Most women prefer working for men

Two thirds of women prefer working for male bosses because they are better managers and less prone to moods, a study has suggested.

Published: 8:46AM BST 13 Aug 2009

Two thirds of women prefer working for male bosses because they are better managers and less prone to moods Photo: GETTY

Many female employees also like having a man in charge because they are 'more authoritative' and 'more straight-talking' than their female counterparts.

Women rated men 'tougher', 'better at delegation' and also more likely to regularly dish out praise.

And men were also hailed as being better decision-makers and having more grasp of the business overall than women do.

It also emerged four out of ten women who have female bosses believe they could do a better job than their immediate superior.

The survey results were revealed in the wake of Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman's comment that men "cannot be left to run things on their own".

On Wednesday, a spokesman for http://www.OnePoll.com, which carried out the research, said: "The results make interesting reading as there were pros and cons to both sexes.

"The research found while women are good at dealing with employees' personal issues within the office environment most felt men were better at 'steering the ship'.

"Men were also revealed to be better at having an overall vision of the direction the business was going to take over the long-term.

"But women were better at dealing with those slightly uncomfortable issues that pop up from time to time because they were felt to be better listeners than men.

"On the other hand many women felt they could do as good or even better than their female boss while only a handful said they could emulate their male manager.

"The results do paint a picture of men being a bit harder and more driven, but that isn't always the kind of approach which is needed.

"So perhaps Harriet Harman was right when she said there should be a management team made up of men and women to balance things up."

The study of 2,000 women in full or part-time employment asked whether they would prefer to have a man or woman as their immediate line manager.

Some 63 per cent expressed a male preference, while only 37 per cent opted for a woman.

The results also revealed one in six women who currently work under a woman is experiencing 'underlying tension' between themselves and their boss.

A host of reasons emerged for the male preference including a feeling female managers felt threatened by other women at work.

A failure to leave personal problems at home was also cited.

Other issues included a lack of flexibility over leaving early or starting late.

But despite the worries, female bosses did score highly on the more personal side of the manager/employee relationship.

They were revealed as being approachable, more trustworthy and more compassionate in a member of staff's time of need.

The research also revealed 66 per cent of women are currently happy in their job amid the recession, while only one in 20 said they would be looking to change jobs in the near future.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6020123/Most-women-prefer-working-for-men.html

Why Women’s Shelters Are Hotbeds of Misandry

This is so consistant with my own views I could have written it - no wait I have many times but not quite so comprehensivly. Note this is from another country called Germany having similar dialogue over the hate factories ( I call them chop shops because that is what they do to men using indocrination tactics on their clients) known as DV shelters.

Thanks to Mark Godbey for the heads up on this artice. MJM

Essay by VON GERHARD AMENDT10. August 2009, 18:30 Uhr

According to Gerhard Amendt, Professor of Gender and Generation Research at the University of Bremen, representatives of the supposedly weaker sex are every bit as violent as their partners. The researcher concludes that women's shelters foster a devaluation of masculinity and should therefore be replaced by familiy counseling centers.

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At the very moment when the operation of women's shelters in Germany has been subjected to scientific study for the first time, the German Bundestag’s Family Affairs Committee has decided to review the question of whether women's shelters should receive funding guarantees through the German federal government. Given the political ideology of women's shelters and the ramifications of such a step, this proposal should be taken under serious review. The answers to a number of questions are still outstanding. Have the services performed in women's shelters stood the test of time? Are the shelters operated in a professional manner, and have they moved on from an ideology that views men as the perpetrators of violence and women as nonviolent? Have women’s shelters developed a professional understanding of family conflicts that enables them to extend their efforts and include all members of a violent family?

As usual, the slated funding guarantees are based on no more than the convenient statistic that "every fourth woman will become the victim of relationship violence at some time in her life." Since there is no comparable data that would apply to men, the number is poorly suited as legitimization for women's shelters. Up until now, reference was made to the role of women as victims, and funding for such institutions was automatically renewed. The effectiveness of the shelters was not monitored. At the same time, the statistic was used to popularize their work. In the pre-Christmas season of 2007, a media campaign was launched in Austria under the slogan “Verliebt. Verlobt. Verprügelt” (In Love. Engaged. Battered). The German lottery also runs public service spots pertaining to the matter. While all this has little bearing on the circumstances under which men and women actually conduct their lives, it couldn’t document more clearly a bias against men.

When women's shelters were first being opened more than 20 years ago, the object was to focus public attention on the experience of violence from a woman’s perspective. The founding of the Bremen women's shelter can be traced to just such an intention on the part of the author, who at the time endorsed the risky attempt to provide political lay self-help. This coincided with the spirit of the times and its sensitivity to violence as an aspect of women’s lives – although it did not extend to men. In those days, the author, too, was unwilling to imagine that women's shelters would make a substantial contribution to a hostile polarization of society into violent men as opposed to irenic women, thereby creating many years of stagnation in gender discourse.

