And yet, your bad female boss is also just one person, and shouldn’t represent all women, says Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work . Tannen has written prolifically about the difficult circumstances facing many women in positions of authority. The tendency to judge all women by the actions of one individual, Tannen says, stems from a long-established set point: When a group of people, such as men, is seen as "standard," we interpret individual behaviour from within that group as representative of just one person. But for women? “We take them to represent their entire gender,” says Tannen.