Why stereotyped boss from hell is not such an exaggeration

HER employer sends a Lexus to her apartment each morning to pick her up and bring her to the office.

The moment the lift disgorges her on the right floor at headquarters, she’s giving lists of orders to her two personal assistants as she strides past them, stopping only to hurl her coat and handbag on a desk for someone else to respectfully put away.

If her Starbucks latté isn’t on her own desk, piping hot, just as she sits down, someone’s in big trouble. Everything has to be done her way.

She’s the boss from hell, played by Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” the movie designed to make 2006 the year to put horns and a tail on women managers everywhere.

Of course, some women who have seen it have already gone on the defence, saying that while the film is amusing, it is nonetheless OTT, stereotypical and exaggerated and that women managers are not like that at all.

Though the movie and the book on which it’s based are widely seen as portrayals of a real woman (Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue) the defenders of women managers maintain that only the exceptionally odd bitch boss behaves as appallingly as the Streep character.

I beg to differ. Many bosses of both sexes do a lot of what she does. Take the throwing of jackets and other belongings on the first available surface in the morning. That is a widespread and an equal-opportunities offence.

Men and women do it. All the time, they do it. Admittedly, few of them expect, nay, require their underlings to hang up the garment. They’re quite happy to have it decorate the back of a chair or the top of a table until they need to put it on again.

Indeed, men who doff bits of their attire tend to get quite ratty when someone else tidies the bits away. They regard it as nannying. They want their clothing visibly scattered, the way an organised killer sets up his crime scene. It means something to have it that way.

The scatter of clothing is a semiotic indicator of how incredibly busy and work-focussed the man is: didn’t even have time to put the stuff away, he’s so eager to get to his spreadsheet.

Analysed carefully, most of the boss-as-bitch behaviours in the film are not specific to one gender and in any case, are often justifiable.

Take, for example, an early scene, where a wannabe journalist played by Ann Hathaway, arriving for a job interview at America’s leading fashion magazine, gets chewed out by the editor for looking like an unmade bed, for not bothering to read the magazine at which she wants a job, and for an ignorantly cynical attitude to the competitive fashion industry she’s hoping will give her a living.

This chewing-out is right royally deserved, except for the fact that Hathaway’s character doesn’t look like an unmade bed. Cinema is not truth and apart from Charlize Theron’s portrayal as a serial killer, no good-looking young actress is ever really made to look horrible. At worst, Hathaway looks like a half-made bed. Quite an inviting half-made bed.

However, bawling her out for not reading the magazine before she goes for a job on it makes perfect sense. Courtesy alone, never mind ambition, should make any job aspirant learn about a company before turning up for an interview there. Similarly, courtesy alone, never mind ambition, should make a job aspirant button her curling lip about an industry she’s trying to join.

You can’t have it both ways. If, for example, you believe nuclear power is the sure way to shorten the life of our planet and all the residents thereon, then if you’re offered a job promoting nuclear power, you either tell them to stick it or you take the money and a vow of silence.

But of course, the Meryl Streep character proves herself vile in many other ways as the plot thickens.

When her long-term PA develops a sniffly cold, Streep treats her as if she has leprosy, shrinking back from physical contact with anything the PA touches and suggesting she take her throat-clearing and bacteria-sodden self somewhere else. How shocking, I hear you say. What lack of empathy. What compassion-deficit.

Me, I say: What good sense.

There’s a strong case for people suffering from colds to stay at home and not be subjecting the rest of us to the red rawness of their noses, their spewing sneezes and the wastepaper basket filling with tissues out of which invisible germs climb, ready to invade every innocent nearby nasal passage.

There’s an even stronger case for people suffering from flu to stay at home, particularly if they recently had a close encounter of the bird kind.

Not because their boss is a bitch, but because the rest of the workforce is less likely to fall ill if the bug and its owner stay at home.

Worse than not wanting the infectious around her, the Streep character expects those who work for her to be available at all times on their mobile phones.

This is nothing new. Many Irish people in service industries such as public relations, if they have the time to go to see this movie, will be mystified by how outrageous this is made to seem, since being reachable by your clients 365 days a year, 24 hours a day is a given for them.

The only excuse for turning your phone off is being at a meeting with the Taoiseach or at the funeral of your entire family. (Indeed, some clients would feel you shouldn’t turn your phone off even during the funeral of all belonging to you. They believe that’s what the silent/vibrate button is for.)

Admittedly, the movie boss is very demanding. Because she sets the bar so high, she is never happy with the performance of any of her staff because they have no chance of reaching her targets.

When they give her blood, tears, sweat, heart and soul, she wonders aloud about their failure to deliver an entrail or two. When inevitable partings happen, she looks at the departing staff member, her head tilted in grim condemnation and tells them softly they are the worse disappointment she’s ever had.

The reason we go into spasm when we hear stories of a tough female manager is because the weird myth about women in management assumes they should be gentler and sweeter than their male counterparts.

This myth sees women as a superior breed of human, whose values, where they to percolate through the workplace, would ensure the withering away of cross words, back-stabbing, injustice, sexism, promotion of the wrong people and work/life imbalance. No evidence supports this myth, but it’s warmly comforting.

Women bosses can be tough. It’s just their toughness is rarely embraced the way male-boss toughness is.

When someone like, say, Michael O’Leary, gets given blood, tears, sweat, heart, soul and entrails, he’s quite likely to look for an organ or two into the bargain. And if organ donation doesn’t immediately happen, Michael O’Leary probably won’t murmur soft observations about his disappointment.

He’s likely to be just a bit louder, more profane and personal.

But of course Michael’s a fella, and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?