Are Professional Women Managers Sabotaging Those Who Follow?

A post at Legal Blog Watch asks whether women lawyers are their own worst enemies in the workplace.

The post notes a recent international study that found professional women do less than men to draw attention to their accomplishments. Those who do manage to crack the glass ceiling tend to "take the ladder with them" and sometimes even sabotage other women seeking promotion, according to a summary of the study by Reuters.

Legal Blog Watch notes that law firms weren’t specifically studied, but said the conclusions could be applied across the board.

The researcher who conducted the study, Shannon Goodson, said findings about women failing to help others were derived primarily from U.S. research. She found that women executives may not be as supportive of female staff. "This led many women in the study to actually prefer male managers to female managers, claiming men are more consistent and fair-minded than women," she said in a statement issued to Reuters.

That finding is echoed in an ABA Journal Web-based survey of 1,400 women lawyers. Respondents under age 40 who said gender made a difference in the workplace also expressed a preference for male managers.

Among female lawyers under 40 who thought gender matters, 93 percent said female bosses were more demanding than males. A majority said male supervisors give better direction (58 percent), give more constructive criticism (56 percent) and are better at keeping confidential information private (64 percent).

Experts told the Journal the result may be due to generational tension. They said younger female lawyers often don’t want to make the same personal sacrifices as their older counterparts. Senior women, on the other hand, don’t understand the mindset of the younger lawyers.