Last week BuzzFeed and HuffPost published reports that Democratic senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is a serial office bully. According to multiple former staffers, Klobuchar sent haranguing, insulting emails to staffers in the middle of the night, threatened to fire people in front of their colleagues, lost her temper regularly and unpredictably, asked people to pick her dirty laundry up from the floor and regularly humiliated a number of those working in her office.
Klobuchar hit back hard. "Yes, I can be tough and yes, I can push people," Klobuchar said after she announced her run for the Democratic nomination on Sunday. "I have, I'd say, high expectations for myself. I have high expectations for the people who work for me. And I have high expectations for this country."
Klobuchar didn't need to say why she thought she was being judged more harshly. Others already did it for her. "This story would never have been a story if it were Arthur Klobuchar," declared Amy Siskind. Despite the examples of bad male congressional bosses that immediately got attention in the wake of the accusations--Anthony Weiner, to name one--it's true that double standards can hurt tough women bosses.
But bullying is a major problem in American culture, one that eats away at our quality of life, is present everywhere from elementary school playgrounds to the White House, and is practiced by both men and women.
It starts at the top with the president. CEOs are said to fear his ire. He insults and belittles ethnic groups and politicians of both parties. His track record of bullying people to get his way goes back decades; when he got into a dispute with a group of rent-stabilized tenants in one of his properties, renters said he took away their heat and hot water in an effort to get them to capitulate.
But President Donald Trump is less a cause than a symptom of a bullying culture run amok. As the age of inequality grew in the 1980s, a parallel culture of lionizing C-suite bullies also emerged. The late Steve Jobs was a notorious workplace bully, while former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was accused of tossing furniture at a subordinate. (He denies it.)
A cross-cultural study of 11-year-olds published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2009 found countries with greater income inequality experienced more bullying, at least as far as children went. "The percentage of respondents who bullied others was four to five times greater in countries with higher income inequality, for example Turkey, the Russian Federation and the United States," Frank Elgar, now an associate professor of psychology at McGill University and one of the named authors of the paper, said at the time.
Workplace bullying undergirds more than a few #MeToo stories as well. At The Takeaway, for instance, John Hockenberry was accused not just of sexually harassing female staffers and guests but also of bullying three female co-hosts.
There is forever a tension in the women's movement: Do we simply want in on the structures that govern our lives, or do we want to transform them as well? The argument for women's rights often centers not just on fairness and equity but also on our merit. While no one would go as far as saying that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, we repeat our own modern equivalents. Women, it is said, are more collaborative and less inclined to take crazy risks that lead to things such as stock-market collapses.
But women, as much as we tell ourselves otherwise, are not better than men. As the Economist pointed out a few years ago, while women say they are less likely to support wars, an analysis of European history found that queens--particularly married queens--were significantly more likely than their male counterparts to take conflicts between nations to a military place. And, as Olga Khazan noted last year in The Atlantic, women can be absolutely horrible to one another in the workplace.
Moreover, there is precious little evidence to support the idea that bullying behavior improves workplace output. In fact, bullying often does the opposite of what is intended. It decreases worker engagement and negatively impacts performance while increasing employee comings and goings; Klobuchar's office has the third-highest turnover rate in the Senate.
Let's not let the desire for a female president blind us to the reality of all this. When it comes to the matter of treating others with respect, we should seek to raise the standard men need to meet, not lower it so women can join in our nation's bullyfest. We don't need to replace one bully with another. We deserve better than that.
Editorial on 02/13/2019