Does a woman have to “man up” to be professionally successful?

It’s 2024, and we are still looking at sanitising our offices of “emotions”, like they are a bad thing

A week ago, Jia Mehta (first name changed upon request), 38, a finance consultant working for one of “the Big 4” finally hit the “send” button under her resignation email that had been sitting in her drafts folder for over a month. She now hopes to go freelance, even though paying for rent in Mumbai without a steady paycheck is no mean feat. But Mehta is willing to make the wager if it means not having to constantly dumb herself down at work, despite being in business for 18 years. “Consultancy is a boys’ club. So besides being mansplained every single day, I am told that my ‘quick-tempered nature’ makes me ill-equipped to handle bigger teams and projects,” she says. “I don’t see them say that to my male colleagues who are far worse with handling not just their tempers, but also their targets.”

Thirty-one-year old Sanjana Gupta*, currently a resident of Mumbai, who has previously worked in the media before switching to handling content for a leading clothing brand, had once been warned by a past employer about her “career taking a backseat” when she demanded to work from home. It was to look after her partner, who was battling a fatal disease.

Thirty-five year old Brinda De*, a journalist now living in New York, was asked if she was “on her period” by a male colleague in a Kolkata-based newsroom where she worked as an intern. Why? “Because I was debating over something we were printing. I was so young that I wasn’t even sure why he asked me that, but I clearly remember it all these years later,” she says.

The writing on the wall is clear: An emotionally expressive woman, especially at a workplace, is unwelcome. She will, more often than not, be asked to “tone herself down to hurt fewer egos and make the reality less uncomfortable for others, especially men,” says Mehta.

This unease with female expression of emotions, especially in professional spaces, is observed across the board—from nine-to-fivers and desk jobs, to politics and entertainment, where even an Oprah Winfrey hasn’t been spared the misogyny. In a 2019 interview to The Hollywood Reporter, Winfrey revealed how, back in 2018, she walked out of CBS’s television news magazine 60 Minutes, when she was told that she has “too much emotion” in her name. “Never a good thing when I have to practice saying my name and have to be told that I have too much emotion in my name," she told THR. “I think I did seven takes on just my name because it was 'too emotional.' I go, 'Is the too much emotion in the ‘Oprah' or the 'Winfrey' part?”

But since when has gender been assigned to emotions? In her book Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions (2022), author Pragya Agarwal, a behavioural and data scientist, interrogates the history and science that has made these attributions. She asks if there is any truth in the notion of an inherent difference between the male and female experience of emotions, and how these distinctions have played into the subjugation of women throughout history. “[C]onstantly being on high alert to figure out the emotional norms in the workplace, making an effort to appear to be warm and likeable, and suppressing emotions in order to create comfort for others—all have an impact on the health and wellbeing of women and women of colour in particular,” Agarwal mentions while discussing her book.

So what are we really conveying when we ask women to switch off their emotions at work?

The impact of being asked to “not be emotional” at work 

In 2022, Psychology of Women Quarterly published a study titled "Words Like Weapons: Labelling Women As Emotional During a Disagreement Negatively Affects the Perceived Legitimacy of Their Arguments". It illustrates that when its study participants read dialogues between two people disagreeing, and a woman was asked to “calm down,” her credibility was dented, and her argument seemed “less legitimate.” However, it did not have an identical impact on a man being asked to “calm down”, or when labelled “emotional”. This is because the term “emotional”—colloquially and specifically in the context of work—is simply not associated with men, is used pejoratively, and hence considered a weakness. 

This impedes a woman’s chances of not just ascending the professional ladder, but also succeeding in positions of leadership. This is because women’s ability to express themselves is considered as standing in opposition to their ability to be sound administrators, according to Kolkata-based psychologist Nilanjana Chatterjee Chakraborty. “We have been told so many times by others to ‘not cry like a girl’, haven’t we? So being feminine is a ‘slur’, but masculinity isn’t. This is how patriarchy demonises women,” she says, underlining how such linguistic and psychological devices are employed by the patriarchy to keep women out of paid workforces. Workplaces, afterall, were historically made by and for men.

