There’s an article today in the UK mail online by Amanda Platell purportedly about why women are typically lousy bosses. Now, In my experience, I’ve had bad bosses of both sexes, but honestly a higher percentage of women bosses have been anything between bad and truly horrendous. So why does this particular journalist think women make bad bosses?
Because, ladies, we are not nasty enough.
Nor are we single-minded enough, nor focused, nor task driven, nor adept at that simple but essential boss task of giving orders.
In short, our commercial DNA is not wired for corporate success.
Some of the HBD crowd like OneSTDV and Half Sigma, as well as Steve Sailer have noted that genetic causes are ok, except where they interfere with current ideological meme. Is that the case here too?
In the article Mrs. Platell relates her time as a boss lamenting that she wasn’t tough enough. She says she wanted to be liked by her employees which made her a nurturer able to get the most out of her people. I believe this is honestly how she sees herself. Women are raised to believe that they are the nuturers. I was disabused of this notion a while ago. Women shouldn’t get a pass on this one just because of their indoor plumbing.
Her other problem? She says she took things too personally. I think in this case it’s a side product of the fact that women view everything through an emotional lens. Women see power as a zero-sum game, the pie is always the same size. If one person has more power, someone else must have less. Men know that this isn’t true.
I was a good manager of people, but a lousy risk-taker. With our typical propensity for multi-tasking, I was more comfortable doing ten things at once and keeping all the balls in the air than what was really needed, to focus on one task and nail that ball in the back of the net.
Less testosterone supposedly makes you more risk-averse. Understandable. Multitasking? Yeah, my LTR thinks she’s a good multitasker too. In reality, she’s scatterbrained and can never seem to finish one task before starting the next. Sometimes I just watch her until she gets self conscious about what she’s doing. Then when she asks me what’s wrong, I tell her I’m ‘observing her in action’ and then walk away.
Even in countries where positive discrimination is enforced by law, such as Norway, the underpinning beliefs are that women bring different mindsets and skills to business.
The horror…the horror.
In that country, by law 40 per cent of all corporate positions are now held by women, but even they concede women are by nature more ‘risk-aware’. For which read ‘risk averse’, for which read useless to thrusting, high-risk, high-profit companies.
Damn Norske’s. Where does women’s risk averse nature pay off? Lower levels of bankruptcy….oh and lower profits, growth, and market value. So much for maximizing shareholder banker wealth.
So where does that leave us in this article? How about this statement of the obvious,
women bosses tend to fall into two categories – too soft or too hard.
Successful bosses mono-task, women multi-task; men are dispassionate, we are naturally emotional; they take risks, we ensure against loss.
Where Mrs. Platell get’s it right is stating that women need to look at the lifestyle choices they make for the reason that they don’t make it into the upper echelons of the corporate boardroom.
Once, we could blame prejudice and sexism, now increasingly we have to look to ourselves. And it’s not just that women are lousy bosses of big companies because of our DNA, it’s also because of the choices we have made.
So what have we learned? Women generally make bad managers because they try to do too many things at once, be their employees mothers, and don’t want to take any risks. All because it’s in their genes. Got it?
