#GIRLBOSS | Photo by Daniel Peckham via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1yrQ0xp)
Earlier today, a friend of mine alerted me to an article published by the good folks at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. They are, as you might have guessed, an organization devoted to promoting complementarianism, the idea that men and women are meant to play different roles according to their genders.
This article is well-intentioned but incredibly tone deaf. It falls prey to the (frankly weird) idea that women are such foreign creatures that men need them to be decoded. The author gives some good advice (pray for your female bosses; honor her with high praise) that is so generically helpful as to not require a gendered pronoun. He also says some really terrible stuff, like “Regardless of whether your boss is an Esther or a Jezebel, your responsibility is to work hard for her,” as if Esther or Jezebel are the only two categories that female bosses can fall into?
For the love of God, women are just people. We’re not wizards or unicorns or changelings, and you don’t need to parse us. I really do appreciate that the author didn’t take issue with female bosses (as some conservative Christians do), but this kind of rhetoric is (perhaps unintentionally) insulting. It insinuates that women are somehow different enough from men in the workplace that their very being requires explanation, and lines like this are just odd: “Having a female boss is no different than having a king, a master, a mother, and a sister. In fact, it’s precisely like having all of those wrapped into one.”
No, it’s not. If you need someone to tell you a woman is like a mother or a sister at work in order to treat her with the respect a boss deserves, you have bigger issues than can be solved in one blog post. Having a female boss is no different than having a male boss, though, because they are your boss. They give you your assignments and have expectations for you and if you want to pray for them or think about how to honor them, fantastic. Do that like you would do with any person. Which, you know, women are.