Re: Amy Klobuchar -- and men with female bosses.

I wasn't surprised to see that the first example given of a disgruntled Klobuchar employee was a man. In my experience leading an office with 6 staffers, the only male staffer was also the only one who consistently felt the need to challenge me. Everyone else was very easy to work with.

So I wonder if some of the stories coming out about Amy could happen, in different variations, with most women bosses as opposed to most men.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53vmp8/how-to-stop-male-workers-feeling-threatened-by-female-managers

One area that has been less explored, and could be seriously holding women back from progressing into leadership roles, is how subordinates treat their female superiors.

Over a series of three experiments, Dr. Leah Sheppard from Washington State University, Dr. Maryam Kouchaki from Northwestern University, and Dr. Ekaterina Netchaeva from Bocconi University discovered many men in subordinate positions feel threatened by female superiors and behave more assertively toward them than they would a male manager.

In the first test, participants completed a computer exercise in which they interacted with either a hypothetical male or female boss to negotiate a salary offer of $28,500. Men interacting with female managers provided significantly higher counteroffers than when interacting with male ones—$49,400 versus $42,870. Whereas female participants provided an average counteroffer of $41,636 and didn't differ significantly depending on their manager's gender.

Researchers then investigated the hypothesis that men felt threatened by female managers by asking all participants to take a test in which they had to guess words that appeared on a screen—a format commonly used to assess if bias is present. The researchers found men who were faced with female bosses were more likely to see words such as "fear" and "risk"—indicators that the men felt threatened, even if they didn't admit or recognize it.

SNIP

Taking light relief in the assumption that millennials are more likely to hold feminist principles is unfortunately not an option, as Sheppard said there was no evidence of younger men being more likely to treat male and female managers fairly than the generation before them. So in order to stop women negotiating this uphill struggle alone, businesses need to face up to the fact that their female staff—regardless of their management style—are more likely to be subjected to assertive behavior from their male subordinates than men in the same position.