A cultural impoverishment

Mehta laughs out loud when asked if she was ever called a “difficult” colleague, when she was only being assertive. “Are you kidding me?” she says. “When the boys did the same and used the exact same words as I did to drive a point across in a boardroom, they were thought of as ambitious, even sexy. But when I did it? I was just being a salty b*tch,” says Mehta.

Ultimately, it’s a lose-lose situation when it comes to women and emotions, even if that emotion is empathy. Take, for instance, how, in 2022, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was perceived as a weak leader when she appealed to rioting and protesting masses to not engage in violence over a remark on Prophet Muhammad made by BJP leader Nupur Sharma. Or how the “Iron Lady of Manipur” Irom Sharmila Chanu—who fasted for 16 years to demand a repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Manipur—was castigated as “crazy” by her own people back home.

Scoffing at emotional expression at work is an anomaly, according to Chatterjee Chakraborty, “because that is where we spend most of our time, more than we do with our families,” she points out. “So if we can’t even express ourselves freely in a place where we are expected to spend most of our time, how can that be healthy?”

Encouraging emotions at work also has a beneficial impact on one’s life at home, says Chatterjee Chakraborty. If not, we trap ourselves in a vicious cycle of toxic emotions that don’t find release anywhere. “It just means suffering both at home and at work.”

Consequently, this becomes an addition to the “emotional labour” shouldered by women not only at home, but also at work, as Agarwal delineates in her book, defining it as “the process of managing, modulating and suppressing one’s emotions to fulfil expectations from others or to achieve professional goals”. This labour, however, largely goes unpaid, which, along with the gender-based wage gap, works against the financial and emotional well-being of women. According to India’s first national Time Use Survey released in 2020 by the union government, 81.2 per cent of all women are engaged in unpaid domestic services, compared with 26.1 per cent of men. Therefore, cumulatively, between their formal workplaces and homes, women end up working more hours than men on an average.

So when women are made squarely responsible for filling the emotional vacuum in workspaces internally, the emotional sanitisation impacts men as well. This, in fact, leads to higher incidences of depression, anxiety and mental health conditions among men, compared to women. “In fact, some years ago, I was keeping a tab on some cases of suicidal thoughts and depression among working people in Kolkata, of which nine out of ten people who died by suicide were men,” Chatterjee Chakraborty informs.

On the flipside, men who choose to be emotionally expressive at work feel more at ease with themselves and their surroundings. Fifty seven-year old Sunayan D., a pharmaceutical executive based in Kolkata, is spending the last leg of his career working under a female manager. “I have never felt threatened by her. On the contrary, my manager, who is younger than me, teaches me a lot about dealing with young professionals in the field every day,” he says. When asked what he likes about her management style and how it’s different from her male counterparts, he takes less than a second to answer. “Empathy and kindness. You don’t always need to lead with fear, which is what all my previous managers—all men—have done. She leads with kindness and a willingness to not always be right. It makes me better at my work too,” he says, adding that it must not be easy for his manager to hold her own in a male-dominated space like the big pharma.

How to not make workplaces hostile to emotions

For beginners, increased visibility of women across verticals and hierarchies, at least in the organised sectors, helps normalise not just their presence, but also their unique approach and responses at work. Megha Dhamija, Principal Partner at Talent Coach People Consulting, a Mumbai-based human resource service firm, says that the reason women were finally included in the workforce was to bring in diverse perspectives. “I laugh every time I hear—overtly or covertly—that whenever there is a high-stakes situation or important project, a woman is not considered appropriate for that job because she operates from an emotional space, and not one of logic. Women were brought into the fold not just so they could check off a gender diversity box, but to bring diverse perspectives, even if that means some heart coming into the head,” she says. According to her, the whole point of the exercise stands defeated if a woman, once offered a spot in the boardroom, is asked to leave half of her personality behind and walk in “only with male logic.”

