Have you ever had a female boss who seemed more critical of women?

July 18, 2020 11:36 AM

I currently have a female boss who seems to be easier on the men we work with vs the women. She constantly puts us down in a subtle but still sort of obvious way, treats us condescendingly, and seems to be more abrasive in general.

My boss is a woman in her 60s, and consistently demonstrates sexist behavior against women. She favors men when it comes to workplace privileges (granting vacation leave, etc), and also does not tolerate any woman speaking up at the office. If a man disagrees with her opinion (even in a drastic, confrontational, and rude way), she laughs it off.

However, when it comes to women, she simply cannot handle conflict. I have seen many women get into power struggles and the like with her, and she takes it very personally, and will permanently freeze out the woman she had a conflict with.

Last week she became upset with me over a missed deadline and she was acting in a passive-aggressive manner. We had a meeting, but she was late to it. When she came in at the end, she didn’t address me. She then snapped at her assistant to re-schedule the meeting.

I know that she was upset, but I didn't have the information. Even if I did, I didn't have access to the database to enter it in. I feel like she's setting me up to fail because she wants me to do things that I don't have access to. Another (male) coworker had a similar situation, but she didn't yell at him. Not to sound like the victim, but why me?

Up until now, I have been trying to simply keep my head down and focus on work until I can leave. I am the third or fourth person in my position within the last 3 years, so I know it's them, not me. I just don't understand why I was hired. Did she see me as an easy target? Why am I the scapegoat?

The others are terrified of her (myself included), because she becomes enraged when others 'challenge' her (even if they're simply expressing an opinion that was solicited).

Is there anything that can be done, besides leaving?

Any advice about how to address the situation is very much appreciated.

posted by Kobayashi Maru to Human Relations (23 answers total)

My current manager is female and was extremely critical of my work the first 6 months despite me taking on more projects in the first two months than my male counterparts had finished in a year. Shockingly, however, she was very positive about those same projects on my mid-term review so she either had an attitude change or she was hazing me. I have no idea. But she definitely coddles and gives special treatment to the new person, who is male, as he only has one project assigned to him and everything he does is amazing to her.


I don’t know what the solution is but I’m here to confirm that there are many women with internalized misogyny.
posted by Young Kullervo at 11:57 AM on July 18, 2020 [18 favorites]

My experience with a woman of that ilk was that her view was that she had had to get to the top the hard way and she didn't see why other women shouldn't suffer as well.
posted by TheRaven at 12:02 PM on July 18, 2020 [36 favorites]

I've heard of this before, for years, and it's a pattern among female bosses and managers when the boss is in a majority-male office, or she rose to the ranks in such offices. There's a point, earlier on, where senior women are more supportive of subordinate women, and then some watershed moment where a senior woman has to reduce the competition for male favor (or, generalizing, majority-group favor) by pushing their subordinate women back. The same thing is likely to happen among ethnic minority bosses; I'm sure many of us heard of the black bosses who are extra hard on their black subordinates, and felt only mixed satisfaction at the justifications offered for it. I'm not sure if it's western culture, modern business culture, or just human cognitive bullshit we're all stuck with.

I'm convinced by this just because if you look at interpersonal and other public behavior through the lens of a status competition, the bizarre, contrary-to-espoused-principles stuff makes much more sense-- we're all in the game whether we see it or not, and status is a deep human drive.

We've got a habit of seeing our bosses as being secure in their position in the company despite not really having any information to that fact, not to mention that their concrete security of position doesn't always match their security as they perceive it. It's like how your parents can seem all-knowing and infallible, you're not informed or equipped to see how faulty or precarious they might actually be. That's why it can be such a surprise when a certain kind of parent starts to see you as competition for status, and acts on that notion.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:18 PM on July 18, 2020 [8 favorites]

Queen bee syndrome Is the name this was given in 1973. I saw it a lot in graduate school in the 80s. Female students would often avoid having female professors on their committees because we’d seen them turn against women too many times.