IGNORANT FAMILY POLICIES

Today, we know more than we did 25 years ago about the partnership dynamics that trigger violence. More than two hundred studies in the USA and Canada have produced findings that have added to public knowledge and increased understanding in political circles. But it is precisely the field of family policies that offers stubborn resistance to the very essence of this research, namely, that women behave just as aggressively and violently as men, and even slightly more often. This also applies to their behavior toward their children. It is particularly conspicuous during phases of a divorce that are high in violence. All counseling agencies should be expected to help limit violence so that children, above all, do not become actively or passively involved in the violent episodes between their parents.

A major survey of divorced fathers conducted by the author in Bremen showed that violence occurs in 30 percent of all divorces, with 1,800 men reporting physical or psychological abuse by their partners. This represents a significantly higher rate of incidence than the approximately ten percent seen in relationships under everyday conditions. Within the 30 percent of divorces where violence occurred, sixty percent was initiated by the men’s ex-wives or ex-partners. Our survey findings revealed that within the most conflict laden context of an adult life, women, too, initiate violence. Only from the perspective of women’s shelters does violence emanate exclusively from men. Instead of making divorce conflicts more tractable, women’s shelters actually exacerbate them. The »every-fourth-woman« statistic is therefore being used to document the necessity of changing the Domestic Relations Law of 1998, because allegedly the sole source of danger for children during a divorce is violence stemming from their fathers. By pursuing this approach to family policy, the advocates of women’s shelters are attempting to use prejudice as a means to rescind the right of children to both of their parents.

The 60 percent of divorce-related violent incidents that are initiated by women inflict great suffering on the fathers involved. Their statements are genuine. Yet there is a difference between science and the ideologically based enemy image adopted in women’s shelters, and it lies in the evaluation of the numbers. Whereas science attempts to resolve conflict, the proponents of women’s shelters book hostility toward men as political success. Accordingly, we do not claim that women experience episodes of violence in exactly the same way that men do. To make that assertion, we would have to survey them, which we have not as yet done – and neither have the »every-fourth-woman« agitators.

We have, however, arrived at an entirely different set of conclusions. We assume that women experienced the abuse in a similar way as their partners, namely, as stemming from the man. American studies confirm this. But if both parties are mutually accusing each other of starting the violence, then what is actually true? Both statements represent subjective truths. Generally, neither of the parties is lying. Unlike during their happier times, however, both of them now feel aggrieved and are no longer able to communicate with each other verbally. They lapse into lethal silence, scream at each other, or resort to physical blows. In such cases, marriage and family counselors can help to restore the couple’s destroyed ability to communicate. Once the partners reestablish a common language, they have the option of entering into a process of reconciliation or choosing to separate with respect. They and, above all, their children do not lose their positive experiences from the past.

Women’s shelters are incapable of providing this kind of professional intervention because of their ideology: they view a man as every woman’s enemy. For them, it is a foregone conclusion that women do not engage in violent acts. According to the ideology espoused in women’s shelters, this is always a given, and mutual talks between a woman and her partner are therefore superfluous. To this end, women are politically manipulated into a victim role and men are collectively denigrated. Consequently, the residents of women’s shelters are allowed to experience themselves only as victims and not as participants in a relationship that has turned violent.

Women’s shelters represent a world where the joy of life is missing, and efforts to resolve relationship conflicts have been replaced by existential despondency or even self-hatred. Misandry appears to offer a way out. This oppressive atmosphere surely accounts for the high rate of employee turnover at women’s shelters and the dissension within work teams. It enables one to understand recent research conducted in the USA which found that women are increasingly steering clear of shelters despite the severity of their conflicts. They do not want to be forced into a world that despises men. Their own problems are burden enough.

The advocates of women’s shelters are unfazed by objections that they are compromising the ethics of the helping professions, for professionalism is not their goal. On the contrary, they self-confidently label themselves as “partisan,” which is synonymous with viewing women as victims who face sinister male powers and an indifferent public. Professional ethics have been deliberately replaced by political motives. And that is by no means selfless. It gives them a narcissistic high and a sense of moral superiority over the rest of the world. It is a mixture of elitism and pretended self-sacrifice.

In the founding years of women’s shelters, this elitism functioned as a gateway for the disparagement of existing professional organizations that were sponsored, for example, by Protestant churches, the Catholic Church, or the German state governments.

