On balance, would you say that you prefer having a male or a female boss?
It's a controversial topic but I got to talking about this at work today. I'd honestly never thought about it before but a lad baffled me with an admission that he never gets along with male bosses as he feels there is a macho-rivalry that goes on. Same with the other one on the call who said that she prefers a male boss as, in her opinion, female bosses are more controlling - she was quite adamant that she would pick a male boss every time.
I definitely prefer a male boss and had assumed it was the norm to prefer the same gender. I wouldn't be comfortable talking to a female boss about my problems and you can't have the same 'matey' relationship where you both take the piss or engage in friendly insubordination. Personally, I can't think of a single instance where I've had a happy relationship with a female boss and it's probably irrevocably influenced my view, I've found them quite incapable of having my back or speaking honesty and therefore I can't respect them.
Maybe that's me though. Next female boss I get I'll rip the piss out of her and ignore her instructions to see what happens. I assume she will storm off and report me to HR for not embracing her girl-power ego.
>>13404 In my experience it seems to be detrimental to office morale if the office is largely female and so is the manager. It's a rare woman who can rise above the bitching of the harpies she is paid to shepherd and it makes working there a living hell.
Men are, generally speaking, more assertive and resilient so they cope with large female workforces better and seem to be more conscientious.
This is just my anecdotal take on working in the care sector though.
I really never understood this debate as I've had good and bad from both - I've had more male managers than female, but honestly can't pinpoint a specific behaviour from either that would make me prefer one over the other. For what it's worth my worst boss and my favourite boss were both male.
Men and women are definitely different in many ways, but when it comes to management, I feel like whoever you are you either end up a shitcunt nazi cunt or just a worker who gets paid more than everyone else because you know more stuff, or you're in the ineffectual middle ground. Gender in my experience has not really come into it, it's been very even so far.
I have, however, worked in industries that are probably more meritocratic than most - there's not many roles here that you get just by showing up with a degree and nice hair, you really need to know the job and the industry to be qualified to lead in this environment, really the only way to do it is to have worked your way up, so perhaps that has something to do with it. It might be different in your usual corporate drone setup where middle management only exists to crack a whip and can skew younger or less experienced, I could see more primal gender traits surfacing there.
I've had good and bad from both genders.
From my experience I'd say I've got on better with female bosses (I'm male) than male bosses.
It all comes down to the type of person they are. I've had a male boss who had 0 people skills which made me quit the job in question because it was a fucking nightmare dealing with him. When he was in the wrong he'd be adamant he was right, my coworker found it best to just agree but that never sat right with me so we bumped heads a lot. He once blamed me for something that had been around since before I started and when I pointed that out it "didn't matter"
The best boss I had was female. She could be a bit of a cunt at times (I'd wager that was due to pressure from above) but looking back she was the best boss I had because I could get on with her. I respected her. She cared about her employees.
A few of my retail jobs from my early days featured a mixed bunch of managers who knew how shit it was and those who were in their ivory tower.
The first boss I had [male] took his job far too seriously and was constantly checking up on people to try and make them work harder.
The second boss I had [male] was very hands off and laid back, but that's because he was mainly interested in trying to fuck the lasses working the checkouts than his department.
I can't recall much about my next two bosses [male] but they were very laid back and kind.
The next boss [male] owned the company and was a terrible human being. He'd bully staff and there were several instances of him making people cry or go off with stress. He used to make unwanted sexual comments about the women to their faces. He joked that a Kurdish member of staff was a terrorist. He was in an unhappy marriage, now divorced, so people used to be afraid what mood he'd come into work as it was completely unpredictable. The worst thing he did was someone came into the office to say hello after almost two years off with a very aggressive form of cancer; he took her to one side and said she was distracting everyone, so she left in floods of tears.
The boss after that [female] was a full blown mentalist. She struggled to keep her emotions in check and she didn't know how to manage people so she'd be constantly crying and shouting. The department downstairs knew if she was in a bad mood because of the way her boots stomped on the floor. She had no sense of discretion so she would regularly do things like berating her boyfriend on the phone in the middle of the office or shouting and swearing on the phone to Amazon because she had drunkenly signed up to Prime and forgot about it.
My current boss [male] is one of the worst human beings I have ever met. He is extremely insecure and most of his actions seem to be based around securing his own position or ensuring that nobody else internally may be in a position to take it from him; he's made it so that a lot of the other departments are scared of thinking for themselves and of making the tiniest mistake. He's the most commonly cited reason when someone leaves. Last year his life imploded after having an affair with one of the admin girls, but he somehow kept hold of his job.
A cunt is a cunt, regardless of what is between their legs.
>>13404 Just to echo what other's here have said really, it feels like a bit of a meaningless generality to me. Even if in a survey it skews one way or another, coz when it actually comes down to it it's gonna be an absolute crap shoot in your own life.
You may go your whole life with nothing but male bosses who are absolute arseholes or vice versa. My current, proper runs the company, boss now is a an older lady who's pretty savvy and has always been upfront and honest with me. I'm sure she'd still fuck me over if she could save some money but we're both aware of that.
In fact thinking back I think I've been quite lucky in that pretty much all the bosses I've had male or female have been in general pretty sound.
So yeah it just feels like a useless generalisation to me. Or as >>13413 says,
>A cunt is a cunt, regardless of what is between their legs.
>>13404 As a bloke I'd probably pick a male boss rather than say no preference, but it's way down the bottom of the list of priorities, and my thinking is doubtless influenced by the fact that by far the worst boss I ever had was a woman.
As >>13406 says, avoiding a pronounced gender imbalance in the workplace would be much nearer the top of the list, though again I'd marginally rather deal with the macho one-upmanship of an all-male office than the back-stabbing cattiness of an all-female one. I've witnessed the plight of "the only man in the office", and it looked bloody miserable.
Honestly have had great male bosses, great female bosses, only really had a bad male boss though, so I'd probably pick woman.
I would say I've found there to be aboslutely no difference, the only thing I will say at the risk of sounding non-woke is that women dominated teams have been far more catty with bitching and factional politicking than any male dominated team. I'm sure it happens the other way, but this is just my experience innit.
I think that's everyone's experience. It's one of those things everyone has probably noticed by just knows you're supposed to brush over in any context requiring PC.
My work was in the situation a few years ago where me and another lad were the only males, to 8 or 9 females. The rest of the lasses actively requested that in future they try to hire more lads, because the catiness was getting so severe. It's mad that it's something they even recognised themselves but were incapable of just... Not being.
>>13419 I couldn't care less at this point. I'm a corporate drone, if they dimple or dangle makes little difference to how much I detest filling in the TPS reports... err, ticking off my SSADM blocks... err, [s]story points[s]... err, commenting enough on the corporate GitHub? >>13409 yes.
>>13417 >>13418 >>13419 I reckon it's just playground antics bubbling up into adulthood. As a lad I might have a (professional) dust-up with someone one day and the next we'll have a laugh over a pint, women meanwhile go into long-simmering psychological conflicts. I'm stereotyping here but I reckon women could do with corporate training in how to properly conduct monkey business.
Still, while a lad team works well I find a male-dominated office somehow lacking something that is difficult to describe. Women have this calming effect and, in general, stop you from living like a caveman.
