Why women bosses get labelled ‘difficult’

At almost every event, we’re pulled aside by a Powrsuiter, who in a hushed, embarrassed tone admits, “My worst manager was actually a woman”.

Don’t worry, you’re not handing in your Feminist Card by acknowledging that women aren’t always perfect – turns out, we’re just as diverse and nuanced as everyone else. There are 3 billion different approaches to ‘leading like a woman’, and some of them are going to be substandard. 

But are women managers really more toxic? This week, we became curious about some of the factors that make the Feared Female Boss such a common archetype – and what we can do about it.

B*tiches, bias and statistics

Google this topic, and you might be depressed by the results. Between 1953 and 2017, Gallup polls consistently found that we are all more likely to prefer a male boss. For many of those years, women were more likely than men to want one.

These stats tell an interesting story, not about managers, but about us. When people express a preference for one gender over another, they’re revealing an unconscious belief. In a world free of bias, we’d all spit out our coffee at the ridiculousness of the question: The gender of our boss is irrelevant – it’s their capability that matters.

Action: Ask yourself how your lived experiences have coloured your perceptions about male and female managers. Be honest… Do you think gender impacts abilities?

The devil wears double standards

We don’t live in utopia; we live here, and our expectations have been shaped by centuries of social conditioning. While a lot has changed, recent studies about managers find that we still subscribe to strongly gendered stereotypes about managers. We expect men to be decisive risk-takers and women to be collaborative empaths.

Why does this matter? Because it’s important to challenge our own implicit biases. If you expect a male manager to be direct and decisive, you won’t be horrified when they are. But if you unconsciously believe women should be kind and caring, then you get a very different manager… Well, it’ll be far more confronting.

Action: Check your bias. If a man were to behave the same way, would you feel any different?

Meaning, not mean girls

If you, like us, grew up on a diet of romcoms, you’d know that Hollywood has traditionally had two roles for women: The ditz or the b*tch. We all love a chaotically adorable Mindy Lahiri, Elle Woods or Cher Horowitz… And we love to hate a Miranda Priestley.

The movies make the distinction all too clear: You’re with us, or against us. You’re likeable or cold. You’re messy or ruthless. There’s no such thing as a woman who makes it to the top without stamping on the pile of women she’s climbed over to get there.  

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it – it ruins our 90s faves. It also showcases a very human trait: our tendency to assume intent. The fastest way to escalate a conflict is to create fiction around a fact, telling yourself a story about why someone behaved the way they did. It may feel better to conjure up a Villain, but that’ll make it much harder to find a more productive path forward.

Action: Stick to the facts. If you have a poor interaction or difficult dynamic, focus on behaviour – you only know what they did; you don’t know why. For example, “Miranda gave me blunt, tough feedback without any niceties” vs “Miranda enjoys cutting me down to size.” 

The parent trap

We all want to make life easy for the people who come behind us… In theory. But reality hits different. Most parents work their butts off to provide a better life for their children, only to find themselves frustrated by how their children behave as a result. If you have ever heard yourself say ‘back in my day, ’ you know what we mean.

We suspect the same goes for our careers. If your experience of success has involved immense sacrifice and struggle, it’s understandably frustrating to manage others who expect the same outcome without the same inputs.

Is it the right attitude? It doesn’t matter. Everyone is entitled to feel their feelings. What we’re all responsible for, however, is how we act on them. 

It’s not ok for your manager to punish you for the challenges they faced, but if you feel like a proverbial punching bag, you can still claw back some control through the power of curiosity.

Action: Ask your manager what success looks like for them and what they’d like to see from you. You might be surprised by their response, you may not. Either way, you’ll know you stepped up and confronted a difficult dynamic head-on – what a powr move.

Empathy goes both ways

We can’t find any research that indicates a prevalence of bad women bosses, but we know anecdotally, it’s a thing.

The good news is that the trends are pointing in the right direction – most people in 2025 couldn’t care less about the gender of their manager. Maybe the increased visibility of women in senior positions has challenged our own biases. Maybe women have become more comfortable embracing our own leadership styles, instead of putting on a ‘masculine persona’. It’s probably a little of both.

Empathy is often considered a ‘soft skill’, associated with kindness and compassion. But it’s not soft – it’s bloody hard to find middle ground with someone who is making your life miserable. If you confess that your worst manager was a woman, your experience is real. Identifying the underlying cause, though? You may find it a little more murky. 

We know that women traditionally had a very good reason to compete – there was only room for one at the top. These days, there’s space for all of us – and the way we can protect and grow that space is by working together – even if we don’t always like each other.