeks ago, then maybe we won't have
to worry about you know, does a female boss check
(15:43):
off so many masculine trades versus so many feminine traits?
Does she ask, you know, are you feeling sick? Is
she the office mom? And it just will it will
cease to matter. And since we have brought up so
many stereotypes, I think it's it's good to maybe end
on this quote from one of the study authors on
on this UH study on exposure to female managers, who
(16:04):
said that there's a need to create awareness of role
models who contradict the stereotype. Organizations and managers can try
to reduce the impact of gender stereotypes by acknowledging the
fact that they do exist. Yeah, so I think that's good,
good food for thought. We all have gifts to bring
to the table, whether we're menstuating or not exactly. I
(16:24):
want a T shirt that says that we can work
on that. So in the meantime, let's read some listen
to your looks. Well, I have one from our listener,
Galen phrase. We don't often we never actually say listeners
last names, but it's important to know her last name
in this example, because she wrote a book that she
(16:47):
thinks the sminty audience will love. It's called Grailing Cross,
and she especially thought that you guys would like it
because her characters were blurbd as the Paranormal World Thelma Mloise,
So it's got really strong female characters. It deals with
a lot of subjects that have shown up in our
past reading list of like magic, the supernatural, the paranormal mysteries.
(17:13):
It looks really good and again it's Galen phrase. The
book is Grailing Cross. You can find out on Amazon,
or she told me Cobo books dot com. All right, well,
I've got an email here from Aaron in response to
our podcasts on beer. She writes, I just finished listening
to your Winded Beer Become a Boy's Drink podcast, and
while you were fantastic as always, thank you, Aaron. They
(17:36):
were also kind of drunk. I was surprised that you
neglected to mention one of my favorite historical facts about
women and beer. Doctors used to recommend that nursing mothers
and wet nurses drink beer is a way to increased
breast milk production, since beer was a convenient source of calories.
Some people believe that certain stout beers were developed specifically
for this purpose, and guinness was often prescribed to lack
(18:00):
teating women. I thought it was worth a mention since
this lady specific and certainly flies in the face of
today's accepted practices. So that's a fun fact. And also
wanted to read this email as a thank you to
Aaron for writing it, because I turned it in to
a blog post for the day, So see your We
we love getting these emails. They are very important to us.
(18:21):
And if you'd like to read the blog posts, it's
over at stuff. I never told you that how stuff
works dot com in case you haven't checked it out,
and I would really, I mean, I like it if
you wouldn't mean a lot to me. And you can
also leave comments and like us and do all sorts
of fun things over on Facebook. And you can tweet
us at mom Stuff Podcast. So there you go, and
(18:42):
in the meantime, get smart over at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more
about the podcast, clock on the podcast icon in the
upper right corner of our homepage. The how Stuff Works
iPhone out has a ride. Download it today on iTunes,
(19:07):
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