Guardian article- Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional labor feminism's next fronti
'Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional
labor feminism's next frontier?
From remembering birthdays to offering
service with a smile, life has a layer of daily responsibility that is hardly
discussed – one which falls disproportionately on women. Finally confronting it
could be a revolutionary step
Women at work: only recently has emotional labor
slowly started to re-emerge in popular culture. Photograph: Chloe Cushman for
The Guardian
Sunday 8 November 2015 11.00 GMTLast modified on Sunday 8 November 201516.18 GMT
We remember children’s allergies, we design the shopping list, we know where the spare set of keys is. We multi-task. We know when we’re almost out of Q-tips, and plan on buying more. We are just better at remembering birthdays. We love catering to loved ones, and we make note of what they like to eat. We notice people’s health, and force friends and family to go see the doctor.
We listen to our partner’s woes,
forgive them the absences, the forgetfulness, the one-track mindedness while
we’re busy organizing a playdate for the kids. We applaud success when it
comes: the grant that was received, the promotion. It was their doing, and ours
in the background. Besides, if we work hard enough, we can succeed too: all we
need to do is learn to lean in.
But what if, much like childcare and
house keeping, the sum of this ongoing emotional management is yet another form
of unpaid labor?
If you think this is pushing it, you
would be wrong. The concept of emotional work and emotional labor – as
repeated, taxing and under-acknowledged acts of gendered performance – has been
a field of serious inquiry in the social sciences for decades.
It’s just taken the rest of us a
while to catch on.
•••
Jennifer Lena, a sociologist and
professor of arts administration at Columbia University, stares at me from
across the rocky wooden café table we’re sharing. Our two beers stand between
us, ready for consumption.
Lena doesn’t drink, though. She just
stares, looking vaguely disappointed and plain unchallenged.
“Your next story is on emotional
labor as the next feminist frontier?” She repeats back at me. “But
that is so sociology 101! I have been teaching undergraduate students about
that for years.”
I take a sip of my beer and mumble,
apologetic.
In all fairness, Lena’s friendly
dismissal makes a strong point. The concept has been around for over 30 years;
it was first introduced by Arlie Hochschild, an academic who formally coined
the concept in her 1983 book The Managed Heart.
But only recently has it slowly
started to re-emerge in online debates and
pop culture. Jess Zimmerman, who wrote about emotional labor for The Toast, saysshe was floored
by the amount of feedback she received – hundreds and hundreds of women commented
in fervent agreement, thanking her for finally giving them a vocabulary for
what they experienced.
Zimmerman framed emotional labor as
something especially occurring in private, while academics first focused on it
as a formal workplace issue. It is perhaps because more and more women are
entering formerly male dominated professions that they’re noticing that extra
emotional – say, “female type” – work
is expected of them.
Air hostess: one of the occupations requiring an
untold amount of patience. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In a work context, emotional labor
refers to the expectation that a worker shouldmanipulate either
her actual feelings or the appearance of her feelings in order to satisfy the
perceived requirements of her job. Emotional labor also covers the requirement
that a worker should modulate her feelings in order to influence the positive
experience of a client or a colleague.
Advertisement
It also includes influencing office
harmony, being pleasant, present but not too much, charming and tolerant and
volunteering to do menial tasks (such as making coffee or printing documents).
Think of air hostesses, which was one
of Hochschild’s main examples in 1983, having to cater to clients’ needs with
an accommodating smile and a sympathetic ear, no matter how tired or disgusted
they are by a vomiting child or a sleazy business class male customer.
Think too of the female politician,
who is expected to be likable and fun, as well as intelligent and capable (if
this rings a bell, it’s because Hillary Clinton’s aides are urging her to show more humor and heart).
Think of your morning Starbucks
barista, who drew a smiley face on your cardboard cup of coffee this morning.
Did she really want to go the extra mile today, or was it just part of the job
expectation?
•••
A few Stella sips in, Lena, the
sociologist, throws me a bone.
“The way I think of emotional labor
goes as follows: there are certain jobs where it’s a requirement, where there
is no training provided, and where there’s a positive bias towards certain
people – women – doing it. It’s also the kind of work that is denigrated by
society at large.”