I wish I had ideas for what to do about it. I was hoping women my age, who didn’t have it as hard as our mothers, would not behave in this way as much. But I can reiterate that it’s a real thing.
posted by FencingGal at 12:29 PM on July 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

My experience has been like TheRaven's. I have had it happen to me a few times, including one where it specifically drove me to leave a job. (You can see my post about that and the compassionate advice of fellow Mefites who inspired me to go.) For what it's worth, in that major case, boss became much nicer to me once I wasn't her subordinate anymore, I think she respected me for leaving, and my life is soooooo much better now even though I kinda took a demotion, or at best a lateral step.
posted by ferret branca at 1:31 PM on July 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I also think my mean boss respected me more in general than the people (men) she didn't bother to be mean to, in a weird way, but it still made my life hell.
posted by ferret branca at 1:33 PM on July 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've heard this described as "pulling up the ladder" particularly when the puller came up, professionally speaking, in an environment where they were told (sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly) that there was only room on the team for one [insert marginalized identity here].

I don't have a solution, but perhaps searching that term on workplace advice sites would yield something. (I just checked AskAManager but no relevant-seeming results.)
posted by basalganglia at 4:05 PM on July 18, 2020 [6 favorites]

Yes. The woman in question freely admitted to it, but interestingly, explained that she did it because she expected much less from men (saw them as incompetent/bumbling, so she praised them freely for doing simple tasks correctly, for example) and held other women to an impossibly higher standard. This was a colleague of my wife's, and she is much happier now that she has started a new job and does not work with this person any more.
posted by coppermoss at 4:13 PM on July 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yes. I experienced this "up close and personal". She slandered and framed my (female) colleague and me, and eventually reached her goal of firing my extremely competent colleague. I knew I would be next, and so I resigned from my job. I was replaced with a male (at a salary that is 36% less than mine was, according to a friend who used to work in HR there). Sadly, I think the only thing you can do to make things better is find employment elsewhere. The injustice of it will be the hardest part to overcome, I'm afraid.
posted by SageTrail at 5:40 PM on July 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yes, I have experienced this. My female manager from a few years back also managed a senior male colleague who habitually fell behind on small tasks that, had it been me, she would have reprimanded me seriously over. But with him she seemed much less hostile. She was awful to me: snapping at me in front of the entire office and, in our meetings, phrasing her feedback in really hostile and unprofessional wording. I'm so glad I don't work with her any more. I hear she's still like this with many female colleagues including those who are senior to her - rude, hectoring and unprofessional. The only colleagues she treats with respect are white men of all ages, and white woman who are visibly older.
posted by unicorn chaser at 6:35 PM on July 18, 2020

Yes. Anecdotal, but I worked in an office with ten people, exactly one of whom was obviously male. He was 19 or 20, entry-level, while the main manager was a woman in late middle age. This main manager treated the guy like, oh, he was just so adorable, like he was an errant but lovable puppy, or her grandson (he wasn't) or something. He was regularly tardy, snarky, frequently lazy, and very frequently in violation of the uniform rules, while the rest of us were stuck in the scratchy company-issued shirts, no exceptions. He did the job asked of him, but only just. Everyone else, any infractions, it meant meetings and head-shaking and much manuvering, accompanied by the false smiles expected of women. I know this is just a story from an Internet stranger, but yes, imho, this is real and is a thing I have experienced.

What I did about it? I left that job and got a different one. I wish you luck. It's a hard position to be in.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 7:10 PM on July 18, 2020

Yes, I think this is what "the Cool Girl" often ages into, for instance. I also think it suggests that the organization above and around her has the same opinion but expects her to do the emotional work, so moving within the org might not work. It might though! Some women are spotty handed villainesses!
posted by clew at 8:24 PM on July 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

Yes. I have seen this happen many times. It is a very disturbing form of discrimination. It can be career ruin for the female subordinates of the female supervisor. Men soon learn to weaponize this against their female coworkers so the men get ahead for the best assignments, promotions, etc.
posted by KayQuestions at 8:37 PM on July 18, 2020

At my very first "real" office job, at a Fortune 500 company, in the late 90s, I interned in a group that was managed by a woman and all but one employee in the group were women. And the group was AMAZING, they were so supportive, everyone worked really well together and worked out disputes and problems professionally and empathetically, and I am still friends with a couple of those women 25 years later even though I was just there for a summer and I was ten years younger than everyone else! I came out of my internship thinking, "The best thing to do when you have a problem or have fucked up is to immediately tell your colleagues so they can sympathize and help you figure out how to solve it!" (Turns out this does not translate.)

