Call out toxic femininity in workplace

An angry woman yelling.

Koome Gitobu, a former presenter at Capital FM, recently tweeted about how much he suffered at the hands of a popular radio presenter who was his boss at the time.

Another social media user, Brayo, shared his experience with a company he worked in. Over 100 male employees hired on contract were fired when a female boss took over the Human Resource Department. 

Brayo said the boss would occasionally threaten the employees by telling them they should not “try” her because she was on her periods. 

Another user, Jazleen, shared her ordeal of getting fired by her boss, Kate, who was famous for having a quick temper. After nine months working as an analyst in the consumer-goods industry, Jazleen could no longer stand seeing Kate’s angry, thick red scribbles marking up her work. 

“It felt demeaning,” she says. So she wrote Kate an email requesting her to offer feedback differently — “It was a very professional email,” she says.

The morning after she hit send, Jazleen found herself sitting across Kate in a conference room, and Kate screaming at her and the company’s Managing Director and CEO. “Are you telling me you’re not going to terminate her contract?” she yelled before storming off. Cooler heads triumphed, and Jazleen kept her job.

This wasn’t the first time Jazleen had experienced Kate’s anger, “It felt like she was constantly 

bent on finding things I was doing wrong, and I was getting frustrated,” Jazleen recalls.

Weeks later, Kate finally got her way when Jazleen misread her memo, and reported to work in a pair of blue jeans. Jazleen swears she wasn’t the only one casually dressed, but before long, Kate bolted into her cubicle, screaming about Jazleen’s outfit. Jazleen apologized, having erroneously thought it was “casual day,” and offered to go and change. Kate told her to leave the office for good.

Jazleen left, but along with the agony of being fired came the subtle tinge that she’d never wish to work for a woman again because this wasn’t the first time she’d worked for an unreasonable supervisor who was also female. “A part of me is scared to work under another woman boss because I’ve had two unpleasant incidents back to back,” Jazleen says. 

“Without an in-depth knowledge of their backgrounds, their gender was the only readily obvious pattern I could discern.”

We’ve talked about toxic masculinity, but what about toxic femininity in the workplace? Experts have categorized toxic femininity under three archetypal roles in the workplace, also known as the ‘Drama Triangle.’ 

First, the Persecutor, who aggressively dismisses and chastises colleagues. Second, the rescuer, who takes away employees’ autonomy under the veil of caring for them. Lastly, there’s the victim, who controls from a position of low self-esteem with passive aggression.

These traits may manifest as an overbearing female leader who constantly harasses her subordinates or refuses to give a key project to a female colleague to ensure she doesn’t have too much work, which may appear as a well-intentioned decision, but only deters a colleague’s career-advancing opportunities in the long term.