I was raised to treat men and women totally equally, and I do.
I’ve had about equal number of female bosses vs male bosses over the years and have not really noticed much of a difference with rare exception when I’ve come across a manly man and girly girl. Most of them were just flat bosses who behaved about the same as their counterparts of the opposite sex.
I’ve also noticed that more often than not I end up with more females on my staff than the m/f ratio within the company would suggest. I’ve often wondered if that was by chance or if there is something going on that I’m not noticing. It could be (a) mgt has noticed that I treat all equally and help direct females my way, or (b) perhaps the employees have noticed and have come my way because of it. Or perhaps it is chance. I’ll never know.
Likewise away from work I treat people the same and our set of friends don’t really include any manly men or girly girls…we tend to gravitate people who treat people as people.
As much as I’m not for affirmative action (it does exactly what I’ve been taught not to do – it treats people differently) I do feel it is high time we have a female at the top of our government. There are as many good female candidates as there are men, and I’d like to see that glass ceiling (a term I dislike but it fits) broken.
The one and only female boss that I felt favored females, her and I had a long talk about it. She ended up agreeing with me that she did, and made a genuine effort to be more impartial in decisions. I can respect that. I remember she even laughed when I explained how it is unacceptable to be biased toward either males or females in all aspects of life save one – because if we were unbiased in all aspects we’d all be bisexuals.