But every time someone from elsewhere in the company came to visit our group, they would make stupid joking comments about women managing other women, and how women at work were catty, and how women managing other women always tried to push their reports down so they'd be the only woman succeeding. And I found this really bizarre and sexist! It was such a comfortable and nurturing environment!

But what I realized over time was that many of the other women managers at the company DID kick down their female reports and support their male reports -- and this was a totally legitimate strategy, since the all-male C-suite was going to promote the male employees. The women were not worth the investment of time and energy because the only place they could be promoted was to the female manager's role, and then only if she was fired. But women who nurtured male talent would get approval from the C-suite because of their ability to find and promote good people.

I eventually realized that my manager, who was known in the company as (and this is a quote, and content warning for misogyny) "a bitch on wheels," was really, really special. She was legitimately kind of terrifying but she was amazing and ferocious and fought like anything to support and promote her women, and that's why she had the only female-majority team in the entire company, and the top-performing team in the entire company. (Men who got sufficiently high-level transferred out of her team, because of all the lady cooties preventing their advancement.)

But yeah, in that late-90s milieu, it was absolutely a thing that many female managers discriminated against their female employees, because there was a VERY limited "pie" available to women, and female managers who promoted women would find themselves out of a job more often than not, and would have their managerial ability questioned since they were promoting women instead of MEN (who were "obviously" better qualified).

When I read the start of your question, the first thing I thought was, "She must be middle-aged or older, and have been working in offices in the 90s or earlier." And YEP. I bet she came up in that extremely dysfunctional culture and has adopted it without thinking about it.

I do notice that some people do better or worse with male or female managers, or male or female reports, and I think that's often related to how they grew up, went to school, or had early work experiences. But I think these days most people are AWARE of those personal quirks and work to compensate for them. (Like, I've worked with men who take feedback a LOT better from women managers, because they take it as more collaborative, whereas they find it competitive coming from men, but they recognize that about themselves and are careful to modulate their response to male managers and recognize their reaction isn't related to the feedback but to their dad being a dick/their first manager/whatever.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:49 PM on July 18, 2020 [10 favorites]

Margaret Thatcher is possibly the most famous historical example of this and displayed a lot of the traits that your boss does. She said "I didn't get here by being a strident female. I don't like strident females." As for lessons from history about how to deal with her, erm, people willing to publicly eviscerate her then a majority of the organisation forcing her out? Probably not the most workable of options for you.
posted by Vortisaur at 2:46 AM on July 19, 2020

Sexism is systemic. Female bosses are swimming in the same sexist waters as the rest of us. And systemic problems in a workplace, even if we're part of the group those problems affect more, tend to rub off on us rather than the other way around. So a woman in a sexist industry (which is all industries) only rises in ranks by upholding the sexist system. It may seem like she has the power to change it and is choosing not to, and on a day to day basis that is almost certainly true, but if at any point she had decided to go the opposite way, how much longer would she have held that power?

Also, if she's in her 60s that means she came up in a workforce that was explicit about things like: [male employee] should get [more support, more perks, more slack for not measuring up, not laid off, straight up paid more] rather than [female employee] because he has a family to support, the assumption being that even if the female employee has kids too, her husband is or should be the primary breadwinner.

All this stuff bubbles under the surface for decades, and you're rewarded with becoming the boss for going along with it, and voila, the system is perpetuated by your own doing. You don't even have to be consciously doing with it--you only have to NOT be consciously going against it.

It doesn't excuse her sexism. No matter why she acts this way, it's her responsibility as your boss NOT to. But another way I've seen sexism come up in the workplace again and again is that sexist female bosses are way more despised by their female employees (and less respected by their male employees) than sexist male bosses.

As for how to deal: I've found it helpful to be boring and straightforward with bosses like this. Only give them the information they need, directly ask them for what you need to get the job done and nothing more, ignore passive aggressiveness, don't show fear, and most importantly, don't treat non-questions as questions. A lot of time a boss will sputter and complain and it will feel like a prompt to the employee to offer excuses or solutions, but really they just need to sputter and complain a little and then move on. Taking it as a prompt often leads to an unproductive back-and-forth instead.

Getting out of there as soon as you can and trying your best not to let yourself become like her are the other most important things.
posted by lampoil at 5:46 AM on July 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

You should be very careful to not generalize the unfortunate piling-on that your question has led to. Sexism 101: People to like to criticize women, for instance coming up with a "syndrome" based on that dislike.

