Harvard Business Review: Women Held Back by Bad (Women) Bosses

A reader forwarded me an article in the Harvard Business Review that bemoans the lack of women at the top of the corporate hierarchy. This complaint is nothing new, and it shouldn’t be in the least surprising that Harvard is as dedicated as any other American university to propping up female status above other, less important goals such as, say, productivity, profit and international competitiveness.

However, the article inadvertently reveals that one of the main reasons women with MBAs aren’t getting ahead despite the best efforts of Harvard et al is other women — female bosses in particular.

According to HBR, it isn’t that men necessarily get more opportunities from the get-go, but rather that they tend to advance faster. And the faster advancement of men is tied to early career success, which is largely dependent upon one’s relationship with the manager:

Can we attribute men’s disproportionate advancement to early managerial assignments? No. Although it’s true that people who have managed others reached higher levels, the women and men in our study were equally likely at every career stage to have had direct reports.

We think that gender difference in advancement may reflect another problem altogether: bad first bosses.

And so we circle back to those fate-sealing first jobs. A quarter of the women in our study left their first job because of a difficult manager—nearly as many as those who moved on for more money (26%) or for a career change (27%). Only 16% of the men left because of a difficult manager. Of course, these results suggest that women and men may be treated differently by their first managers.

But who are these early managers? Well, it turns out that they are, more likely than not, other women!

As the graphs in the article demonstrate, more women with MBAs are in management than men, who are more likely to be in executive positions than women. So in that fateful first job our young, female MBA grad gets, she’s more likely to be under the supervision of a female than male manager, and, according to Harvard, that manager is the biggest obstacle to her success.

So, if women’s main obstacle to advancement is other women, then how to solve the problem with an acceptable feminist outcome? This article is valuable in that it reveals exactly the wall that feminism is about to crash right into.