Dhamija takes the argument forward and points to the fact that men—who have traditionally been synonymous with “leader figures” in the public domain—too are made to face difficult emotions at work. But they’d much rather “drink over it” or find people to blame, instead of sitting down and accepting their emotions in a healthy manner. “What we have normalised over the years is associating expressions of anger or rage when met with failure as a sign of masculine power. Therefore, ‘power’ has become synonymous with such negative expressions mostly shown by men. On the other hand, crying as an expression of accepting failure is never seen in workspaces,” Dhamija says, and a claim that Chatterjee Chakraborty corroborates. But “crying is a healthy coping mechanism,” the latter adds.

The real world, however, is far from being ideal, and it still requires women to assert their masculine side, maybe even strip themselves of empathy to get the job done. Gupta has had to do that on several occasions, “especially with young and middle-aged men,” she says. “One kind is irreverent for no reason, the other biased. I feel emotions take time and no modern-day workplace has the time to sit with anybody’s emotions. The very idea scares them because then they will have to realign their progress and productivity-related aspirations to systemic change,” she adds.

During his manager’s initial days, Sunayan, on a few occasions, had witnessed her switch up her “angry, masculine side” to get her point across to belligerent distributors at sales calls. “You could see it made them deeply uncomfortable, as she would immediately switch back to her gentle nature once she was done making her point. It left them so confused,” he laughs.

But for Delhi-based Trisha De Niyogi, Director at Niyogi Books, coming from a family of “highly emotional men” and having an emotional father who still helms their family’s publishing business meant never looking at emotions as taboo, even at work. De Niyogi acknowledges her privilege, but adds that once she steps outside the comfort of home turf, it comes down to asserting one’s authority, “but without raising your voice,” she says, even in a display of anger.

Evidently, it all starts at the top, as practices have a trickle-down effect in any culture, within any set-up. For many women, not finding allies in fellow women at work can be a cause for severe disenchantment and discomfort. During her internship, while De had confided in her female seniors about her male colleague passing the misogynistic comment on her passionate inputs at work, they made light of it. “‘He is that way. Don’t mind him,’ is what they said, before they went out for smokes with him,” she recalls. When asked why she didn’t take it up with the organisation’s HR, De says she didn’t know whether going to the HR was an option for an intern. “And I also had senior female colleagues tell me that it wasn’t a big deal, so I believed them,” she adds.

Some women, however, turn this patriarchal apathy towards them and their emotions on its head, choosing to feel liberated from its pressures. Conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah who runs her eponymous firm Abha Narain Lambah Associates in Mumbai, was never the one to let social predicaments weigh her down. “I became so used to walking into rooms where I was the only woman that I started to push the envelope bit by bit even within corporate spaces,” she says. “Of course, I have experienced sexism at workplaces and have been told by fellow women to let it slide. But I did not let that stop me. If they don’t expect anything from me, even a step forward is a win.”

She talks about architecture as a sentient art, where emotions should sit front and centre. Therefore, it is inadvisable to leave your emotions behind when you’re designing built heritage, especially in public spaces. “I don’t believe in this thing of ‘male logic’ versus ‘female emotions’. It all has to come together. There are very empathetic men and narcissistic women also. So, at the end of the day, you have to bring your complete self to work,” Narain Lambah says.

Her firm has a gender ratio of 60 per cent women and 40 per cent men, with a day-care creche for young children of employees. It was a concerted effort to make the workspace inclusive, especially for working women who can barely get away with being an “absent mother”, as opposed to the well-accepted, even celebrated figure of an absent father. This measure, however, was inspired by Narain Lambah’s personal experience in her initial days. “When I had my daughter, I, one day, decided to take her along with me to the corporate office of a bank that I was designing. I did not know how they would take it but I did it anyway. Women need to try and not hold themselves back from pushing the boundaries. What do we have to lose anyway, if society does not have expectations from us since we are seen as emotional?” she questions.

After all, while work is only a fraction of our lives, it should not reduce us to a fraction of who we are. So if the only time women can succeed at work is when they are men, “Why have women in workplaces at all?” Dhamija asks. 

(*Names changed to protect the identity of the individual.)

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