Your question was not, in fact, "are all older women like this" or "tell me all the stories about older women who are sexist" but "what should I do".

The answer to "what should I do" is look for a new job. The high rate of turnover in your job make it obvious that your job is not likely to lead to success.

How to address this situation: do not generalize it to all women.
posted by ashy_sock at 6:58 AM on July 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: @ ashy_sock- Of course, not all women are like this. Early in my career, I've had wonderful women bosses whom I still keep in contact with. They were wonderful mentors and I learned so much from them.
posted by Kobayashi Maru at 8:02 AM on July 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

The post title is a question, literally “Have you ever had a female boss who seemed more critical of women?” Many of the responders to this Ask are responding to that question, and have indeed experienced that.

Kobayashi Maru, I also don’t have much advice besides look for another job, and a response offering you solidarity. I had a very similar experience in grad school with a female advisor/lab head who would make almost ridiculous accommodations for her male grad students that were not offered to me or the other women there. For your question, “Why am I the scapegoat?”, I tend to agree with TheRaven, In other words, it’s about her, not about you. Sorry that that is not more actionable advice; in my experience, focusing too much on what’s wrong with me in a fucked up work situation like this just leads to expensive-to-therapize trauma. I’m sympathetic that this situation is happening to you, and I hope your work situation improves (possibly by changing where you work).
posted by zingiberene at 4:50 PM on July 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have worked for two female CEOs of mid-sized nonprofits who were blatantly sexist. In a tidy display of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, both of them also considered themselves "good mentors to women." It’s infuriating.
posted by desuetude at 5:36 PM on July 19, 2020

I got fired by a female boss for some indeterminate reason after being 2 years in the position with good reviews. Just after my 50th birthday. She also fired another woman aged 50 and, after making him think he was being groomed for management, fired a 50-something Black man. She was about 46 herself, so go figure.
posted by matildaben at 7:18 PM on July 19, 2020

I had this happen with a woman who was a coworker and got promoted into a shift leader type position, in the sort of job where that pays an additional dollar per hour and most of the duties are pretty much the same. Never had any issues with her as a coworker but once she got the promotion this sort of thing started. Sometimes the smallness of the power differential is inversely correlated with how much someone wants to show they have power over you.

I don't have any suggestions, just affirming that this happens, it has much more to do with the power structure and personality of the other person than it does with you. It's not always correlated with age.

I've come across it in other, non-work, settings where a woman in a more powerful position wants to demonstrate that I am in the subordinate position and demonstrate that she has power over me. I'll just say that this is easier, in some ways, to deal with at work than at the gynecologist -- but it's easier to go to a new service provider than to find a new job.

I don't have any good tips on how to deal with it at work.
posted by yohko at 11:13 AM on July 20, 2020

I posted this question not long ago about my current boss, who is a cis woman and who exhibits a lot of the traits you describe: she gets very aggressively condescending/belittling/dismissive very fast, often bringing in remarks about her target's personality or appearance. Any pushback will be shut down very angrily, even if it means lying/gaslighting about what she actually said or did. It is indeed very hard to deal with constructively and you have my sympathies.

Male team members also come in for some scolding but not nearly at the same intensity or frequency as female employees incl myself. Previous answers are completely right: she is indeed someone who worked her way up the ranks in a very, very heavily male-dominated industry. I think in her case it's a combination of placing extreme pressure on her female reports to be perfect, because she knows we have to be the way she had to be in order to earn any respect at all, and contempt for us when she feels we fall short. I try really hard to remember that she is probably carrying a lot of baggage from what she went through to get here AND continues to struggle with in order to maintain her position. It helps mitigate some of the anger and frustration, though it doesn't make it ok.

I agree with others that an outright show of fear is the #1 thing you have to avoid, while also not seeming to challenge her or dismiss her concerns. This is a very, very delicate balance to strike and I for one am still figuring it out. I don't even know that changing jobs or industries would help you much since this is so widespread. Yes, as individuals we have a responsibility to maintain self-awareness about not perpetuating cycles of sexist abuse just because we have legitimate damage from experiencing it ourselves, but yeah a lifetime of misogynist horseshit is going to leave some of us pretty screwed up. It's bitterly sad, but you have every right to be angry, to defend yourself, to remove yourself from those situations.
posted by TinyChicken at 2:57 AM on July 21, 2020