NYTimes: "No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers"

BestServedCold · 2009-07-26T02:53:06+00:00

I have been in this career for many years and I have seen, and this is a generalization, that women are better list-makers. They will do their to-do list. They will prioritize their to-do list. They will get through their to-do list. Maybe it’s because we do shopping lists. And if we have a problem — again, as a generalization — we will confront the problem and deal with it head-on.

Funny she mentions women's shopping lists. Because the women I've gone shopping with will spend an hour in a grocery store with a list with ten things on it. A list I'm back to my car in ten minutes with.

A. Hands down women are better. There’s no contest.

Q. Why?

A. In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers. Men love to hear themselves talk.

Definitely. Men are definitely the sex that loves to talk and talk and talk just to hear the sound of their own teeth chattering together.

I’m so generalizing. I know I am. But in a couple of places I’ve worked, I would often say, “Call me 15 minutes after the meeting starts and then I’ll come,” because I will have missed all the football. I will have missed all the “what I did on the golf course.” I will miss the four jokes, and I can get into the meeting when it’s starting.

This is the only defense she offers for the opinion that women are "hands down" the better managers.

Then she immediately offers a much better counterpoint for why she's wrong.

Men also, they’re definitely better on the “whatever” side. Things tend to roll off their back. We women take things very personally. We’re constantly playing things over in our head — “What did that mean when they said that?” — when they mean nothing. And I’m certainly not immune to this. So there’s a downside to women.

I'd say it's 50/50 whether or not she's even very successful at self-analysis and I wonder what an anonymous poll of her underlings would reveal. But let's give her credit and assume she's everything she thinks she is. She is then making a huge logical error by assuming all women share her positive leadership traits.

A. I don’t waste time. If you want to chat, if you want to gossip, I’ll gossip with anyone, I’ll hang out. But when I’m working, I’m working. When you sit here in my office, we work. Men don’t do that as well as women do, either. All of sudden they’re on football. All of a sudden they’re showing videos of their son’s soccer game. Then they’re telling a couple of jokes. I’m not good at jokes during meetings. I’m very focused. I’m very singularly directed.

Wrong.

Don’t hire somebody you don’t like. There is always a strong internal pressure to give a job to a person who has all the right credentials and says all the right things, even if something about her sends up little signals of alarm.

I'm sure this woman is very fair and even-handed when it comes to her hiring policies.

etherspirit · 2009-07-26T05:35:01+00:00

I think she's not as anti-male as the title might suggest, but assigning causality based on sex is such fucked up pseudoscience/statistics, but so many journalists love to write about it. The fact that you can write "Women are Better Managers" and that you can't write "Men are Better Entrepreneurs" (or engineers, etc.) is not right either.

2009-07-26T05:50:25+00:00

My god that interview was hard to read. She talks and talks endlessly about the same nothings and then says men just want to hear their voices.

oh and and if my manager walks in 15 minutes late to a meeting, I immediately lose all respect for him/her. A good manager will be there BEFORE the meeting to ensure it will run smoothly at the time it is supposed to begin.

This woman is just another stuck up, arrogant businessman/woman

pemboa · 2009-07-26T18:42:38+00:00

Maybe they are. That's cool with me.

mbrodge · 2009-07-26T06:12:09+00:00

I know it isn't an accurate reflection of society or the sexes as a whole but I've worked for 7 female managers/supervisors of whom 2 were good and 14 male managers/supervisors of whom 3 were bad. If I were to make the choice between the two with no information beyond male or female I would pick the male manager every time.

rmbarnes · 2009-07-26T16:53:33+00:00

In my experience, and yes this is anecdotal just like the lady who wrote the article, woman managers tend to try and mother people more rather than let them get on with their jobs. Now both male and female bosses seem to have the habit of sometimes actually hampering progress by asking for progress reports while workers are to busy to give progress reports because they're actually doing the damn job. Woman seem worse at this though. It's like an article a read the other week that said the reason for western governments becoming more intrusive to the lives of their citizens was because there are now more woman in government, and woman's tenancies are to mother people. Hence the nanny states.

As a side note: I wouldn't listen to anyone with the title of 'Brand Manager' (male or female). This sounds like a bullshit who you know not what you know job, and people who do it probably are over paid in comparison to their actual contribution.

2009-07-26T06:51:30+00:00

Yes, women are a joy to work with.

Title	NYTimes: "No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers"
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	6
Comments	8
Date	July 26, 2009 2:30 AM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/94lgz/nytimes_no_doubts_women_are_better_managers/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/nytimes-no-doubts-women-are-better-managers.1053471 https://theredarchive.com/post/1053471

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