No absurd hypothetical today folks, and probably no poll, which means no dessert. Blame jayrey; she was screwing around with the central teleport unit, trying to clone Taye Diggs for some reason. Ask her, I don’t know the details.
I manage an inside sales call center. One of the team leaders below me, “Jennifer,” is a young woman in her first supervisory position (at least with us; I don’t have her resume memorized). Jennifer is a quite attractive if you like tall busty blondes. Which I don’t–I’m into short sylpid gingers–but I can see how other men react to her.
Which is kind of the point. In her previous positions with the company, Jennifer toed the line on the dress code. Now she’s pushing the limits. Everything she wears is technically within the code, but only just. Her skirts are extremely tight and just barely long enough; her blouses seem about a size too small and are always buttoned low; etc. These aren’t my assessments alone, by the way; my work wife has made similar comments on her attire and stated that Jennifer’s lucky she doesn’t work for her.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not planning to counsel Jennifer on her attire: partly because I am not an idiot, and partly because I don’t give a flip. My interest is that she keep her team productive and profitable, and if she does that while dressed as Jadzia Dax, that’s fine with me. But I am somewhat concerned that her attire may compromise her effectiveness as a team leader, that her employees make be distracted by her overly sexualized garb.
I could be wrong, of course. I’m frequently wrong. I never thought Bill Clinton would be president.
So here are my questions:
Have you ever worked for a person like this? If so, did his or her overly sexualized attire compromise his or her authority over subordinates, reduce your respect for him or her, or otherwise reduce his or her effectiveness? If so, how much?
Obviously “sylpid” was a typo for “sylphid.” Everybody makes typos, particularly on phones. As for it not being a word, here’s the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary:
sylphid /0ˈsɪlfɪd/ noun & adjective. L17.
[ORIGIN French sylphide, from sylphe sylph: see -id².]
► A noun. A young or small sylph. L17.
► B attrib. or as adjective. Sylphish, sylphlike. L18.
I was trying to clone Taye Diggs “for some reason”?? Are you blind, man? One look at that gorgeous hunk of maleness should tell you exactly why I wanted a clone of him for my very own. I’m getting old, honey, but I ain’t dead yet. And, to clarify, I did not break the central teleport unit. It overheated a bit (just like I did, thinking about my Taye clone) and some of the innerds are now, well, slipping. But not my fault. I’m blaming shoddy workmanship in the original manufacturer.
Now, to the OP’s question. I once worked for a youngish woman who was in her first managment role at an insurance company. I was only working there during the summer so I’m not exactly sure what all the team she managed did (I did filing). She was a buxom bottle blond, a bit on the heavy side. She wore suits every day, slim skirt and jacket, but the skirts were too tight, the jacket a shade too small, the blouse buttoned a tad too low and pulling across the bust, her high heels just a bit too tall, makeup a skosh too heavily applied. Now, I’m a tall, busty blonde (the type **Skald **doesn’t care for, which is why he is so mean to me . . . but I digress). I know how challenging it can be to find a blouse that doesn’t pull across the bust, but they are out there. Anyway, between that look and her decision to adopt a hard-ass managment style, yes, I lost respect for her.
And, as usual, Anaamika makes a valid point: how would a man dress in an overly sexy manner? Tight pants, gold jewelry, open shirt? Okay, maybe I can see that in certain settings. Yes, that would cause me to lost respect for him, too.
If I may take liberties with our flagitious Ryhmer’s premise, one might consider the question to be directed more toward behavior that over-humanizes an individual in a primal and attractive way.
Women generally seem to dig an educated but humble & approachable guy who can build a house, pack the freezer with trout and game, pay his bills, repair the cars, and go all googoo over babies and weddings. Maybe that’s your boss for the hypothetical?
As for OP: I’d have some trouble with her. Not because I’d be hot for her all the time, but because I’d wonder if she was a) immature and teasing or hunting in the employee pool, or 2) so clueless about how her actions are affecting others that she couldn’t possibly be an effective manager of people, or III) trying to create a distraction from her actual incompetence. It’d just make it hard to assess her as a boss, and quite frankly, hard to trust her. It’s quite alright to be sexy, but there are few work environments I can think of where it’s appropriate to display that particular skill.
AND…I actually do work with a couple of fashion designers/models. They are SMOKIN’ hot on their website and at public appearances, and absolutely unremarkable–I mean, not even ‘office hot’–at work. You’d never know they were anything but brilliant cogs in our machine.
