Two years ago, when I was 29, I accepted a job with the word “executive” in the title. I’d read all the studies on women in management positions and was understandably nervous about being a boss. Female bosses are often considered less likable by many accounts, and not just by male employees. In one British survey, a quarter of women said that female bosses were more likely to be insecure backstabbers, who brought their personal baggage to work and spent too much time worrying about their appearance. I didn’t want to be like that, but didn’t know what a good boss looked like either.
Of the handful of older women I’d worked with, some seemed to be resentful of me, prone to lectures about how hard they had it in the deeply sexist early days of their career. Others weren’t exactly hostile, but still kind of cold. A few clearly wanted to mentor me, but had to be home at 5 p.m. every day for their second shift. And there was also a whole swath of women aged 30 to 40 missing entirely from the workplace, due to the Mommy Gap, which may help explain the existence of twentysomething bosses in the first place.
Even though I’d been working with professional women for about a decade, I failed to come up with even one mentor-type figure I felt like calling up for advice. After reading this week's interview with Irene Dorner, CEO of HSBC USA, in the New York Times, I found myself again struggling to name a single female mentor. Though she comes from the business sector and not media, her words rang true: “I suspect that we were simply not very good role models,” Dorner said. “And there aren’t enough of us to be visible so that people can work out how to do what we did.”
Via: Lonely at the Top: Being a Lady Boss Without Mentors
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