What Should I Do About My Awful, Sexist Boss?

 

The Ethicist

 

What Should I Do About My Awful, Sexist Boss?

 

 

    

Credit...Illustration by Tomi Um

 

 

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

•New York Times Magazine

•Nov. 5, 2019

 

I just finished a big project working under a male manager with whom I don’t get along. (I’m a woman in my 20s, and he’s significantly older.) We work in teams and our members spend a lot of time together — working, traveling, socializing. People who haven’t worked with this manager see him as charismatic and friendly. When he gets stressed, however, he has temper tantrums, snaps at people and digs in to defend his positions, rejecting all opposing points of view. This behavior is unpleasant, especially when it’s directed at me.

 

I’m equally troubled by a number of specific occasions when I felt his behavior clearly crossed a line. once, over drinks, he mentioned that he thinks most of the women at our company are “weird.” Another time he said, seemingly jokingly, that he thinks women are the future and should run the world, but that men should “still be in charge of entertainment — seriously, men are funnier.” After he snapped at me in front of a client, a (male) member of the client team came up to me and said, “It must be hard to be a woman on your team.” on another evening, we were hanging out as a team and watching music videos. I put on a video in which a female pop singer looks amazing and does a lot of dancing. He proceeded to cross-examine me and the other woman in the room, trying to force us to agree that the pop singer’s behavior was a step backward for feminism. We defended ourselves and asked him to read about third-wave feminism. He got upset and said he just wanted his daughter to be “like you two” and “not like her.” It was really awkward; he apologized the next day.

 

All of this has occurred within a frustrating work-life merge space (which tends to happen in my kind of work, or might just be our modern condition). Co-workers are friends, managers are mentors, our office has a beer tap in the kitchen and company leaders are casual (while also holding a lot of power). I’m upset that this guy thinks I’m a willing audience for his anti-women remarks when I’m really just trying to preserve my standing as a good worker, as well as my emotional well-being by not engaging with someone who rarely changes his mind (believe me, I’ve tried).

 

I think my company needs to know about my boss’s bad behavior, but I’m not sure what’s relevant. I know how I feel: His behavior is anti-women, and his professional development should be curtailed, or terminated, until he works to change himself. If I don’t say anything, nothing happens. If I do, I need to be precise about my accusations. What’s fair in this situation? Name Withheld

 

First, let me state the obvious: Your boss has a problem that can easily become the company’s problem. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states on its website that “it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.” What counts as harassment — in particular, the “hostile environment” kind — is something you could discuss with the human-resources staff, or even with an employment lawyer. Because it’s unlawful to penalize people for reporting discrimination, H.R. departments generally will urge their companies to avoid even the appearance of retaliation. Whether or not your boss has crossed a legal line, he’s hovering close to it. In H.R. terms, he sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

 

From an ethical perspective, too, it’s important to have clear rules to discourage an atmosphere that makes things harder for women. That you have some recourse here is a reflection of a social development: People now grasp that creating a workplace environment hostile to women — or, indeed, to historically disadvantaged minorities — is wrong. The rise of the #MeToo movement shows that existing legal remedies need to be coupled with changing norms, and norms without sanctions have no bite. We’ve come a long way; we clearly have a long way to go.

 

But it’s troubling that the remedies to the Horrible Boss problem tend to be restricted to actions that specifically relate to gender, race, religion and the like. You’re just as dismayed by other aspects of your boss’s behavior, and why shouldn’t you be? There are two wrongs here: making things worse for women, and making things bad for everybody.

 

In this country, alas, we often take the mistreatment of employees by their supervisors to be an unavoidable if regrettable feature of the workplace. While state employment laws vary, the usual default is that employers may fire employees “at will”; there is no presumption that if you do your job as required, you won’t be fired without good cause. Of course, you can try to negotiate a contract in which you and your employer agree in advance that you’ll be fired only for a specified range of causes. But without a union to bargain for you or a tradition like academic tenure, the typical employee will find it next to impossible to negotiate such a deal as an individual.

 

What we need is a new social covenant that affirms the value of decent treatment in the workplace and that punishes abusive behavior even when it isn’t discriminatory in nature. It’s a poor defense of our existing ways to point out that workers are free to leave if they’re unhappy. Even aside from the fact that noncompete clauses often curtail that freedom, why should mistreated employees have to pay the emotional and financial costs of moving? As the Business Roundtable has recently recognized, the workers of a company — as well as shareholders, suppliers and the communities where they’re located — are stakeholders. They deserve a measure of respect.

 

There’s a good chance that the H.R. folks could persuade your boss to keep his ridiculous opinions about women to himself. But can they persuade him to be less of a jerk? What makes the proverbial horrible boss so horrible is the abuse of authority that his or her conduct represents. Everyone knows the difference between bosses who are simply demanding — even abrasively so — and bosses who abase, demean and humiliate employees simply because they can.

 

The #MeToo movement has, invaluably, encouraged people to think about power inequities in the workplace. Yet there’s the prospect of a larger moral movement here, and we’ll have done ourselves a disservice if we limit our concerns to conduct with a sexual (or otherwise discriminatory) valence. Most of us spend an enormous proportion of our waking lives at work; the norms that establish what is and isn’t acceptable there are hardly a secondary consideration.

 

My mother took in five stray cats that she found in her backyard. Two years later, her grandson needed to move in with her for financial reasons. He is allergic to cats. She allowed him to reside with her but refused to give up the cats. (The cats are a symptom of her hoarding disorder.)

 

To live there, he takes daily allergy medication and weekly shots, but still suffers. His doctor says the medication would help relieve the symptoms if it were one cat, but not five. I realize it’s her home and his choice, but her decision hardly seems ethical, never mind compassionate. Name Withheld

 

As you recognize, people are not generally obliged to provide board for their straitened grandchildren, let alone relinquish their pets for the purpose. Your mother may not want her grandson as a long-term boarder; she may prefer the company of her furry and four-footed family. But you must think that, in ordinary circumstances, your mother would find these cats new homes if her grandchild’s health required it. If your diagnosis is correct, these cats aren’t just there for companionship; they’re a symptom of a psychiatric condition. Like other things your mother is presumably hoarding, they are sources of comfort, and not easily given up.

 

Hoarding can be a condition of its own, which can be alleviated with cognitive behavioral therapy — so long as one is convinced that one has the condition. It can also be a symptom of anxiety or depression, which may be treatable. (Or, alas, a symptom of age-related dementia, which typically isn’t.) Although your mother would be acting compassionately if she cut down her cat colony for the sake of her grandson’s health, she may simply not be able to do that while she’s ill. Focusing on making her well may get her to the point where she can do what’s best for herself as well as for her grandchild.