Boys considered leaders; girls called bossy
Grade 9 students in the Collective Voice program at Aden Bowman Collegiate share their lives and opinions through columns. Selected columns run each Monday in The Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
There’s no doubt gender roles are slowly dissolving, but there’s one “B” word that continually inhibits girls and women from becoming leaders: bossy.
Being labelled bossy can cause girls to bite their tongues and try to fit in, or even change their ambitions and goals in life.
Just like many other girls, my peers, my sibling, and even my teachers have called me bossy. I think I’m a good leader, but growing up I constantly wasn’t as respected as a leader as my male peers were, so I often surrendered any leadership roles to one of them. Others simply wouldn’t listen to what I said or acknowledge me as a legitimate leader, like they did for boys.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also experienced this throughout her life, so she started the Ban Bossy campaign. It claims the word “bossy” disproportionately describes young women, damaging their confidence and desire to pursue leadership positions. We can’t expect women to grow up to lead if we discourage the very traits that get them there.
Girls are encouraged to be quiet and submissive, and when they break these gender norms, they’re often criticized, disliked and called bossy. This sends the message to girls that they shouldn’t raise their hand or speak up.
By middle school, girls are already significantly less interested in leadership than boys. By high school, girls’ self esteem drops 3.5 times more than boys, according to the Ban Bossy campaign.
Unfortunately, these trends continue into adulthood and can often be recognized in the workplace. When a woman becomes the leader, begins to do her job and tells people what to do, she is often immediately degraded for doing the same thing men would do in a position that men are usually in.
Women are constantly penalized for asserting themselves, because many people don’t realize that bossiness and female leadership are not the same thing. We should be promoting women’s empowerment, instead of their deterioration.
I recently asked some of my peers if they’ve ever been called bossy. All of the girls I asked said yes, as well as some of the guys. Both men and women are called bossy in the workplace. When you look at only behaviours, without the bossy label, men are just as likely as women to demonstrate the characteristics of a “bossy” person.
However, the difference is that the label “bossy” is used to refer to women at least three times more frequently than to men, according to research by Nic Subtirelu, a PhD student at Georgia State University.
Women are expected to be nurturing, collaborative and kind, while men are expected to be assertive, commanding and direct. People are often taken aback when women show the same strong leadership traits as men often do, and they then brand those women as bossy.
Even though the Ban Bossy campaign has many supporters, there are still many people who dislike what it promotes. I agree with the Ban Bossy campaign, and I think instead of teaching girls to “learn to overcome adversity and suck it up,” as Margaret Wente wrote in The Globe and Mail, we should be teaching everyone to not use gender stereotypes. People need to stop discouraging girls from becoming strong leaders.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that women can say or do whatever they want with no repercussions. Regardless of gender, bossiness is a sign of bad leadership. But being bossy isn’t the same thing as being assertive.
The next time you call a woman bossy, think about whether you would say the same thing to a man.