Women Prefer Male Bosses Even More Than Men Do | Hacker News Reader

Women Prefer Male Bosses Even More Than Men Do

businessweek.com

27 pointsselmnoo14 comments

Very linkbait title.

"Only one-fifth of people surveyed by Gallup this week said they preferred a female boss over a man. One-third preferred a male boss, and the rest had no preference."

That means nearly half (47%) didn't care, and there's only 13% difference between those that prefer men to women.

To me this is simply a matter of demographics. There's still a big chunk of people that have been working since the time when women were only allowed to be secretaries or nurses. As they retire the percentages are likely to even out completely.

It's also quite ambiguous , does the person prefer to have a boss who is $gender because the gender is an advantage in it's own right? Or do they simply believe that people who are good bosses are more likely to be $gender but would be equally ok with a boss of either gender provided that they were a good boss?

Or maybe they previously had a good boss who was a man and a bad boss who was a woman (or vice versa) and the question reminds them of that.

> Women fighting for a broader presence in the upper levels of management face at least one very personal obstacle: Most workers don’t want them there.

Um, no. The data below directly contradicts that statement. 1/3 could conceivably be said to not want them there (though even that is a stretch). The other 2/3 either do want them there, or don't care.

This reminds me of an informal study that discovered that women mainly interrupt other women during meetings. http://jengaoneweekatatime.tumblr.com/post/91743154369/do-me...

Somehow that reminds me of the conversation I had with four other girls last night. When I talked it was all piece and calm, but at times they'd start talking over each other like parrots. Funny stuff.

The original source [0] is much better and includes the most recent data points in the graph and the ever so important margin of error (-/+ 4). The graph is actually much different from the business week article which should cast some doubt on the factuality of the reporting.

[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/178484/americans-prefer-male-boss...

Edited to add: The margin of error of -/+4 points seems optimistic given the year-to-year change around 2001 for %Prefer male boss of 17 percentage points.

Women were 50% more likely than men to prefer a male boss and 79% more likely than men to prefer a female boss. The biggest difference seems to be that women were much more likely to express any preference at all.

It is important to note that no preference is a volunteered response that is a response that was not among the options given in the phone interview. I wish that Gallup had asked how much people care or whether they care at all.

Wait a minute...

> In a 2010 survey of 142 legal secretaries, not one preferred to work for a woman partner (about 47 percent had no preference).

Interesting that they decided to throw women under the bus even though the minority simply didn't care either way.

Better title would be, "Most people don't care if their boss is male/female, but we will skew these results because that's a better article"

Yet another use for red-black trees: assign colors to sexes and rearrange your org chart until it satisfies the red-black constraint.

It's interesting to see how different was the original title: women-dislike-having-female-bosses-more-than-men-do (in the URL)

There are a few factors here. Besides demographics (mentioned by jobu) there's self-protection: women and minorities are penalized for promoting women and minorities. So neither a female boss nor a female subordinate really wants to work with the other, because together they can't both win (on average). Just game theory given current constraints. And that's why guys don't mind having a female boss -- there's not the same penalty for either.

http://aom.org/News/Press-Releases/Women-and-minority-corpor...

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