Research suggests that cumulatively,
ongoing emotion work is exhausting but rarely acknowledged as a legitimate
strain – and as such, is not reflected in wages.
I take on that role. That’s not my authentic self,
but I have no choice
Sara Thompson
The growth of low-wage, service
industry jobs, where “service with a smile” is an expectation, has helped
further entrench the phenomenon. Here, emotional work is not an added value; it
is rather a requirement to get workers to the bare minimum.
In the US, where the federal tipped
minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour, this is further accentuated. In those jobs,
the employer is expecting emotional output, but is unwilling to pay for it. The
duty to recognize emotion work is offloaded onto the client – who is then
expectant of emotional fulfillment and satisfaction before providing the extra
money.
Advertisement
This has nefarious consequences,
especially for women. According to astudy by
ROC United, a worker center representing restaurant workers, women living off
tips in states that have $2.13 minimum tipped wages are twice as likely to
experience sexual harassment on the job compared to women in states with higher
base wages.
Recent data suggests at least
two-thirds of the low-wage industry is female, with half of these workers women
of color.
Even in more prestigious industries,
Jessica Collett, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame,
explains, men and women may both be engaged in the same degree of emotional
labor formally, but women are expected to provide extra emotional labor on the
side.
For example, boardroom members – male
and female – may have to schmooze clients to the same extent (a formal
expectation that goes with their jobs) but women may be expected, on top of
this, to contribute to office harmony by remembering colleagues’ birthdays, or
making small chit-chat to staff. Male colleagues may do this too, but if they
do it will be noticed as a plus (“isn’t he sweet and generous with his time?”).
This remark was echoed by a
successful female human rights lawyer and friend of mine, who recently
complained about the expectation that she should engage with office
administrative staff every morning – something she was happy to do, but also
felt she had to do. She needed to be seen as kind and competent in order to be respected, something her
male colleague never bothered with.
Robin Simon, a sociology professor at
Wake Forest University, turned the tables on herself and said that as a female
professor, she was expected to be much more emotionally aware and available in
and out of the classroom than her male colleagues.
“Students expect more emotion in
women,” she says, with female professors not just expected to be chirpy in the
classroom (especially with the rise in student-evaluation-related employment),
but also sometimes doubling up as therapists and faculty-politics peacekeepers.
•••
“I don’t really get it. What is
emotional labor?” one of my male friends asked me, busying around his kitchen,
making us lunch as we took a break from working together out of his Manhattan
home.
As I tried to break it down for my
lunchtime cook, I saw his brows furrow in concentration and then slowly make
way for confusion. My friend, a successful software engineer in his mid-30s who
had shown himself an ally to feminist causes in many of our past conversations,
clearly thought this one was a step too far.
“Why is the fact that women provide
emotional support work, though? What if people actually enjoy it? What if women
are just better at doing that? Why do we have to make that something negative?”
“My friend would never dare say: ‘Women are more
talented cleaners.’” Photograph: Ron Chapple Stock/Alamy
His questions may have betrayed some
exasperation with me. He had, in all fairness, prepared all of the meals we had
shared during our New York friendship without ever complaining.
“Why do you feminists always have to
make normal things into issues to be debated?” he continued.
For him, framing emotional work as
anything but natural was seen as needlessly picky; it was making something big
out of something that was simply best left alone.
My friend would probably never dare
say: “Oh, but women are better cooks,” “Women are more talented cleaners” or
“Women are better with children.” And yet, that he was suggesting that maybe
some women “are just like that” – better at emotions – seemed to be the
argument I was bumping into most frequently when I brought up the argument.
But this essentialist view doesn’t
hold up academically.
In a 2005 seminal academic article on
the subject using data on 355 employed and married parents, sociologist Rebecca
Erickson found that not only was the brunt of emotion related work taken on by
women at home, on top of child care and housework, it was also linked to gender
construction, not sex.
“Part of what the research on this
shows is that women’s increased propensity to engage in emotion work is not
related to their sex but really their gender and the position that they have
served in the family and in friendship groups, in society,” explains Collett.
