Oh, She’s Too Emotional

Not true actually, She's Just the Wrong Gender for the Emotion She is Showing..... in the workplace

I’ve heard this so many times and the comment is ‘women are too emotional for business’. This is not true. 

We have all seen at work, and are especially seeing now in the world lots of emotion on show, in full view, amplified and repeated. What we are seeing is ANGER and RAGE and HATE and INTOLERANCE and more. These are all emotions aren’t they? 

These are all emotions that men or the masculine energy IS ALLOWED to show. Sometimes these men are respected when they bare their teeth and show dominance and aggression. When women show how they are feeling they feel anything but respected. How big a double standard is that!

We all feel anger. We all feel disgust, disappointment, frustration, contempt. These are not exotic emotions. They are human ones. They evolved in us for good reasons. They are signals, that we are in danger, there may be a threat so be vigilant

The question isn't whether you feel them. The question is: what happens to you when you show them?

The answer to that question is not the same for everyone.

The emotion is not the problem. The body it comes from is what will be judged

The Gap Between Feeling and Permission

In workplaces, in boardrooms, in performance reviews and corridor conversations, there is an unspoken hierarchy of emotional permission. Some people get to express anger and be seen as decisive, passionate, someone who gives a damn. Others express the same anger and are labelled difficult, unstable, unprofessional.

This isn't an anecdote. You may have experienced this yourself,  It is documented, replicated and observed across industries and cultures. It plays out with particular consistency along gender lines.

A man raises his voice in a meeting. He gets heard.

A woman raises her voice in a meeting. She gets managed.

Same room. Entirely different consequences.

We have not built workplaces that are emotionally neutral. We have built workplaces that are emotionally selective.

Anger: The Most Gendered Emotion in the Room

Anger in men reads as authority. It signals that something matters enough to fight for. Male anger is regularly interpreted as competence, as leadership.

Female anger is regularly interpreted as a problem to be solved. It raises questions about temperament, about likability, about whether she can 'handle' the pressure. The anger itself gets scrutinised rather than the thing she was angry about. 

Over time this  is a mechanism that silences, when you learn that your anger will cost you more than it earns you, you stop showing it. You internalise it. You perform composure until composure becomes a cage. Internally though resentment builds. Anger is a powerful messenger, often signalling a boundary has been crossed and we need to reassert it…….but we feel we can’t and this hurts us

Then someone gives you the feedback that you need to 'work on your  executive presence.'

Executive presence, in many organisations, is just a polite phrase for: make yourself easier for everyone else to manage.

Disgust and Disappointment: The Quiet Ones

Anger gets most of the attention, but disgust and disappointment carry their own gendered weight.

Disgust is that visceral, full-body 'this is wrong' response. It is one of our most primal signals. It exists to tell us that something violates our values, our standards, our sense of what ought to be. It’s telling us to distance ourselves from the source

When a man expresses disgust at a decision, it often reads as principled. He has standards. He won't compromise.

When a woman expresses disgust at the same decision, she risks being read as emotional. Overreacting. Making it personal.

Disappointment gets softer treatment on the surface but it carries its own trap. Women who express disappointment are sometimes praised for being 'measured.' But measured disappointment still gets discounted. Still gets managed. Still gets redirected into a conversation about whether she might want to reframe her expectations. In other words it’s her own fault she is disappointed because her expectations were wrong

Judgement: Who Gets to Have Standards?

Here is the one that really needs examining.

Judgement is the act of evaluating, assessing, finding something acceptable or wanting is a core professional competency. Every person in a senior role needs it. The ability to look at a situation and say 'this isn't good enough' is not aggression. It is discernment.

However the cultural tolerance for expressed judgement varies enormously depending on who is doing the judging.

When a woman is direct in her assessment, when she names what is wrong without softening it into a question, when she holds a standard and says so clearly she runs into a wall of social friction that her male counterpart simply does not encounter.

Her judgement is questioned. She gets asked whether she's 'thought this through’ 

He gets asked what the plan is to fix it.

The double standard isn't just unfair. It is inefficient. It wastes talent, suppresses intelligence, and keeps organisations making the same mistakes because the people who could see them learned to stay quiet.

What This Costs

For women, the cost is high due to the low-level exhaustion of constant emotional editing.

Of choosing, a hundred times a day, whether to say the true thing or the safe thing. Of watching colleagues say exactly what you were thinking and be applauded for it. Of being told, explicitly or implicitly, that your emotional range is an asset when it is positive  and a liability when it is challenging

It is a significant contributor to the frustration and exhaustion and  burnout I see in my work with women in high-pressure industries like pharmaceuticals. It’s not the workload. It’s the constant uncertainty, it’s the masking, the not knowing what to show to make you acceptable.  The relentless management of perception.

There’s a cost to organisations too.  When you systematically discount the judgements, frustrations, and standards of a significant portion of your workforce, you are not just being inequitable. You are potentially making poor decisions. You are losing signal. You are optimising for comfort over quality.

That is a choice. It is just rarely named as one.

This Is Not About Men vs Women

I want to be clear about something, because I know this topic can be read as a grievance — as one group against another.

It isn't.

Men are also constrained by gendered emotional norms. The expectation that they remain stoic, that vulnerability is weakness, that they should be steady and controlled at all times, that costs them too. Differently, but it costs.

What we are talking about is a set of cultural scripts that are bad for everyone, operating in different ways, with different consequences. 

Women are penalised for showing strength emotions. 

Men are penalised for showing soft ones.

Neither is free.

The goal is not to redistribute the penalty. It is to question why the penalty exists at all.

Full emotional range is not a management problem. It is a human capacity. And organisations that treat it as one are leaving enormous amounts of potential untouched.

What We Can Actually Do

Awareness is not enough but it is where change starts. So here is what I suggest

Notice your reactions. When you feel uncomfortable because a woman is being direct, or a man is being vulnerable, sit with that discomfort. Ask yourself where it comes from. Whose script are you running?

Name the double standard when you see it. Not as an accusation, but as an observation. Stop rewarding emotional suppression. 

Stop describing self-censorship as professionalism. 

Stop treating someone's ability to mask their interior as a leadership quality.

If you are the one who has been editing yourself,  if you have spent years managing your fire down to an ember because you learned it made you easier to work with then know this: the problem was never yours to solve.

Your anger was information. Your disgust was discernment. Your disappointment was a standard being held.

None of that needed fixing.

Beverley McCluskey

Bee works with women in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond.  Helping women who are running on empty but can’t stop, or won’t who know they can’t keep going like this

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