Our readers know that occasionally, I’ll pass along a video from Rich Cooper, the Canadian dating coach, author and manosphere pundit. Cooper tends to be somewhat controversial but his takes are always interesting and they tend to stoke discussions on social media when we share them from this site. So with things beginning to wind down as Christmas is only a week away, I figured this was a good opportunity to do that again.
And this video from Cooper is bound to generate some buzz. Almost certainly it’ll irritate some of you.
He’s talking here about a message he got from one of his viewers, a middle-aged guy who says he’s nine years away from retirement in a job with a large organization – whether it’s a corporate firm or some sort of governmental bureaucracy I’m not sure – and he’s rapidly approaching burnout status. The reason? He’s stuck with a female supervisor who lets emotion cloud her management and she’s utterly incompetent and chaotic as a result.
Cooper launches into a 10-minute examination of this which our female readers might or might not be in agreement with.
I’m going to put myself square in the middle of this debate.
I’m fortunate enough to make a living being my own boss, and I’ve been able to do that for most of my time in the working world. That having been said, while I was in school and in the few years between doing Purple & Gold Magazine and The Hayride I was somebody else’s employee. And to an extent, in my work at The American Spectator there’s a boss and I’m not him.
Or her, because Melissa Mackenzie is the publisher at the American Spectator.
She’s not the first female boss I’ve had. She’s the third.
My relationship with Melissa isn’t really all that hierarchical, though. I’m a senior editor over there, but really I’m a columnist and she and I co-host the Spectacle, which is the main (I guess) podcast that the American Spectator produces. I don’t have any administrative responsibilities, I’ve only been to the office a couple of times and I’m not even on the staff calls. In other words, Melissa doesn’t really feel like the boss; everything we do is a lot more collaborative than hierarchical. We’ll drive that podcast more or less equally, and I can’t remember the last time I sent up a column or an idea for one that got shot down.
So I don’t know if Melissa is a counterexample to what Cooper is talking about, or if she doesn’t count because of how that relationship is structured, or if I don’t count because I’m more of a ringer than a real employee.
But like I said, she’s the third female boss I’ve had, and the first two were in actual office environments.
And the last one was great. She was really friendly, I never really saw a whole lot of drama out of her that affected me (there was a ton of drama in that office, because it was mostly women in there and they couldn’t stop fighting among each other for two seconds, and Ann had to referee that garbage non-stop), and we got along pretty well because I was reasonably effective in my job without a great deal of supervision. It didn’t help that Obama had just taken office and was contemplating policies that would have utterly wrecked the company’s business, and shortly thereafter it merged with a big national firm which induced me to strike out on my own as the publisher of this site, but I didn’t leave because she was a bad boss. I liked her. Had things stayed stable I could have worked under her happily for a while.
So I’d say that was a counterexample.
The female boss before that? Exactly what Cooper is talking about in that clip.
Nonstop chaos. Interrogations and suspicions of everyone in the office. Rampant paranoia. Playing coworkers off against each other in an effort to manufacture spies and rivalries. Always setting someone up as a scapegoat for her failures.
She had the job as a supervisor not because of DEI, per se, but because of a connection to somebody higher up. That functioned like a DEI hire in that nobody would hold her accountable for the messes she made. And she made everybody absolutely miserable in that office. The turnover was almost comic.
So I’ll say that I neither fully agree nor disagree with what Cooper is saying about female bosses. But what I can say is this: while doing what I do is far from the most lucrative pursuit I could have chosen, one reason I have no regrets about being a web publisher and pundit is that I’m not in a corporate environment.
That makes me happier than I can describe, having spent a few years as a corporate America wage slave.
I don’t know how you guys stuck in that environment handle it.
For people working in family-owned or closely-held companies, it’s a little better, because everything is necessarily mission-focused. Even a rich family-owned business can still go belly up, and so doing things efficiently and effectively is understood as a necessary part of survival. But when it’s a publicly-traded megacorporation, and almost no matter how poorly run it is there’s no real risk of it going under, my experience is it’s like living and working in a funhouse mirror.
Mergers are nonstop, and when there aren’t mergers there are reorganizations. Every six months to a year the suits roll out some grand redesign of the business operations, which throws everyone’s life into chaos. Just getting good at your job and doing it well so you can finish your work successfully and go home to an actual life? No, no.
And in those kinds of environments, which are generally created by the human resources departments at these corporations (because the HR department is the repository for the political radicals and woke cultists that Corporate America mistakenly believes are a resource which should be mined for talent), you’ll find fertile ground for female bosses of the DEI stripe.
In my experience, that’s where you get the bad girlbosses. It isn’t even really their fault. The company creates chaos by turning over its business practices, and then it puts semi-qualified female DEI hires in charge of managing that artificial chaos. They can’t control things, because they’re largely out of control anyway, and so they spend their time and energy trying to make it look like they’re in control.
Fake-it-til-you-make-it management style leads to utter misery for non-managers. For everybody, really.
And when the company is just a division of some larger entity owned and operated thousands of miles away, nobody really cares if it’s a miserable workplace anyway. If nothing works, they’ll just buy a more successful company in that sector, merge this one with that and fire everybody. Or they’ll all eventually get jobs somewhere else, because everybody has resumes updated and ready to send out.
To me, that’s hell. I got a taste of it and I’ll do just about anything to never go back. If that’s the environment you have to work in, you have my sympathies.
And I wonder whether the unfavorable perception of female bosses isn’t a product of the fact that you get disproportionately more of them in those dysfunctional corporate environments because of DEI (smaller firms engage in a lot less of that, plus their motivations and accountability levels are a lot different).
But as I said, I’m only talking from a few years’ experience here.
Would I rather have a male boss than a female boss? Probably, I guess. Would I prefer no boss? Absolutely.