But that bolded part is critical--most people, when making the observation that women are more passive, don't realize that they're using a male standard as a basis for judgment.
Thist is an important insight, but one should be careful with it. Taking it too far leads to the exact same kind of backwards thinking where (taking race instead of gender) reading books is "acting white". If one group in society (men, whites, etc.) is dominant, and society continues to function, then obviously the dominant group is doing something right, and forcing or pressuring the oppressed group into doing something wrong. In the racial case, that "something" is education. Whites oppressed blacks; whites were educated while blacks weren't. The answer is to educate blacks and stop oppressing them; it isn't to tear down education itself as an artifact of white oppression.
Back to your example, sometimes someone in a traditionally male occupation has to be assertive. It's hard to imagine a passive salesperson or a passive Prime Minister being very effective, male or female; agree or disagree with them, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were not passive women by any stretch of the imagination.
(Thatcher and Meir may have certainly been bad PM's in the sense of doing bad things, depending on your political views; I don't want to argue it either way. But they were certainly effective; if one agreed with and wanted to pursue Thatcher's agenda in the UK 30 years ago, Thatcher would undoubtedly be the best candidate for PM. Likewise, one can be an extremely effective salesperson while selling useless crap no one really needs.)
Thist is an important insight, but one should be careful with it. Taking it too far leads to the exact same kind of backwards thinking where (taking race instead of gender) reading books is "acting white". If one group in society (men, whites, etc.) is dominant, and society continues to function, then obviously the dominant group is doing something right, and forcing or pressuring the oppressed group into doing something wrong. In the racial case, that "something" is education. Whites oppressed blacks; whites were educated while blacks weren't. The answer is to educate blacks and stop oppressing them; it isn't to tear down education itself as an artifact of white oppression.
Back to your example, sometimes someone in a traditionally male occupation has to be assertive. It's hard to imagine a passive salesperson or a passive Prime Minister being very effective, male or female; agree or disagree with them, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were not passive women by any stretch of the imagination.
(Thatcher and Meir may have certainly been bad PM's in the sense of doing bad things, depending on your political views; I don't want to argue it either way. But they were certainly effective; if one agreed with and wanted to pursue Thatcher's agenda in the UK 30 years ago, Thatcher would undoubtedly be the best candidate for PM. Likewise, one can be an extremely effective salesperson while selling useless crap no one really needs.)