{"id":521,"date":"2014-11-13T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=521"},"modified":"2014-11-13T09:00:50","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T13:00:50","slug":"double-bind-facing-female-bosses-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/double-bind-facing-female-bosses-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Double Bind Facing Female Bosses &#8211; Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[The topic of the double bind facing female bosses raised a lot of hackles among a group of women\u00a0participating in this study in Spain. When one of the participants,\u00a0Graciella, a financial services manager in her forties, described her\u00a0approach to being a boss, an uproar erupted from the group. Graciella\u00a0explained, \u201cIf I\u2019m the manager, I don\u2019t care about your personal\u00a0problems\u2014whether you are a woman or a man. I don\u2019t want to be\u00a0involved in your life. It\u2019s not part of my job.\u201d The objections were loud\u00a0from the women in the group, and a lively discussion ensued about how\u00a0being friendly makes it easier to get things done at work and having good\u00a0relationships creates a better work environment. When Graciella was\u00a0asked to say more about her professional experience, she acknowledged\u00a0that female staff don\u2019t stay long on her teams and that she had been told\u00a0she was hard to work for\u2014although she had never thought about the\u00a0possibility that female staff had different expectations of her than of her\u00a0male colleagues.\nMany female clients have complained that it\u2019s more difficult for them\u00a0to get things done when working with female staff than is true for their\u00a0male colleagues. As Rosa and Sheri described in the previous excerpt on this topic, women expect more investment in relationships from female\u00a0bosses and superiors. If those expectations are not met, they could feel\u00a0less motivated to cooperate. Complicating matters for female bosses is\u00a0the friendship rule about practicing equality, or the Power Dead-Even\u00a0Rule described by Pat Heim and Susan Murphy. The Power Dead-Even\u00a0Rule is the invisible \u201cnatural law\u201d (or friendship rule) that says, \u201cFor a\u00a0positive relationship to be possible between two women, the self-esteem\u00a0and power of one must be, in the perception of each woman, similar in\u00a0weight to the self-esteem and power of the other.\u201d This friendship rule\u00a0sets us up to feel uncomfortable with women who have more status and\u00a0power or who toot their own horn and get promoted. The combination\u00a0of the Power Dead-Even Rule and the expectation of women bosses to\u00a0be more relational, which is not rewarded in the masculine workplace,\u00a0sets us up for confusion and frustration about what to expect from\u00a0female bosses, as well as confusion about how to be a female boss in the\u00a0hierarchical workplace.\nAn excerpt from my book,\u00a0<em>New Rules for Women<\/em>, available at Amazon (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/<\/a>).]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[149,169,207,222,418,612,634],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-excerpt","tag-double-bind","tag-emotions","tag-feminine-values","tag-friendship-rules","tag-new-rules","tag-women","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}