A former manager with nearly 15 years of leadership experience says the feminist push for female-dominated workplaces is backfiring — and the hardest hit are the very women it claimed to liberate.
Women now comprise almost half of all managers in the United States, an increase of more than 50 percent since 1980. The share of women in heterosexual marriages who earn as much or more than their husbands has nearly tripled over the past five decades.
Feminists celebrate this as an unqualified victory. But the reality on the ground tells a different story.
Writing under a pen name to protect his current employment, a veteran manager recounts leading an office culture that was almost entirely male — and hearing female employees call it “the best office I have ever worked in.”
“This has been beyond a doubt the best office I have ever worked in.”
The comment came from a hard-charging young woman with a graduate degree from one of the most left-wing private universities in the country. She wasn’t the only one to say it.
The male-dominated leadership team fostered what the manager describes as a result-oriented, assertive, competitive, and risk-tolerant environment. Meetings were short. Managers voiced annoyance with those who couldn’t get to the point. Yet it was famously accommodating to those with family responsibilities.
As long as female employees did good work, no male manager ever questioned pregnant or nursing mothers who required time for medical appointments, pumping, or other maternal necessities.
So why did so many female employees — supposedly suffering under patriarchal structures — tell these male managers how grateful they were?
Because, as many told the author, they were not getting this treatment when they were led by female supervisors.
The Complaints About Female Bosses — From Women
The manager heard complaints from male employees about female-dominated work cultures where they felt excluded or bullied. But by far the most complaints about female-dominated work came from the women he managed.
Women who had been pregnant or had little children told him their female bosses were less sympathetic to the various needs related to motherhood than male counterparts who seemed more willing to grant mothers some slack.
They described cattish work cultures defined by inscrutably complex cliques.
Research supports what these women reported. Female leaders who never had children or placed careers over their kids — researchers call them “queen bees” — not only lack sympathy for colleagues who do, but seem to punish them, perhaps because they feel the loss of not having kids of their own.
One first-time nursing mother told the manager that a previous female boss told her that if she wanted to have a successful career, she shouldn’t have any more children.
Studies show qualities typically associated with women — including agreeableness, conflict avoidance, and risk aversion — are disadvantages for supervisors. Female leaders attempting to manifest male qualities such as assertiveness or hiding their emotions can make the work environment even more hostile.
“If she wanted to have a successful career, she shouldn’t have any more children.”
The author warns that as men’s influence over work wanes — especially as woke ideologues claim that “historic wrongs” demand a reverse, female-dominant workplace — we will see less of a utopia of gender equality and more of a feminist dystopia.
Those workplaces will be more cliquish and more beholden to gossip and personal grudges. They will be defined by micromanagement, indecision, and an aversion to risk.
And counterintuitively, the attempt to exhibit masculine traits will make them less welcoming to women seeking a balanced family life and the freedom to be engaged, devoted mothers.
How ironic that the feminist labor movement that promised to liberate women to discover fulfillment in a competitive career may actually undercut the successful work they hoped to find.
