Although I’ve worked for many more men than women over the course of my career, it’s hard for me to make a flat statement that one sex is clearly better at managing and leading than the other.

The men I have worked for have run the gamut from bullying and boorish to smart and sensitive, with every shade in between. In fact, I find it much easier to rank my many male bosses on a good-to-bad scale because they seem to fall into such a ranking fairly easily.

That’s not the case with the women I’ve reported to. Although I had a great personal and professional connection with every one of them, their strengths and weaknesses always seemed to be very polarized. Or to put it another way, the things my female bosses were good at they were REALLY good at, while they things they weren’t so good at could drive you to despair.

For example, although I have had at least one bullying male boss who was always glowering and ready to get violent, I’ve never had a guy I was working for ever actually resort to a physical attack. It was a female boss—one who I still today admire as one of the best managers I ever worked for—who actually balled up a newspaper while screaming at me and fired it at my head. This happened on more than one occasion when she was unhappy with my staff’s work.

My point is this: You can’t make a case that men as a group or women as a group are better managers. Each man or woman I have worked for has been good and bad at lots of different things, and it is silly (and sexist) to make a case for the managerial prowess of one gender over the other.

That’s why I nearly fell out of my chair when reading the latest Corner Office column in The New York Times, titled “No Doubt: Women Are Better Managers.” The Q&A was with Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, a media company. The provocative headline was inspired by the interviewer’s observation, “It sounds as if you’ve thought a lot about men versus women as managers.”

“I have, I have,” Smith told the Times. “Hands down women are better. There’s no contest. In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers. Men love to hear themselves talk. I’m so generalizing. I know I am. But in a couple of places I’ve worked, I would often say, ‘Call me 15 minutes after the meeting starts and then I’ll come,’ because I will have missed all the football. I will have missed all the ‘What I did on the golf course.’ I will miss the four jokes, and I can get into the meeting when it’s starting.”

Smith continued: “Men also, they’re definitely better on the ‘whatever’ side. Things tend to roll off their back. We women take things very personally. We’re constantly playing things over in our head—‘What did that mean when they said that?’—when they mean nothing. And I’m certainly not immune to this. So there’s a downside to women.”

Smith’s full interview with The New York Times is well worth reading, if for no other reason than to see how such a smart and savvy female executive can come to such a dumb and sexist conclusion. Nowhere in the Q&A does she really make much of a case for why women are better managers than men. Yes, she gives some anecdotal examples, but nothing that makes you sit up and say, “Wow, she’s right about that.”

And let me add this: If any man was quoted in The New York Times saying that men were hands-down better managers than women, he would be roundly criticized, taken to task and—depending how poorly or indelicately he put it—perhaps even tarred and feathered on his way out of town.

In my long career, I’ve discovered only one clear truth about men and women as managers. It’s this: You simply can’t make a blanket judgment about the quality of managers by their gender. Anyone who tries to do so is foolish and shortsighted, and perhaps hasn’t worked for enough different kinds of managers—male or female—to figure that out.

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