Polled Women Gallup From Woman-As-Boss

A rift in sisterhood gapes open in the statistics of a recently released Gallup Poll on gender bias.

The poll found that 46 percent of Americans would prefer to work for a male boss. Only 20 percent would prefer working for a woman, with the remainder expressing no preference.

It is an unpleasant enough statistic. But it looks worse closer up. It seems that if women want to find out who is dragging their feet on the way to the gender revolution, we have but to look in the mirror.

It is women who are more likely to resist working for a woman. A whopping 54 percent of women said they would prefer a male boss. Only 37 percent of men said the same.

In a version of the survey done a year earlier, Gallup asked why. About 15 percent of the women cited past experience with either a male or a female boss, said David Moore, managing editor of the Gallup Poll. Fewer than 10 percent said they thought men were smarter, more competent or made better leaders.

The largest percentage of women had the most discomfiting explanation.

“Two-thirds of the women who preferred to work for men said it was easier to get along with them, that women tended to be more uptight, that women are harder on other women,” Moore said.

That sound some people hear is the grating of pervasive gender stereotypes on their egalitarian sensibilities.

“It would be interesting to know how many of those women had ever had women bosses,” a question the Gallup Poll does not answer, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women.

Among women who have worked for other women, sociologist Anne Statham, at the University of Wisconsin Parkside in Kenosha, has found, more than half are eager to do so again.

But there are working women who hear in the Gallup statistic a ring of truth.

Take lawyer Susan Lifvendahl, 28, an associate at Ross & Hardies, who has worked for both men and women in three different law firms and only now finds herself in her first positive working relationship with a female supervisor.

“In a strange way, I felt the women weren’t supportive of other women,” she said. “Their interest wasn’t in advancing other women’s careers. I think they feel other women may be a threat to their own position in the firm. I found men to be a lot more understanding, more patient, less petty.”

And she found women managers who had not married or had children unsympathetic in the extreme to women with families.

“There’s definitely an attitude of, ‘I gave up that part of my life for this position; if you want to succeed, you should do the same,”’ said Lifvendahl, mother of a 5-month-old boy.

It is a phenomenon common enough to have a name: the Queen Bee Syndrome, by which a successful woman not only does not help the women climbing up behind her but kicks away the ladder.

Bravo offers a defense of bees: If some women managers are tougher and less pleasant than men, she said, it is what they had to become to succeed in an unwelcoming work world.

“They had to out-guy the guys,” Bravo said. “I think some women got the message, ‘This is what it takes to get ahead.’ And they became even worse - more rigid, less sensitive to women’s needs outside work.”

An easygoing managerial style, suggests Anne Ladky, executive director of Women Employed, may be a tough act for a woman struggling to stay afloat in male-dominated corporate waters. “If the woman boss is in a tenuous position, there may be a greater fear of making mistakes, which is always hard on subordinates,” she said.

Ladky suggested that some women, particularly in support positions, may prefer to work for men because they tend to be more powerful than women.

All of which leaves the poll results floating in a stew of questions. But whether it can be attributed to perception, reality or both, the dismaying statistic offers a ripe opportunity to talk about how to change it.

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Women and Work appears Tuesdays on the In Life People page.