For me, it’s a delicate line and so hard to describe exactly where the line is. I admire a woman who is both beautiful and intelligent. But the other side of that very fine line is a woman who is just a skoshe TOO sexy, whether it’s her clothes, makeup or behavior. In that case, yeah, I wonder what her agenda is. And as was stated before, management is a people job and you have to be politically savvy. Someone so little awareness of her impact on others demonstrates a weakness on both of those fronts.
It’s a little hard to say whether it was the attire that was the driving factor… but I did have a boss about ten years ago who dressed in miniskirts and low cut tops on a regular basis. Had she been hanging out in a singles bar, I would still have called her desperate for attention.
On the other hand, she had so many other flaws that clothing really was the least of them. For starters, you couldn’t trust a single word she said. It took employees a matter of a couple of weeks to scurry back to the proverbial water cooler to compare notes. She once put a call on speaker phone so that we could all listen to her “play a joke” on a manager at a nearby office in the same franchise.
I admit, I have lost respect for women that dress in a way that is clearly garnered to gain male attraction. I remember having a temporary job with the State and seething with frustration because I couldn’t get the job permanently because it had requirements I could not pass (at the time I did not have a bachelor’s degree) and yet my boss, who was as dumb as a rock, had a job much better than mine PLUS all of the men salivated around her all of the time because she wore tight skirts and low cut blouses and was really hot. She used her looks - she was canny in that manner - and it worked.
At this age, ten or more years later, I blame the men. Hey, it’s one thing to admire, but don’t lose your mind.
This is amusing. A boss that can do all that is apparently too much for us wimmens to handle. I don’t want a man that is going to hunt (fishing is acceptable) and please don’t go crazy over babies because I don’t either and I won’t understand you.
What would make me uncomfortable sexually in a man is if he was aggressive in his sexuality. If he came onto hot women in the office, for example, or was constantly talking about the girls he banged. A really drop-dead gorgeous guy that was also a good boss - I might feel a little fluttery for a couple of months, but I’d get over it.
I did admit to generalizing. Meant in the same spirit as I would be expected to dig on “Her skirts are extremely tight and just barely long enough; her blouses seem about a size too small and are always buttoned low; etc.”
I’ve worked with a lot of high-powered executive women and many of them were A+ types in almost every way - drive, intelligence, skill, and in a lot of cases sexiness. They worked with all of those qualities, the sexiness was part of their “power”. So, to answer the OP question directly - no, I would not lose respect, I would see it as expressing power.
I’m sure it’s judgmental of me, but overly-sexily-dressed bosses generally cause me to think some variation of “hitting the low-hanging fruit, are we?” To be scrupulously fair, I think less of anyone who is overly sexily dressed in the workplace, not just bosses.
Mind you, this is largely only true of attire that is clearly overly sexy, which can be pretty hard to specifically define. There is quite a lot of business attire that is both sexy and perfectly appropriate. That flavor of attire does not cause me to lose respect for a person.
As far as I’m concerned, I find it hard to respect anyone who comes to work in other than businesslike attire. By that, I mean clothing more appropriate for a club or the beach or lounging around the house. Too sexy, too casual, or too slobby indicate either cluelessness or unprofessionalism. You may be the best at your job, but if you won’t play the attire game, you may not be taken seriously by people who could move your career along.
And I say that as someone who used to wear jeans to work. They were clean and in good condition and I knew when I needed to dress professionally. Sadly, too many of my coworkers were not as astute and suddenly a strict dress code went into effect.
FairyChatMom, would you think it likely that the account executives who work for Jennifer would be less likely to respond properly to coaching, instruction, discipline, and leadership from her?
I had a supervisor once who was female, platinum blonde, late-40ish, who came to work once wearing a T-shirt emblazoned in large letters with: “A hard man is good to find.” (Everyone knew that she was actually mildly male-hostile too.)
Those were the days before everyone was terrorized into walking on eggshells 24/7 lest a single hair out of place, a single button not buttoned, could get a guy court-martialed, hog-tied, and sent to the Re-Education Camps.
Of course, this was also in a very non-public-facing job in a very non-public research laboratory. Not to mention that it was the midnight-to-8 shift.
I have worked for a woman who was dressed too sexy, almost all the time.
Her tops were always too tight and too low-cut. She had one top that she wore in the summer a lot that looked like a bathing suit! Her skirts were always too short, and she always wore too-high heels. She had very long hair that she played with constantly, flipping it around, tying it back then letting it down.
It was on purpose.
Anyway, I respected her knowledge of the company, but I didn’t respect how she interacted with men. Totally different than with women, and totally unprofessional.
(And I’m a woman who has long hair and wears makeup, and no, my skirts aren’t to the floor.)
I don’t want a man that is going to hunt (fishing is acceptable) and please don’t go crazy over babies because I don’t either and I won’t understand you.