In that respect, little has changed. The proponents of women’s shelters believe that their combative, anti-patriarchal rhetoric will have a greater impact than professionally trained counselors and therapists. Most of them seem unimpressed that they are not genuinely helping those who seek counseling, because they attribute their failure to a lack of political insight on the part of the women. Their sense of mission appears to provide greater narcissistic gratification than the tough, daunting task of working with violent families who have elevated physical expression to the language of everyday life and otherwise no longer have much to say about each other.

THE FEMINIST IDEOLOGY: A HOTBED OF MISANDRY

Granted, there may be shelters that have jettisoned their ideological ballast, but even the term “women’s shelter” itself always implies the disastrous ideology of radical feminism, whereby relationships between men and women are characterized by their respective status as victim and perpetrator. According to that, women can do nothing and men are completely in charge. Thus, women's shelters perpetuate the destruction of communication within partnerships as a political project within the gender discussion.

The conclusions are obvious. The concept of ideologically based women’s shelters is no longer needed. What families with violence problems urgently need is a network of counseling centers that can provide unbiased and nondiscriminatory assistance to all of the parties involved. For family violence is systemic and psychodynamic in nature. If a woman strikes her husband, and the husband strikes his wife, then there is a high probability that they are also abusing their children. And children who have been struck, boys and girls alike, are in turn more likely as adults to strike their own children or partners. This sets the course for the reemergence of intra-family violence in the following generation. Society continuously accumulates a growing potential for violence. And mothers who do not strike their children, but instead leave the task to the children's father, are no less integral parts of the scheme of violence – as is the parent who simply remains silent in response to the entire situation.

FAMILY COUNSELING CENTERS AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Instead of women's shelters, what we need in the future are specialized counseling centers for families with unresolved violent conflicts. These would be staffed by well-trained men and women who cooperate based on professional ethical standards. They would intervene directly during violent family crises and, in extreme cases, provide a temporary safe haven for men and children and women, to the extent this has not already become unnecessary due to a personal protection order. We need family counseling centers that can step in and have an impact at the very source of the ongoing intergenerational cycle of violence. A public that is dumbfounded by the apathy of youth welfare offices and horrified by school murders and the corpses of children should approve government funding only if those who seek counseling are assured to receive effective assistance. Counseling and therapy simply must be kept free of political ideologies. The only place where this does not apply is in undemocratic societies.

Likewise, we need to initiate a new discussion at colleges and universities. Politcal correctness has given rise to a prohibition on thinking about women in terms of aggression and violence, and this must be confronted with the findings of international research.

About the Author

Gerhard Amendt is Professor of Gender and Generation Research. His most recent book, "I did not divorce my kids!" How Fathers Deal with Family Break-Ups was published in 2008. His forthcoming publication is a text book on intra-family violence. The author can be reached at amendt@uni-bremen.de or through his homepage: http://www.igg.uni-bremen.de

Translated by Philip Schmitz

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article4295642/Why-Women-s-Shelters-Are-Hotbeds-of-Misandry.html

Men, Math and Marriage

By Paul Elam

I’ve been just sitting here for 30 minutes now. My hands have been poised over my laptop, but they’re frozen. Actually they have a slight tremble, like all the keys are painted with cyanide and my fingers know it.

I have decided to do a piece offering some marital advice to men. And I know men pretty well. I might as well be doing a porn review for the readers of Ms. Magazine. But I am feeling dangerous and my fingers are starting to work, so here goes.

My first piece of advice when it comes to marriage is simple.

Don’t. And I do mean never. And, yes, that means you.

I don’t cotton much to psychobabble, so I won’t make a hypocrite of myself by putting you though it. Thankfully, it is not necessary. For it isn’t relationship dynamics that will get you. It’s math. And the numbers are scary.

First, and most of you know this, more than half of all marriages end in divorce, not counting the ones that end in murder, suicide and psychiatric facilities. But that doesn’t mean that only half of marriages are failures. There is a lot of failed marriages that don’t end up as divorces. These are people who stay married and make a hobby of hating each other like Palestinians and Israelis.

And the math on marriage isn’t near as disturbing as the numbers you will be faced with when it‘s over. The equation goes roughly something like this.

1 angry wife + 1 lawyer + 1 family court = 1 impoverished man living in a studio apartment and driving a 1981 Buick Skylark.

Numbers are sometimes ugly, but they don’t lie.

But wait, you say, I can change that equation with a pre-nup!

Yes, you can. Here are the factor weighed results.

1 angry wife + 1 lawyer + 1 family court + 1 prenuptial agreement = 1 impoverished man living in a studio apartment and driving a 1982 Buick Skylark.

Pre-nups take more time to draw up than the courts take tossing them aside.

