Horrible Bosses

There are few things worse than a bad boss. Most of us have had one or two experience with such a person. But, not for nothing—my own experiences pale in comparison to the every day absurdities visited upon professional women by the gormless fragility of so many male middle managers. A woman I know, who has worked in tech for decades, even under generally good working conditions says she has had to express requests and solutions through a sympathetic male coworker just so they would be heard. This is among peers, folks.

And when it’s bad, it’s stupid. Stupid, for example, in the way that a proactive task she took on six months ago—and which got her chastised and called “arrogant” by her boss at the time, so she stopped doing it and ate crow—is now the unfinished requirement holding up the project, and she better jump on it. He has no memory of what he said back then, but now another man has told him the task must be done.

She endures frustrations like this daily. My solution, if I were in her shoes, would be direct action—reminding my boss that I tried to do the task six months ago and was called arrogant. A solution that would be risky for me, and impossible for a woman. Supposing, for a moment, that the boss was culturally misogynist, to pick an explanation at random, a man could push back if justified; a woman who pushed back might get a warning about her future employment.

This kind of thing is so widespread, so “just the way it is,” that most of fail to ever even notice when it happens. Certainly we don’t do anything. Another reason it’s great to have a penis.