Father figure? Perhaps he's hen-pecked
- Men's attitudes to female colleagues depends on their wives and daughters
- A boss with a stay-at-home wife is likely pass up a women for a promotion
Are you a working woman who thinks you're overdue a pay rise? Are you frustrated that a long-deserved promotion continues to elude you?
If your boss is male, there may be factors thwarting your career progression that have nothing whatsoever to do with your ability and everything to do with his personal life.
It may not matter if you've brought in more business than your peers, single-handedly turned round your company's fortunes or even invented a cure for cancer. The most important factor may be whether your boss's firstborn happens to be a girl rather than a boy, or whether his wife is a stay-at-home mother.
That's according to a groundbreaking piece of new research, which shows that men see female colleagues through a lens defined by the nature of their close relationships with women in their private lives.
For example, if his eldest child is female, a male boss will pay his staff more, give women the biggest raises and be more likely to treat male and female colleagues as equals. Conversely, he will pay his female and male employees less (and himself more) after having sons.
If he has sisters, a male boss is more likely to cling more to traditional gender roles and believe a woman's place is in the home.
This is also true if his wife happens to be a stay-at-home mum: in which case his world view, albeit unconscious, is that working women are less competent and female-run organisations less effective.
This disapproval means he is less likely to promote qualified female employees.
It's a shock. No matter what key client accounts you bring in or how long and hard you work, the fact your boss's wife spends her days volunteering for the school cake sale committee or honing her abs at the gym may make you less competent in his eyes.
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