Survey sheds new light on male bosses and trust

(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Last month the folks at Mozy released a survey about how we're working more and more outside of business hours. Yesterday I received a follow up email from them where they informed me about another interesting data point from their survey: Men are more likely than women to believe that their employees are working remotely.

The level of difference varied among countries, and the survey was small enough that I wouldn't run out and write a whole book on this phenomenon, but it does make me wonder: Why is there a big difference?

I'm a huge fan of Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE), where people are recognized and rewarded for the end product, rather than the number of hours spent slaving away. (Recognizing, of course, that there is value in failed projects as well as successful ones, but that's a topic for another day.) If employees are where you cannot physically see them, you must rely more on ROWE principles, because even if you require them to track their time in 15 minute increments, you can't really tell what they were doing in those particular 15 minutes. (Well, with the exception of someone who installs computer monitoring software so you can track every mouse click of your employees.)

Logically, you would think that since women tend to worry more about flexibility then men do, if you wanted a flexible schedule, off site work capabilities, and the trust that you would get your work done regardless of what you were doing right this minute, you'd want to look for a female boss.

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So, why isn't this true?

Is everyone projecting their own work ethics on their employees? Among men and women who work full time (defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as 35 hours per week or more), women average 7.8 hours per day in contrast to men, who average 8.3 hours per day. Perhaps because women work fewer hours, they assume their employees aren't working when they aren't being watched. And by the same token, men know they are working more than the minimum and assume their employees are too.

Maybe it has to do precisely with the fact that women do want more flexibility, so if they have to be in the office, you should be too? 

Honestly, I don't know what the reason behind the difference is. I do know that people (both male and female)  have long had preferences for male bosses. A September 2011 Gallup poll said that 32 percent of people preferred a male boss to 22 percent who preferred a female boss, with everyone else not expressing a preference.

The most fascinating aspect of this, is that this is the smallest difference Gallup has ever recorded. The greatest difference was when they first asked the question, back in 1953, when 66 percent of those surveyed preferred a male boss, while only 5 percent preferred a female  boss. That seems understandable from way back then, but the current difference still indicates that, overall, people perceive differences in management based on gender.

Have your female bosses shown a lack of flexibility? What about your male bosses? Do you have a preference? If you wanted flexibility and a boss that trusted you, would the gender of the boss sway your decision to accept or reject a job offer?

[BFNZ]

It's probably because women multi-task and few of us can work from home without putting out the washing, emptying the dishwasher and pulling a few weeds here and there. The only one of our all-female team who works remotely is a woman who has a house-husband.
We often discuss how we could never work from home because we'd be distracted by at-home things.
Meanwhile Men wuldn't ever consider running the vaccuum cleaner around while the jug boils, so why would they think women would?

[Faxon100]

This survey covered one issue which is not sufficient to determine trust in general. What was the percentage difference between men and women bosses in the USA? That info was left out of the article.

Women still have more issues with people respecting their authority. Perhaps that impacts "trust" when a worker is off-site. I have witnessed teams mutiny and dis women bosses much more often than they do men bosses. So it may be the acceptance of their leadership and authority a woman does not trust, having witnessed workers treat men bosses better.

Your "projection" theory of a lower work ethic is insulting to women, as is your idea that "if I have to be here, so should you". Sure, there are nasty folks of both sexes, but as a theory of behavior for an entire gender? Yuk. When a women gets a supervisory position, she knows the deck is stacked against her- people prefer male bosses, right? I believe that when bosses are confident they can measure results, more will approve off-site hours.

By the way, why has the percentage of people preferring men bosses fallen so much in the last few decades? Because more people have had both men and women bosses and discovered some are good and some are
not, of both sexes. Eventually the "no preference" answer will overwhelm the gender preference answers.

[lelnet]

I haven't really noticed a strong correlation. I mean yes, the worst boss I've ever had was a woman, and the best was (is, actually) a man. But the second-worst was also a man, and while I'm not 100% sure where I'd rank them precisely, there are two other women I'd put in the top 5. (Although they weren't technically my direct-report supervisors, they were both managers I dealt with very extensively...quite well enough to see how skillfully they managed both their teams and those teams' overall work product.)

In my experience, most people are so bad at management that, to be a _good_ manager means you're so far outside the normal range that the traits of "normal" persons of your sex are pretty much irrelevant to you as an individual. I'm much more concerned with working for the sort of organization that makes a practice of finding and nurturing the rare folks with exceptional skill at managing teams, than I am with whether the boss of the moment has a Y chromosome or two Xes.