In the mid-2000s I worked for a few years at a large 3-letter government agency. Large as in 40,000+ employees.

They were going through a time of transition. Lots of old guard, boomer types were retiring, and huge numbers of new Millennials coming on board. This agency spent a lot of time studying the workplace, interviewing employees, etc., to try to create effective management practices. The report was huge and long (and classified), but I've never forgotten some of the takeaways.

One of the main takeaways is that Millennials have short attention spans. They want to be doing a lot of different tasks, and they feel they are most effective when they are multitasking--meetings, email, working on their primary project, keeping up with team leader on IM, researching, etc. They want to do it all, every day. The study found that, objectively, the work product coming out of those who THOUGHT they were the best multitaskers was the worst quality. That is, those people who thought they were doing a great job because they also seemed busy, were really doing a shit job.

Anyway, the most interesting thing to me had to do with a large study of managers. This agency, as with just about every other agency and business, was in the midst of a big push to train and hire more female managers. I doubt anything changed after this study, but the results of an agency-wide survey were pretty shocking.

Men didn't really care if their boss was a man or a woman.

Women, by a large percentage (something like 70-30), preferred having a male boss. There were many reasons given, but the most common was a variation of "My boss is a bitch to me and nice to my coworkers." Women managers reported that they struggled with either being the "mom" boss or the "bitch" boss, with nothing else possible. Employee conflicts that got escalated up to HR or management were most common between female bosses and female employees.

For what it's worth, I had a female boss, and she was one of the best bosses I ever had. She was also very much the "mom" style of boss.

This was the first time I heard of the "Queen Bee syndrome," and while I'm not sure it has it entirely right, I think there's something to it.

I just wasted 20 mintues of my fucking live going down the Twitter rabbit hole reading about this Jennifer Scheurle / Noni Ochs whatever rabbit hole. I think Jennifer is a loathsome person, but I still have no idea of what she's actually accused of doing. All of the accusations are vague milquetoast bullcrap.

"grooming" "lovebombing" "tried to isolate me from my friends" "I think she was jealous" "She claimed she wanted to lift up other women, but really she was happy with their success as long as they climb above her." "She played the victim and appealed to some of my friends, damaging those relationships with lies." "Significantly impacted my mental health"

So what the fuck did she actually do?

Multiple other women (most with pronouns, fat advocacy statements, disability statements, mental health statements, and statements of bisexuality) have entered the conversation on twitter with similar shot complaints.

One who comes up a bunch (twitter nobody, fat advocate and disabled):

"I worked my ass off WHILE PREGNANT and got put on BED REST because she was ABUSIVE and this lady didn’t even PAY ME but sure, I SCAMMED YOU. @jeanleggett you are a coward"

"I’ve worked in tech and games for 7 years, every single one of my bosses was abusive, controlling, manipulative. @jeanleggett was worse - she pretended to be different, that she understood. Just a different manipulation tactic. She used me until I literally almost died from it."

It's a damn shame that "toxic masculinity" has entered culture the way it has, because you want to see toxicity, BEHOLD TOXIC FEMININITY.