The fact of the matter is that in modern culture men are better off downing ten shots of tequila and stumbling blindfolded through a mine field. The odds are better.

Think about it for a moment. Marriage is quite literally an investment of not only your heart, but all of your work, income and future income, especially when children are involved. Now, if an investment broker told you he had a deal in which you could invest, with mostly intangible returns, and there was more than a 50% chance that you would be wiped out and spend most of the rest of your life paying the margin call or going to jail, how much would you invest?

Well?

Oh, come on now, you might be saying. It’s not fair to reduce the institution of marriage into a financial equation. Well, yes it is. Believe me, if the woman you marry doesn’t heavily consider your income prior to saying yes, she is the infinitesimal exception. And for those of you who still think it is natural and right for a man to be the breadwinner and the head of the family, please know that would be the same head that gets lobbed off in the family court where more than half of you will end up.

And even if you don’t think, for who knows what reasons, that marriage is about money, you better believe that divorce is. Reducing holy matrimony to assets and liabilities is precisely what family courts are designed to do. And they do it with brutal efficiency. If you walk in to one of those places as a man in western culture, you will find that out in the most sobering ways imaginable.

Your experience there will leave you with a mental block. You won’t even be able to say the words “family court” again, for they will find you, shivering in the corner, mumbling incoherently about“that place.”

A lot of married men already know this. Those are the guys in the other half of the marriage statistics. You know, the group that is “successful?” Plenty of them have consulted lawyers because they wanted to escape insufferably nasty, horrifically high maintenance wives, but the more legal realities they heard, the more those banshees they were married to began to resemble June Cleaver. As soon as they coined the phrase “Take him to the cleaners,” the follow up, “cheaper to keep her,” wasn’t far behind.

Just don’t do it.

Living with a woman may be a better option, but you need to be careful with that one, too. Depending on the laws where you live, you could end up married without knowing it. So gather your facts.

Yes guys, that means go see a lawyer, one that understands men’s legal issues, before you even shack up. Do it the moment she asks if she can leave some clothes in your closet. Better yet, do it now, while you don’t have a girlfriend and can still think from the neck up. Consider the legal consult the investment of a lifetime, because it is.

And having children? Sure. Just be prepared to have every connection to those children severed when it’s over, except, of course, for the financial connection. That will be maintained at gunpoint.

So choose that Skylark carefully. You’ll be driving it for a long time.

I know that some of you are thinking, “Oh, that will never happen to me.” All I can say is that more than half of you are deluding yourselves, and the rest of you have no reliable way to know just how lucky you will be. For those who maintain that adolescent sense of invulnerability, such admonitions will fall on deaf ears. Never underestimate the power of denial.

I also know that some of you, especially some women that are reading this, are saying “Hey, wait! Not all women are like that! They are not all the same!” And you are right. But all family courts are the same. Screwed in L.A. Shafted in New York. Swindled in London. They are all the same.

Just don’t do it.

But, in the rare case you are not going to listen to me and make your own decisions, and you insist on taking that plunge, I have some suggestions on finding a suitable bride that might help with damage control down the road.

First, never finance a relationship. Only date women that pay their own way from the start. Admittedly that reduces your chances of dating, much less marriage, but there is a sound reason for it.

It leaves you with a better, if less common, class of woman. For if a woman feels that she is entitled to ride your wallet though life when she is infatuated with you, when you can do no wrong and are the most amazing man she ever met, just imagine how she will feel about your wallet when she hates the very sight of you and the sound of your voice makes her want to claw her own eyes out.

Watch her behavior and learn from it. How does she act when you disappoint her? What is her reaction to hearing the word “no,” or when you choose your way instead of her way?

If she takes it in stride and moves on, then you might have a keeper, inflection on the word might.

However, if she responds to the fact that you went golfing when she didn’t want you to by cutting you off in the bedroom for a few days, or by telling you how selfish and immature you are for having any interests that don’t revolve around her, what do you imagine she will do when she fully believes that you are the anti-Christ and are responsible for every ill in her miserable life?

And that, gentlemen, is precisely the woman you will face in a divorce. She won’t be rational or reasonable or even principled. She will be, quite literally, your mortal enemy. And she will have the full force of the state on her side.

Make that a 1971 Pinto.

And so there you have it, guys. A brief primer on the potential house of horrors we call marriage. All you need to do to have a fighting chance, though, is find a woman who makes her own money and considers it natural to pay her own way; a woman who understands that no one is the center of the universe and that meeting in the middle is the only sane path to a partnership.

In other words, just don’t do it.

Paul Elam is the editor of A Voice for Men

http://www.avoiceformen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31:men-math-and-marriage&catid=1:articles&Itemid=2