Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is trying to help women contribute, lead and succeed as much as they can. The use of the word “bossy” has started an interesting argument. Sheryl Sandberg and American Girl Scouts chief Anna Maria Chavez have started The #Ban Bossy campaign. They believe the word “bossy” is disproportionally used to describe girls rather than boys, and this discourages girls from leading. I looked at Google Trends to see if there was data to support the name-calling.

Google Trends measures the volume of different search words and phrases over time. It turns out while “bossy woman” is actually searched for less than “bossy man” on average, “bossy girl” is searched for much more than “bossy boy”. No way of knowing from this data who is doing the searching or the name-calling.