Bosses wrongly think women have more problems at work

Posted at 4:27 PM Nov 10, 2009

By Andrea Grimes

​You'd think a look into the personal and public lives of male politicians would prove this to anyone with a brain, but apparently stereotypes stick: bosses believe men have fewer problems balancing their home and work lives ... even though they don't, actually. In fact, women are likely to report less family-work conflict than men. According to Reuters:

Women's careers are being stymied by more than a glass ceiling. Bosses believe women have more family-work conflict, which is a misconception that is holding them back, according to new research. And it's not just male managers who have the wrong idea. "These perceptual biases held for both male and female managers," Jenny Hoobler, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her co-authors said.

Love it--even though something isn't actually true, a societal fear of women's power and autonomy still makes it kind of true--at least in terms of the negative effects on women's real lives. (See: suffrage, reproductive rights, etc.)


The Chicago study asked 178 managers and subordinates about how women handle their private and professional lives, and strangely, the more women were dedicated to managing these things (by being part of organizations and programs dedicated to just that), the more they were seen as being unable to handle their (often) double days:

"The women's movement of the 60s and 70s in the United States brought revolutionary change in terms of women's upward progress in organizations, but the biases supporting the glass ceiling today are much more subtle, multifaceted and deeply embedded than they were then," the researchers said. "Today women encounter biases so rooted in systems that they may not even be noticed until they are eradicated. In this study, we believe we have identified one such bias," they added.

Again, here we see that even women have internalized the idea that to be male, and to have a male experience, is the default and that any variation on that is negative. I personally love the idea that women may still have more work to do--again, with the double day--but are completely able to handle it.

Then again, we may be looking at a case of another common phenomenon: the fact that women are not supposed to complain about things that stress or upset them, lest they be seen as shrill, bitchy or unladylike. If the false perception about women's inability to handle work stresses really does widely exist apart from a 178-person study, women in the workplace who know about it are probably still unlikely to address it, lest their situation get even shittier.