Woman’s place

Bad news for female managers. Apparently their subordinates resent being disciplined by them. Men and women alike would far rather be scolded by male boss than female one. Indeed, study of gender and discipline at work by professor at the School of Management at Arizona State University finds that women dislike being told off by another woman even more than men do.
Many studies of male and female bosses have claimed that the sexes differ in their styles of leadership; women do better at the people side, men at the getting the job done side.
Sociologists have studied the different reactions of girls and boys to discipline at school; boys get used to being reprimanded whereas girls, who are more rarely rebuked, take it more personally.
The researchers interviewed workers from broad range of jobs who had been disciplined in variety of ways, from being fired to being ticked off. In about 40 percent of cases, they found subordinates changed their behaviour as result of their telling off, and female bosses were as successful in this as men.
But male bosses were much more severe than women; they were three times as likely to suspend or sack subordinate and only half as likely to give merely verbal telling off. Even so, when female subordinates were asked if they felt responsible for their bad behaviour, 52 percent said ?no’ when female boss read the riot act – but only 18 percent when the boss was male.
One explanation for this, suggest-ed by member of the audience at the recent Academy of Management conference in Toronto, is that women tend to resolve conflicts quickly – and are therefore blamed for overreacting – while men wait in the hope that things will blow over. Another explanation is that women are recent arrivals in managerial roles, and so have less legitimacy than men. There is also problem of ?gender spillover’ – people assume women are kind and gentle at home and expect the same at work.
Spillover though, works both ways. The paper is called “Wait until your father gets home”; line that small family subordinates are all too used to hearing.