Worker Says 'No One Will Ever Hate You More Than A Female Manager Who’s Over 40' — And People Have Major Thoughts
Is it her age and gender that makes her awful to work for? Or is it just that she's a bad person?
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A, fizkes / Shutterstock; Canva ProMost of us have had a terrible boss or two (or three or 10) over the course of our careers, and a woman on TikTok thinks she's identified the type of manager likely to be the biggest possible nightmare.
But others think she's misidentified the problem, and it sparked a major debate about what actually makes a bad boss.
The woman decreed 'no one will ever hate you more than a female manager who's over 40.'
Miranda Priestley in "The Devil Wears Prada," Jennifer Aniston in "Horrible Bosses," Sandra Bullock in "The Proposal" — men may play the bumbling, arrogant idiot leaders, but when it comes to truly evil bosses in movies, it's usually the female ones who are the most diabolical.
And for Mia, a TikToker known as @spoopymia, it certainly seems like art has been imitating life. She recently took to the app to share her hot take on what it's like working for women of a certain age.
"No one will ever hate you more than a female manager who's over 40," she deadpanned in her video, adding, "I will not elaborate." Probably because to do so would cost her a job — you sense she's speaking from experience here, if you will.
Many women wholeheartedly agreed with Mia's take on over-40 women as bosses.
And she definitely was not alone in her sentiment. "It’s not every female manager over 40, but there will be ONE who will make you understand this," one commenter wrote, and scores of other women had their own tales to tell about horrible female bosses.
Even a female manager who's over 40 herself wholeheartedly agreed with Mia's take. "As a woman over 40, let me say, she's not wrong," TikToker @manderscarmen said. But she added that Mia wasn't telling the whole story.
"Those types of women are the women who are generally insecure and do not take care of themselves and are unhappy," she went on to say. "Because women that are over 40, that do take care of themselves, that are happy, that are confident, don't make anybody else's life miserable."
Hard to argue with that — most awful people are just projecting.
But lots of people disagreed and thought the idea that a female manager who's over 40 makes the worst boss was sexist, ageist, and dated.
Here's the thing — when you think back on all the worst bosses you've had, aren't most of them men? I'm just one person, of course, but I've had a very circuitous career path including lots of freelancing, so I've had about a gazillion bosses. And other than a few notable exceptions (you know what you did, Julie!), all of the bad ones have been men.
But then again, I'm a man too, so perhaps the gender dynamics were different with my female bosses than the myriad women on TikTok who felt totally seen by Mia's post.
There were a lot of other women, however, who pushed back hard on her take. One woman who's over 40 described how much she loves managing her team of 20-something women, and even finds herself emulating them.
Another person described how much they love their over 40 female boss, and how she takes an interest in them as a person and is a genuine part of their life beyond just in her capacity as their manager.
But TikToker @amandatalksalot disagreed more than all the others. She criticized Mia for what she saw as a sort of hypocrisy.
"You're calling out women for being mean to other women when you're actually being mean to other women in your video," she said in a stitch with Mia's TikTok.
She went on to criticize what she saw as sexism and ageism in Mia's post. "It's hard enough to be a woman in corporate America, but now you're bringing age into it?" she said.
And she suggested that there was something far more important creating the problems Mia seems to be having with her boss. "Instead of pointing out that someone hates you... because of their age and their gender, how about they're just a [terrible] person? Because I guarantee you there's just as many 20- and 30-something-year-old women who are petty and vindictive as well."
She also pointed out that generalizing "a female manager who's over 40" is the worst person to work for gives cover to "the misogynistic things that men do" at work.
There's clearly something to Mia's take — it generated more than 5,000 comments, many of them agreeing on the basis of their own nightmare experiences with their female bosses. Still, @amandatalksalot makes a good point — the one throughline among all terrible bosses is that they're bad people, and there's no age or gender that can account for that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.