When was the last time you bit your tongue in a meeting? When that difficult colleague sent that passive-aggressive email, did you take a deep breath and rise above it? Yes, maybe your instinct was to storm right over there and chuck that coffee in his face. And that’s probably what he deserved. But you’re more professional than that.
We all accept that part of being professional involves keeping our thoughts to ourselves sometimes, but the amount we have to do this day-to-day varies depending on our individual personalities and the particular environment we are in. Sociologists call this unseen emotional effort ’Emotional Labour. And yes, this is gendered: Research suggests that women are doing far more of this emotional labour than men. This is partly a function of power dynamics in the workplace: Employees in less powerful positions naturally end up taking on more emotional labour than those higher up. And that is still, in most industries, women. But even where women are reaching higher positions, there is evidence that this division is still taking place. What happens is that women take on a supportive, caring role by default. They provide unacknowledged, exhausting emotional labour. Sound familiar?
And women are often caught in a double-bind. Because if and when they step out of a caring role, they are often met with mistrust or hostility. We’re all familiar with the idea of the ‘office bitch’, or the female leader who meets the men head-on. How do we collectively treat such women who step outside of their assigned gender role? A recent survey of Silicon Valley tech companies reported that a shocking 84% of women surveyed had been told that they were too aggressive, part of a wider culture which expects women to fulfil nurturing and compassionate roles (despite research suggesting that compassion is no more an innate characteristic in women than in men.)
We’re entering the murky world of shame, what renowned researcher Brene Brown calls the ‘swampland of the soul.’ Women’s (and men’s) behaviour is defined within a narrow range of acceptable ways of being – emotionally –supportive, caring - and where they step outside of that, they can be shamed for it. Researchers have found that when women try to negotiate their salaries, they are far less likely to be positively-received than their male colleagues - perhaps the reason why 57% of men will do this in a new role, but only 7% of women. While Sheryl Sandberg’s famous call for women to ‘Lean In’ is appealing, the facts on the ground suggest that women are holding back for good reasons: They can read the room.
Shame is an extraordinarily powerful feeling; it goes to the heart of who we are as people. It’s that feeling of ‘I am wrong, bad, not good enough’. It’s natural that we all do our best to avoid it at all costs. And when we engage in the dance of workplace norms, this is part of what we’re doing. When women behave in ways not sanctioned by culture, they are implicitly shamed by being ignored, shut down, or subtly mocked or ostracised. They aren’t given the pay rise, or the promotion, or the job at all.
This isn’t just about women. Brown’s shame research shows clearly that there is a gender split in how we shame each other. Whereas women are shamed for not being on top of everything all the time – the job, the house, the family – and performing that perfectly, men experience shame for one thing: Showing weakness. And since our corporate powerhouses are still male-led, this is the emotional undercurrent defining many boardrooms, trading floors and busy offices. No wonder people were so relieved to experience some empathy in meetings.
What I’m saying is that we are all, men and women, participating in a culture that punishes us all. Men are expected to succeed at everything, to never show vulnerability, to be strong at all times. And that is just unreasonable. In our workplaces, it can create an inflexible culture where mistakes are difficult to own and learn from for fear of shame, and personal difficulties or stress are ignored, to our personal detriment. On the other hand, women are seen as bringing a welcome, ‘acceptable’ caring face into teams, but their ability to participate in ambition or bossiness (and don’t the connotations of that word just reverberate with old sexism and cheap digs?) are met with micro-aggressions and shame.
We must find ways to participate equally in vulnerability; to allow men to feel it, and to create a culture where the role of receiving that vulnerability is not only borne by women, but also by men. And women must be allowed to lead, even where it means being tough rather than warm, authoritative rather than supportive.
This post first appeared on the Untapped blog