Reply to Women - how do you deal with a female supervisor who is jealous of/intimidated by you?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op I've been in your shoes, with coworkers telling me that a more senior woman felt threatened by me. She was 20 years older than me and had always been the closest to the even older male boss. Soon after I was hired he kept coming to me for ideas instead of her. We had different expertise, but mine was more closely aligned to that of the big boss and hers was more in admin.

The hardest part was that we were leading up different teams, and I needed her collaboration at the end of my projects to make them successful. I think I stayed in that toxic environment for far too long, and it may have hurt my career. One time after she literally screamed at me in public, I went to big boss to say that this was unacceptable. He sighed and said yeah she's a pain in the rear. I'll talk to her. But all that did was make everything more passive aggressive. Big boss relied on her too much to make a change, even though she alienated me and several other young staff who would dare to speak up at meetings.

No great advice. Just commiseration.[/quote]

I've had bosses like you describe -- male bosses.  Some people are easily threatened and difficult to work with.  But I get really tired of this idea that if it happens to be a bad female boss, then it *must* be because she's unattractive and is jealous of the younger employee.

Nothing in your post suggests that it had to do with age or with sex or even with you in particular.  Even the male boss said she's a pain, which indicates that she was likely difficult with MALE employees as well.  She probably was just more difficult with the younger, less senior employees because it was easier to get away with it -- not because she was jealous of younger women.

I think that if we perpetuate this idea that difficult female bosses are difficult because they're jealous, then we're only hurting ourselves.  Male bosses can be difficult, too.  They can do all the same things OP posts and PP posts.  It has nothing to do with sex/gender.  It just has to do with difficult personalities.[/quote]

I'm the pp you quoted. I guess it's not necessarily a female thing, and I'm not particularly attractive, so I'm not working that angle. She just happened to not act this way toward males. She also seemed happy for the men in our office but seemed extra mean to me and other women after we had children. She made sure we knew the she "never had time to have children since there was so much work to do at the office." But that's a whole other story![/quote]

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