A woman’s right to say ‘meh’: being sex positive
won’t guarantee you an orgasm
Read
more
This is a role we have simply become
accustomed to: the woman as the emotion manager, throwing them into what
Colleet calls a “second shift”.
In the bedroom too, women are
expected to manage their male lovers’ emotions and sensitivities.
In a recent article in
the Guardian, Alana Massey talks of the ongoing sexual inequality that exists
in a post-pseudo-sexual liberation world. We may have slowly come to terms with
the idea of women having sex to the degree they want, but sex positivism has by
no means been followed by widespread conversations on the kind of sex women want and need in order to be
fulfilled.
You might therefore also think of
women feeling the need to fake orgasms as not just a consequence of a society
that still views sexual intercourse in a male-centric way, but as a way for
women to cater first and foremost to the male ego.
A study published
in 2011, collecting data from 71 sexually active heterosexual women, found that
while all women reported experiencing orgasm generally (mostly during
foreplay), 79% of them faked orgasms during penetrative vaginal sex over 50% of
the time (25% of surveyed women faked 90% of the time).
The study found that 66% those women
faking (or making “copulatory vocalizations”, as the study put it) reported
doing it in order to speed up their partner’s ejaculation. Even more to the
point, 92% of the women reported they very strongly felt the technique boosted
their partner’s self-esteem, which 87% of them said was why they were doing it
in the first place.
•••
Sara Thompson, a teacher turned
financial litigation lawyer in her early 30s, is by all means and purposes in a
very egalitarian relationship.
Her husband and partner of 10 years
is a successful researcher, administrator and professor at an Ivy League
university. Together they share a life filled with formal and informal
arrangements that keep their relationship sane and seemingly equal from the
outside.
But get Thompson speaking about the
emotion work and every day extra effort in household organization that goes on
as part of her romantic relationship, and some clear disparities start to emerge.
Through an upbringing where she was
reprimanded when she took up too much space, she has been shaped into being
someone who is constantly, chronically paying attention to the environment
around her.
Advertisement
“I am a person today who is very
aware and conscious of the loudness of my voice, the presence of my body in a
public space, the comfort level of the people around me,” she explains.
Much of what she lists doing isn’t
simply cleaning and maintenance, but it is closely related. It involves thought,
and planning:
“Hanging stuff on the walls, putting
photographs in picture frames, thinking about whether we should buy new sheets
because the old ones are getting old, thinking about the time that we are going
to have dinner, thinking about what we are going to have for dinner.”
It is not just that Thompson is
cooking dinner, it is that she is planning dinner menus (what would he like to
eat?), and thinking of what time to have it – all types of thoughtfulness that
go unnoticed. “It really annoys me that I have to think about this. It’s not
fair, it’s taxing on me”, she says.
Birth control planning is another
issue. “I am the one who has to do the entire research and break it down for
him. ‘How long does it take you to get pregnant after the IUD?’ he asks me.
“Well, why wouldn’t you make time to make that research if you are thinking we
will have kids?”
The same is valid for smaller details
of everyday life. “He is looking for stuff. Have you seen my nail filer? He
goes to the closet and says he cannot see it. It’s there. ‘Where do we keep the
kitchen towels?’ He asks me time and time again. After the third or the fourth
time, that shit needs to be learned.”
She continues: “It suggests to me
that there is a detachment to home that I do not have the luxury of having.
Because if I did, then our everyday life would be a nightmare. So I take on
that role. That’s not my authentic self, but I have no choice,” she says.
So Thompson picks her battles (don’t
we all?), and the question remains – if we are socialized from a young age to
be this way, is it possible that we really are better at it, even if nature did
not make us so? Should we just shut up and get on with it because the world
would probably stop turning if we didn’t?
Or is it time we started forgetting
the birthdays too, time we stopped falsely screaming ecstasy, and demanded
adequate, formal remuneration for emotion work provided in the workplace as a skill?
Now that, right there, would probably
be a shake-patriarchy-to-its-core revolution.
Comments