The other two women were judgemental, controlling and mean-spirited. Both situations became intolerable. To extracate myself, I had to leave organization, in one case, and get a transfer to another department in the other.

So this begs the question– what happen? Obviously, the equation includes both myself and the manager. I tend to work effectively, independently and only ask for help if I need it. Most managers do want a certain amount of ‘ face time’.

That said, my observation is that women bosses seem to need to be in control of every situation, in great detail. But not all the time; usually only during meetings or after you have completed an assignment.

Women managers tell you what they don’t like, but not what they want. Every manager has a style, so it is wise to understand their expections. My experience has been that women managers are overly critical of completed work and do not give specific criteria or requirements ahead of time.

Worse yet, both of the bad woman managers I worked for talked negatively about their subordinates to other subordinates. This is perhaps the most damaging behavior of all because it renders a team disfunctional. Employees not held in high esteem by their boss are thus not respected by their peers and not able to contribute to their full potential. Also, if a manger talks ill of a subordinate to another subordinate, that person has to wonder what the boss is saying about them when they’re not around or thinks that they are part of the bosses inner circle.

Overly aggressive behavior, on the part of women, seems to be tolerated in the workplace. This makes an overbearing or bullying female boss more dangerous to an organization, since this behavior is too often given a pass.

I think that women have a natural urge for POWER. They love it, they thrive off of it. Now, I am a strong woman, and I have valid opinions when it comes to authority and work related issues. For me being a woman,and for me announcing that I believe that women are bad managers, is a spark because I’ve looked at all the feedback you’re getting from this article, and majority of the feedback is from OTHER WOMEN, complaining how you’re being sexist and not giving women a fair shot at being managers/supervisors.

For instance, my manager at work is a bitch, I am not joking, I am not stretching the truth, she is cold-hearted.

One reason why I believe that she and other women make bad managers is because women take their emotions out on other people, especially their co-workers. Women cannot seperate their work lives from their personal lives, and honestly I am one of those people, HOWEVER, I AM NOT a manager, and choose never to become one. They are hated, talked about, and just I would never want to be in that situation, where I have to boss people around. I know as a woman, if I were put in the situation of a woman manager, I would make the same actions as my current manager, and being under her and having to take her authority is HARD, STRESSFUL, and my emotions just get beaten up.

It’s one thing to not like one of your co-workers, but to completly just shut one employee out, when you are obviously showing guidance to the other 9 people in the work office, that is a managent problem. I feel as though, women just don’t have why it takes to have that much authority.

I know I blabbed for a lot of this comment, but I definitly agree with your article, and hope to see more of your thoughts.

This is a very interesting forum debating the issues of women in managements.

I am also conducting a research investigating into the issues of inequality of women in managements to establish
why there are not enough women on managerial positions compared to men.

It would be grateful if you could take a few minutes to answer the below survey or pass onto friends and relatives.

Lisa.

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I think a key word in what you said is “insecure” which I think absolutely true.

They dealt with situations in a very emotive fashion and their level of professionalism was non-existent in some cases. I found there to be a hidden agenda, in most cases it was her trying to blame me for things going wrong in order to hide her incompetence.

When you talk about hard vs pushy I can relate to this. I found with some of these women managers in trying to be firm and assertive they over compensated and came off as unapproachable, rude and stand-offish…big no-nos as far as being a good manager is concerned! And in trying to appear assertive they seemed to have lost all grasp of their social skills and a few adopted a school teacher-like demeanour automatically presupposing you were either going to you already had complete a task incorrectly, I guess in order to maintain an air of superiority.

This is where I am convinced that gender politics comes too much into play when you have a women managing a guy, particularly where the age difference isn’t that big. I found this to be prevalent in women who were insecure, they felt the need to over assert their supposed superiority by putting you down and criticising everything you did. Now that isn’t bad management, it is management full stop. The mark of a really poor manager is when they turn day-to-day tasks into a game of one-upmanship.

Funnily enough the best women managers I had were a lot older than me, 10 – 20 years in some cases, I’m 27. So perhaps the answer really is that with age comes maturity and women are better suited to being managers once they have reached a certain age and have acquired enough managerial acumen in order to manage effectively and practice good judgement which hasn’t been tainted by personal opinions or hidden agendas.