Devil Wears Prada is a hit, but that doesn’t mean it’s career news
I swore that I would not write about the Devil Wears Prada because the bad boss topic has gotten so much play lately.
But now respectable news outlets like CBS News and the Chicago Sun-Times have crossed the line for me: As an excuse to run a trailer for the Devil Wears Prada, they are going on about how women want male bosses.
News agencies are citing a poll released by Lifetime media in which 800 women were asked if they prefer a man or a woman boss. Among generation Y respondents, 31% preferred women 47% preferred men and 22% didn’t have a preference.
But the margin of error is 6%, which is so high for a poll like this that you may as well not do it. In this case, with the absurd margin of error, the results could actually be 37% of women prefer women 41% of women prefer men and 22% don’t care. Is this news? No.
But now random people on the street and on the Internet are spouting off about how to explain why women are more difficult to work for.
EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT UP!!! These are not statistics that show that women are any more difficult than men, so we don’t need to dig up reasons why that might be true.
That said, you might want to take a look at the poll results yourself. There are some interesting findings that do not relate to a movie and therefore have gone unreported. For example, women who are single like working for women and women with kids like working for men.
What I really want you to do, though, is take a look at the career pundit who talked about this poll on CBS. Her suit is totally out of control. The last time I had a top that fit like that I had to safety-pin the middle so that my breasts didn’t flop out. What is she thinking?
Everyone — even the 50% of you without breasts — when you have an important thing to do, like appear on a huge television show, have someone who is qualified give you some outfit advice.
Penelope,
I thought that this kind of sexism was over, honestly. Not since Demi Moore in Disclosure has this been so blatantly misrepresented. In my experience, it hasn’t mattered so much whether their boss is a man or a woman, as much as those underachievers believing they can manipulate men as opposed to women when they aren’t achieving the results required of them!
Are you kidding me? I’ve only worked for women and some are easy and some are difficult, just like everyone else in the world.
We haven’t come a long way, baby, if this is the discussion still on the table.
Yes, right, this is where the discussion *should* be — that it’s about the individual and not about gender. Warms my heart to know that that’s where it is on my blog :)
After a recent study of Human Departament Resource 35% of women prefers women cheef, 55% prefers men cheef, and for 10% doesn’t matter.