I have a female boss now and its the worst job I've ever had. None of this is because she's female, just to point out that it's probably got more to it than just male/female.
I don't know that gender per se fixes it. Historically, men were in charge of certain kinds of work, the kind that is now paid, and women were in charge of other kinds. These complemented each other.
As we move away from traditional family and tribe or community based social organization towards more paid work, our male leadership patterns seem to have become more dominant and we have lost that balance. Women with serious careers are frequently socialized to lead like men and they are sometimes harsher than the men as if to "prove" themselves or out of bitterness.
I'm not sure how to fix this, but the Jessica Livingston story seems to be the exception, not the rule. From what I gather, she and Paul started the company together as equal partners and he soon roped his previous business partners into it. But it was initially the two of them.
When you have a male dominated organization and women rise through the ranks, they seem to typically be broken of such feminine leadership styles. They typically have to lead like a man to get promoted.
I'm not sure how we get there because currently the default expectation is that women learn to lead like men to get leadership roles.
>As we move away from traditional family and tribe or community based social organization towards more paid work, our male leadership patterns seem to have become more dominant and we have lost that balance. Women with serious careers are frequently socialized to lead like men and they are sometimes harsher than the men as if to "prove" themselves or out of bitterness.
I'm glad you took the risk in your initial post, as you've very well articulated something that I've noticed for a while - but couldn't capture as well. I'm highlighting this bit, because I think it's particularly balanced and insightful. In recent years, we've read about how broken many men are - how they're emotionally shut off and how depressed it makes them in the long run, but when discussing the ills of patriarchy, there's still a large group that attributes it to whining feminists, failing to realize that it hurts us all. Imbalance will always have negative effects - politically, socially, economically, spiritually, etc..
I think that's a really key point and it gets missed because most recorded history is male history. Men operated in the public sphere and most history is about that public sphere. It's really hard to find records at all about what went on in the private sphere. So our written records wind up de facto being an ode to male power and male tactics and we completely miss the fact that there was this whole other thing going on privately and it was a very big part of the world, but there is very little record of it.
So we wind up discounting it entirely and not even recognizing that it existed. It's a huge blind spot.
There's an interesting book about the history of technology for doing housework called "More Work for Mother." It details how in the past 300 years or so, we have very much reframed work in order to divide up domestic responsibilities and paid work. With the rise of money, we needed to free up male labor from the domestic sphere in order to empower men to bring home a bigger paycheck so everyone was better off.
Historically, men beat the rugs. Then we invented vacuum cleaners and vacuuming was "women's work." Historically, men took grain to the mill to be ground into flour. Now you can buy flour at the grocery store.
There were countless ways in which men were involved in running the household that got handed off to women so men could do paid labor. And now women are also doing paid labor and there's all these problems. And people fail to see the connection in part because they don't know how labor was divided up 300 or so years ago. They think the way it was done in the 1950s was always the norm and this is absolutely not true.
So there's a huge piece missing and we don't even see that it is missing and we wonder why in the hell things aren't working smoothly.
> they are sometimes harsher than the men as if to "prove" themselves or out of bitterness
Not out of bitterness, but rather because you are often assumed to be weak, emotional, and incompetent as a women and you need to overcome that negative bias. There's no such negative bias towards men in the role.
1950 are not representative for whole history and upper classes livestyle was rarely representative of how majority of people lived. Don't use 1950 middle class utopia as representation of how genders historically acted.
Also, those women are not "acting like men" nor doing something against nature. They are acting like people in lead positions, full stop. Just because it used to be only men being in that position in the past does not mean that women in same position should be expected to do something else.
It is not male behavior, it is leader behavior. The "feminine" style is largely adaptation to different situation - the one where you don't have much direct power and where you depend a lot on how people feel about you. It is normal and healthy to adapt to changing circumstances.
I said nothing about the 1950s. Please revisit my first comment where I spoke of my personal struggles to make sense of my life and find a path forward for me personally.
If you would like to back way, way off of your outright dismissive position, we can try to bridge the communication gap here. But if not, I don't see any point in continuing the discussion.
You largely described 1950 middle class ideal in gender roles.
The kind of work women did in the past periods is paid now too. Households were making own candles, cloth, raised animals for food, killed them, bed sheets, soap and so on and so forth. A lot of stuff you buy now would be crafted by women. Outside of 1950 homemaker or rich people, women in the past could not afford to be only nice and gentle. Women sold on local markets (based on local museums) while men went to sell away. Nannies and servants were paid (poorly). Women even worked in mines based on mining museum - they were separating rocks which is not as hard as mining (they were paid less then men obviously). Kids worked too. Also, still in mining areas, male miners tensed to die young while women and kids continued to live and continued to need money. Which practically meant, making things and selling them.
Same after wars. Men died, at periods a lot, women continued to live and needed to feed themselves and rest of family. That is the thing about male protectors and conquerors stereotype - they die or get disabled and remaining men can't replace them so easily.
There was patriarchy but also a very real need to negotiate well on market. A lot of those expectations is rich upper class thing - behavior you can afford only when you are rich enough not to be economically productive.
> Historically, men were in charge of certain kinds of work, the kind that is now paid, and women were in charge of other kinds. These complemented each other.
Seems pretty similar to idealized nuclear families of the mid 20th century
> As we move away from traditional family and tribe or community based social organization towards more paid work, our male leadership patterns seem to have become more dominant and we have lost that balance.
Now we're even talking about "traditional family" organization.
I'm not making any statement about whether this view is right or wrong, and I know plenty of families in traditional roles that lead fulfilling and financially stable lives - my parents among them. That said, these comments absolutely do describe "traditional" families where men and women's work are largely segregated. The above commenter is absolutely not "projecting an awful lot".
Currently I've got a good female boss, with which I appreciate working a lot. But I don't find that she works differently from the other good male bosses I've had the privilege of working with.
Note that I am in France so I think that leadership model here are different from America.