Men rule — at least in workplace attitudes

“In our society, leadership has been coded as masculine,” says Deborah M. Kolb, the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership at the Simmons School of Management and author of "Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating the Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success." “To be a leader you have to be decisive and take charge. That fits fine for men, but when women do it they get labeled.”

Kolb doesn’t think people’s negative attitudes about women have anything to do with their abilities. She points to many surveys that show women are on par with men when it comes to leadership attributes. Unfortunately, she adds, in most surveys, including ours, women are not seen as having the same leadership potential as men.

One of the reasons women might not be getting their leadership props is because there are still so few women in high level positions throughout the work world. “Familiarity is a powerful force,” says Karissa Thacker, a management psychologist and president of Strategic Performance Solutions Inc.  “We are much more familiar with men in leadership roles.  The unknown scares all of us regardless of gender."

Almost any woman leader has a story to tell about how she wasn’t always taken seriously, even as they reached the pinnacles of their careers.

Just a few weeks ago, Kathleen Waldron, president of Baruch College at the City University of New York, says she was in front of a group of people ready to tell them about a generous financial gift the college had received.

“I said to the assembled crowd that ‘I have an announcement to make,’ and someone yelled out, ‘You're pregnant!’ This is 2007 and I’m 58 years old,” she added incredulously. “I think people take liberties with women leaders that they won’t with men.”

Waldron, who worked in corporate America for 15 years, says the main obstacle she faced when dealing with men and women who had never worked for a female boss was that her employees weren’t sure she was going to be powerful enough to help them in their careers.

The numbers in our survey bear that out.

Among those polled a greater number said they were very confident they could rise through the ranks if they had a male boss, compared with those who had female bosses.

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, said that finding was easily explainable by the fact the women have been historically under-represented in the upper echelons of management, so men are more likely to be "the ones in power who can influence careers."

He said board members share that historical bias, a fact that "sometimes keeps women from advancing to the top job."

"I think women are every bit as good if not better bosses than men," he said.

There are some glimmers of hope.  About 54 percent of those polled in our survey said they didn’t care if their boss was a man or a woman. And when individuals actually had experience working for a female boss, their preference for a women leader went up slightly. Younger workers 18 to 29 appeared to have a higher preference for female chiefs than those 30 and up, possibly pointing to a generational change.

Change also will come if women become better advocates for each other, says Liz Cornish, author of "Hit the Ground Running: The Woman's Guide to Success for the First 100 Days on the Job," who wasn’t surprised at the many women in our survey who were critical of female bosses.

“I think that women, part of our DNA, is we have an inner critic,” Cornish says. “When we see other women be successful it causes us to feel even worse of our inability to rise to our own potential. Therefore we want to bring that other person back down to our level.”

But the bottom line is it’s not just about women playing nice. It’s about general attitudes of women as chieftains throughout the population, and those attitudes won’t die easily, says Brendan Burnett-Stohner, a vice chairman for Christian & Timbers, global executive recruitment firm.

Even women who have risen to unprecedented career heights end up with big targets on their heads, she says.  Hewlett-Packard's former CEO Carly Fiorina "is a prime example of a woman that got sabotaged,” she says. “I imagine the board got tired of her talking back to them and said, ‘Let's find someone who can understand us and uses sports analogies.’ ”

With all these obstacles, it’s important to look at how the few women that have made it to the top were able to navigate the bumpy path. I interviewed many high-level executive women for my book "From the Sandbox to the Corner Office," and the one theme among all of them was they didn’t let naysayers stand in their way.

Fran Keeth, the CEO of Shell Chemical, told me she faced the good ol’ boys network, but she kept hammering away. Her plan was to do the best job she could and do it with a persistent smile. While she admittedly gritted her teeth at times when men didn’t take her seriously and excluded her from conversations. “It took some doing to get myself accepted and earn my spurs. I became accepted, but I was not really one of them.”

So is there any hope for Hillary?

One quote from a male that took our survey points to an uphill battle:

“As liberated as I consider myself to be, I think I’d have a problem taking orders from a woman.”

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