Comparative Analysis Between Two Articles

It has come to the attention that none of the senior positions are occupied by women and would like the company to be more modern and inclusive by focusing on recruiting more women into senior position. The two articles, “Do men make better bosses than women” published by Wolfe Layhle and “Why we don’t like women bosses” published by Viven Shiao both expressed contrasting perspective. After thorough analysis of both articles, I would like to recommend Wolfe’s article to be sent out to the heads of department as Wolfe’s argument seems to have an edge over Shiao’s with the regards to the credibility and persuasiveness of the article.

1. Credibility of Sources¬¬ Wolfe’s article portrays greater credibility as compared to Shiao’s. Wolfe’s statements have been consistently supported by substantial evidence from reliable resources and statistics. Wolfe claim that that women were better at engaging with employee at managerial level compare to male. (Wolfe, 2017) This claim was supported by authors Kimberly Fitch and Sangeeta Agrawal, article on Forbes (2015) and her past studies (Wofle, 2016). Wolfe constantly giving credit to her sources by provides citation and a reference list that allows her article to be more persuasive and her audience to be more convinced. In contrast, Shiao acquired her resource from Randstad to support her argument, she claims that Singapore employees prefer male over female boss. (Shiao, 2016) However, Shiao lacked in credibility as there was lack of evidence to support her claimed statements such as “But once they rise to positions of power and exhibit traits such as dominance, people get uncomfortable.” (Shiao, 2016). This shows that the claim she made was based on her personal interpretation and assumption, hence making it a groundless speculation without any concrete evidences to support it. Therefore, due to Shiao’s inability to provide consistent evidence to her claims. Wolfe’s article has generated greater credibility as compared with Shiao.
2. Creditability of authors With regards to the author’s credibility, Shiao has been proven more credible as compared to Wolfe. Wolfe has a rich background with more than 25 years of experience in Business sector and has been writing about woman for 8 years (“Lahle A. Wolfe”, n.d). However, woman tend to show favouritism toward own gender unconsciously (Warrell, 2016). Hence being a woman, herself, there can be a tendency that she evinces favouritism towards the same gender. Furthermore, she is the owner and the president in LAWolfe Web Marketing (“Lahle Wolfe Ehrlich”, n.d). As a powerful woman herself, she may be inclined to prove that women can lead and may craft her article with lesser regard to the limitations of women as leaders. Wolfe may not be as credible as there is a possibility that her bias towards women as leaders may have reflected on the article. Whereby Shiao has been a journalist for Straits Time and Business Time. According to Straits Time (2018), she is one of the award recipients at EMTM Annual Awards 2017, bestowing her the prestige and credibility as an author. Not only that, she equally critical about women as leaders, despite being a woman herself, reflecting her objectivity in her argument. As a result, Shiao was objective in her article and could be given more credibility as an author as compared to Wolfe.
3. Persuasiveness Wolfe’s article displays a greater persuasiveness as compare to Shiao’s article. Throughout the article, neither did Shiao hold a balanced point of view, nor did she produce sufficient concrete evidence to support her statements. Due to the lack of neutral tone, Shiao’s article may seems unreliable and unpersuasive. As compared, Wolfe took a neutral stance throughout the article and bought up a counter argument that was not in her favour. This can be seen from “The survey concluded that the stereotypical attributions assigned to the female gender … have some merit in terms of women being ranked higher than men, but the results were not constrained to stereotypes” (Wolfe, 2017). This reflects her ability to acknowledge the stereotypes made and that such stereotypes are inconclusive. Wolfe managed to keep a well-balanced argument, acknowledging the limits and hence is able to generate a logos appeal to persuade her readers.

Conclusion

Wolfe’s article is able to establish greater credibility of resource and persuasiveness, and seems to have gaining an edge over Shiao. While Shiao is arguably a more credible author, her article lacked the neutrality in stance and was making baseless statements without having sufficient evidence. Wolfe exhibited a more holistic argument where she took a more neutral stance with a better engagement of the logos appeal to persuade her audience. Therefore, I would like to recommend Wolfe’s article to be sent out to heads of different departments.