No place at work for Godzilla – with or without a handbag
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YOU would think there were enough problems facing women in the workplace without other females coming into the equation. However, researchers from the University of Toronto have come up with a new burden for women: namely the female boss.
Scientists have discovered that women who have to answer to one of their own feel a lot more stressed than those with a male supervisor. The Canadian team, which studied 1,800 workers, decided the reason was the Queen Bee syndrome.
To the uninitiated, this is based on the fact that there is room for only one queen in the hive and any pretenders to the throne have to be dealt with as brutally as possible.
Therefore, the Queen Bee is, invariably, nasty to and about her staff. She never behaves in an assertive way but, nevertheless, does her best to intimidate people with rudeness, favouring non-verbal messages such as rolling her eyes, looking at the clock when employees come in late, sighing loudly when something goes wrong and always treating men in senior positions as the dog’s you-know-whats, however ghastly and incompetent they may be.
The researchers say the Queen Bee is out to make herself important, but always at the expense of those around her, failing to see that seniority or a higher position is never a licence to demean others.
Even worse for equality between the sexes, the University of Toronto scientists say that many women workers do not like to be led by women because they see leadership as a traditionally male role.
Aaaaaaaaagh.
As someone who was there at the start of women’s liberation, back in the 70s, this kind of behaviour makes me despair.
Is it not enough that women face the glass ceiling, lower pay and all the problems associated with child care?
Then you discover that some women – think Margaret Thatcher – believe their own gender to be inferior.
Great.
The Canadian researchers believe that this is why US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton failed to get her party's nomination – or why Segolene Royal lost last year's French presidential election.
If people who think this way would just try turning the gender tables for a minute: how would a man feel if he were told that, during his working life, he would probably earn an average of 17% less than his female colleagues for doing the same job, that he would need to take time out, probably years and probably when he was at the height of his career, to have and look after children, with no income guarantee.
He would say “no thanks” or words to that effect.
For the Canadian research, they compared stress levels and the physical health of staff in three situations: working for one male boss, for one female boss, and those working for one of each. The study found that women who have a lone female supervisor suffer far more than those with a male boss.
They reported experiencing chronic insomnia, depression, anxiety as well as headaches, stomach pain, heartburn, neck and back pain, and fatigue.
But women who worked for a lone male supervisor had far fewer symptoms. And those who worked for one of each were somewhere in the middle.
For male workers, strangely, there was no difference in distress levels – whether the boss was male or female. Even more discriminatory was the fact that while women employees expected male bosses to be aggressive, unpleasant and demanding, they did not expect this behaviour from a female supervisor. That does not help the case of the sisterhood one iota.
A bully is a bully – whether male or female. And bullies are everywhere. In my time, I have known some five-star creeps. Either you learn to deal with them or you sink without trace.
The bosses from hell are always going to be with us. You need to learn to deal with them; preferably not by sticking a knife in their back, as that is likely to end up with you in jail for the rest of your natural.
It would be far more constructive to find out what happened to the poor darling in the garden shed when she was three years old so you can understand why she ended up as Godzilla with a handbag.
Maybe her parents didn't show her enough love during the formative years. Who knows? More important, who cares?
All the hapless employee has to worry about is keeping the boss under her thumb throughout her working life.
In this country, we do seem to love the boss from hell.
Witness The Office and Ricky Gervaise, the sort of manager who keeps telling bad jokes and waits for his staff to fall about laughing – and they always do. There’s the over-critical boss and the one who slams doors, screams and shouts, veering off into spectacular mood swings when he isn't happy with your work.
So what do we do with the manager from hell? Nothing. The ball is always in his court.
And, let’s be honest, we seem to have worked up an insatiable appetite for managers who swear and shout. Just look at the way we fawn over celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsay. What's so great about a man who has managed, single-handedly, to turn effing and blinding into an art form?
There seems to be a blind acceptance that good manners are relics of times gone by.
Yet, do we really want to be bawled at in the workplace?
If we were honest, we might admit that Gordon Ramsay's behaviour is the stuff of which tribunals are made.
Threatening behaviour doesn't make for a happy staff. Good manners are about basic respect, and extending common courtesy to an employee is what we have a right to expect. But the celebrity culture has spilled over – so many hard-working, ordinary people are just as likely to be the random target of those who believe violence, mental or physical, is the answer to everything these days. But it isn’t.
A good boss takes staff with him – or her. The gender is neither here nor there.
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