Male vs female boss

This is really interesting Maggie - do you know of the 44% who preferred a male boss how that split between men and women?

You do know that men outnumber women in management positions? So if you have eight male bosses (one of them being awful) and two female bosses (again, one of them being awful) guess which gender sticks out in your mind?

(this is an example from my own life by the way).

Talk about family friendly work environments, talk about getting more women in management positions, talk about getting more girls interested in 'male' industries - engineering, science, maths - by all means.

But can we dispense with the 'Daily Mail' style article "Have you ever had a bitch for a boss?" It doesn't help and it isn't constructive and really does nothing to advance the cause of women in any sphere of life.

We don't know how many of the poll respondents were male or female but we received comments and anecdotes from both! The question we asked was a bit controversial but it was never intended to criticise or offend. We thought the results would be interesting, and they certainly were, with both men and women responding. We wanted to address the issues that are going on in the workplace and discuss how businesses can overcome them - if people genuinely think that men make better bosses then we need to change that mentality.

It doesn't matter who answered the question, my beef was with the question itself.

Men outnumber women in management positions. When you ask "who's better a man or a women?" you are not comparing apples to apples. Percentage wise you are more likely to poll people who have never had a female boss at all.

These types of 'polls' only serve one purpose - to start a discussion about all the disasterous female bosses everyone has had. That debate is not only unfair, but, fundamentally, does nothing to further the advance of women in professional roles. 

I know you and Women in Technology are passionate about promoting women throughout IT and financial services. Just let's depense with the tabloid-friendly findings - because behind every "I once worked for a real bitch" story is a 40 year old women, with two children, working 60/70 hours a week in an IT department in a bank who, frankly has better things to worry about.

I wanted to mention the demographic of the respondents in response to Catherine's question. The poll wasn't intended to encourage bitching - it could equally have started a discussion about how people find men's leadership style too insensitive and find women easier to deal with. But yes I agree that men outnumbering women means that the comparison is sometimes not the same! Thanks for your thoughts, is always good to hear what people think.

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