Who's the boss?
In a recent MSN article - How to De-Fang a Toxic Boss - one can't help but notice that the accompanying art (above) seems to be sending a pretty gendered message. Boss ladies sure are bitchy!
Just saying.
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well, at least they are showing women as bosses~ there was a time not to long ago, in my lifetime, when any depiction of a "boss" would have been a male,& likely with women cowering beneath him.
so
progress, but, not perfection.
I don't know. It's an article specifically about "toxic bosses." The pictures, male or female, are not going to show a boss acting nice. If they had chosen a male boss looking angry would that be gendered?
I suppose they could have covered their bases and used a male boss in one picture and a female in the other. I'm just not seeing this as sending a specific message against females.
Many of their other articles that have been about boss relations have had male pictures. Why is it only the one about "toxic" bosses that show women?
and that uses two pictures of women, instead of multiple genders.
I think that in a society where male is unmarked and female is marked, whenever there's a woman being shown you have to look at WHY that is.
The default human in the US as presented by articles, books, movies, etc is a male WASP
To me, it looks suspiciously like:
a) if a woman is a boss, she is probably bitchy
b) women bosses can and should be put in their place
c) male bosses are ok as they are, don't question their management tactics or personality because they are supposed to be like that.
Classic fear of female bosses and assertive women!
I'd rather I was wrong, though. I'd rather see something positive or neutral in it.
Well, the article does use both male and female bosses as examples in the text. I'm not sure I think the accompanying stock photography says it all. Graphic designers just do a search on a stock photography website when putting something together like this. Perhaps these images are were the first to come up in the search, which says more about the stock photography site than the author.
I only saw one male boss example in the text. Are you seeing more?
There's one boss of each gender in the text, with 1 her, 3 hims, 2 hes and 1 she in the text, plus one male name, one female name. Deconstruct it how you will, but the text is either balanced or tilted towards representing male bosses.
It's pretty unlikely the images and text come from the same person, so comparing them may be apples/oranges.
The author uses male pronouns about the same number of times as using gender neutral pronouns and "him or her" combined. That's why I'm wondering why the photo is of a woman when the author talks about men for most of the article.
What I think is particularly interesting is that both the women are quite young.
So, your boss is both female AND younger than you...luckily for you, your irritation with her stems from her "toxic" management style. *phew* Avoided that hard self-examination!
.... I think I'm becoming too cynical about office dynamics.
Well, I found the stock image, and it's titled: "Bossy Woman."
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-5805078-bossy-woman.php
One thing that concerns me more, Jessica:
Why does the search for "bossy women" bring up a page full of sexually provocative and physically aggressive images...
see: http://imgur.com/vEEvR.png
...when a search for "bossy men" doesn't yield a nearly similar result?
see: http://imgur.com/k6TFU.png
Why?
It's called: Inequality.
Well, it does use both male and female examples, but it irritates me that they tried to get a nasty-looking woman in the second picture as opposed to maybe a stern-looking woman crossing her arms or something.
Otherwise, I don't like the tone of the article much. It seems a bit presumptuous to try to change your boss's behavior. The first picture says "improve a rough relationship" but the article talks about trying to get them to change their methods. I feel like that's the job of one of the higher-ups, not someone whose opinion s/he might not care about anyway.
My very sexist father quit his job as a prison guard five years ago because a woman got a promotion above him and he would have to answer to her.
I've seen articles like this with screaming guys pictured. I'll grant that if you're going to have two pictures, showing two angry women doesn't look very good, but you could still lodge a different complaint if it was two men. Why aren't we talking about the fact both of these women are white? And so forth.
If you start noticing a pattern of women (or whatever group) being pictured as angry bosses, then it becomes more noteworthy. Just this... it's hard to draw any real conclusions from it.
Angry Boss #2 (the blonde one) looks more like she's constipated. Maybe she should try some of that laxative yogurt.
Haha. I thought these were pictures of women giving their toxic bosses what for.
Sounds like self-reflection. If you see an angry woman and you think "bitch", that means the patriarchy got to you, even if you are a feminist. Maybe it's time for a vacation somewhere away from civilization.