What is the danger of a female boss

Perceiving female leaders as a threat, men become more aggressive towards them, which can disrupt workflow and lead to power struggles.

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Can it be experimentally proven that men feel vulnerable when working under the guidance of a woman? Ekaterina Nechaeva, Associate Professor of the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University of Milan, and her colleagues conducted three such experiments. One of them involved 76 students from an American university (52 men and 24 women)1. They were offered, communicating via computer, to negotiate a salary at a new job with a human resources manager (male or female). After the talks, the participants took an unconscious threat test in which they tried to guess the words that appeared on a computer screen for a fraction of a second. Participants who “see” more threatening words like “fear” or “risk” are thought to feel more threatened themselves.

Male participants who spoke to a female manager felt threatened and demanded a higher salary (average $49 per year) than men who spoke to a same-sex manager (average $400). The sex of the manager did not affect the behavior of women in any way, and they asked for a lower salary than men (on average $ 42), which was consistent with a well-known trend – women are usually less aggressive in negotiations.

Another experiment involved 68 male students. They were asked to imagine how they would share a $10000 bonus with a male or female colleague or boss. With colleagues of either gender, students shared the money equally. However, when it came to the boss, they felt vulnerable to a woman and gave her a smaller share than a male leader.

The third experiment was conducted via the Internet, it involved 370 people (226 men, 144 women), it also had to share a similar amount with a female leader, who was described as either direct and enterprising, or as a power-hungry careerist. Men kept a larger share for themselves if the boss was a careerist, while women shared about the same in both cases.

Ekaterina Nechaeva believes that such an attitude of men towards female bosses can disrupt the workflow and interfere with teamwork. She doubts that the behavior of men is easy to change: stereotypical ideas about masculinity are too deeply rooted in us. In turn, women in leadership positions should try to appear in the eyes of male subordinates as more enterprising and less power-hungry.


1 E. Nechaeva et al. «A man’s (precarious) place: men’s experienced threat and self-assertive reactions to female superiors», Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015, №41(8).

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