zlacker

I hate to say it, but this kind of behavior makes sense. It's more difficult to criticize female leaders right now for a lot of reasons. The author makes good points, and there is a disparity when it comes to criticism because men have to worry about how it might be viewed. Women are people too, and most people make terrible leaders and terrible leaders will retaliate however they can. A guy who was a Director at my current company got about half a dozen people fired because they disagreed with him on a topic he was ultimately wrong about. He was able to do this because he presented himself as a visionary that would prove them all wrong. He was subsequently fired after he was shown to lack perspective and expertise in the technical field his "vision" required, but those other people still lost their jobs well before that point.

Now, imagine an equally bad female leader that is also presented as a visionary. Maybe she just gets them fired by complaining to the CTO like happened at my company, or maybe she also posts the details online and ruins their reputations. She would potentially make them unemployable, while still being ultimately wrong and a bad leader.

Now, on top of that consider that while having this opinion, I still am constantly advocating for my female colleagues because on top of all that, the tech field just doesn't have many female members. The odds of a woman being a good leader is about the same as for a male in the tech field, but there's still 10 times more men. To be clear, do to pressure and a human need for validation I would say the average female dev is better than the average male by a bit because they push themselves a little harder, but good leadership is not something that develops by working harder.

All of this makes everything to do with this topic extremely difficult to deal with. I want to provide the same level of criticism to everybody, but if I don't know you well enough I can't be sure my name won't get dragged through the mud on social media. It might not even be the woman in question who does it, and the higher the stakes for the woman, the more likely I am to get called out by a coworker who's just trying to do the right thing. The end result is still that by criticizing a female leader I risk not only my job, but my entire career and social standing. That simply isn't the case when I criticize the male version of the terrible boss, and case in point I did so in the example I provided, I just wasn't high enough up the chain for him to bother reacting to.