If you’re a woman—particularly one in a position that could be perceived by a man as threatening—you’ve undoubtedly been told to “calm down!” Even though I did not have a reputation for getting emotional with people who worked with me, I can’t count how many times a male opposing counsel told me to “calm down” for doing nothing more than firmly stating a position. A professional nemesis of mine would use that phrase regularly to demean what I was saying, usually adding “we’re all friends here, Jenn” (we were not). These days, it’s cliche for a man to tell a woman to calm down for expressing any amount of emotion, no matter how small or justified.

Conversely, when men become emotional—no matter how outsized those emotions—neither men nor women tell them to calm down. Instead, male emotions (usually anger) are expected, viewed as justified, and typically tolerated. And men are certainly not viewed as irrational when they become angry: their arguments aren’t discredited because they lose their cool.

Telling women to calm down is a mechanism of control—designed not only to silence our messages but also to remind us of our hierarchical place. But is doing that always effective in the workplace? In this week’s issue of Comes Now, we take a look at how women’s emotions are perceived, whether those emotions affect our decisionmaking, and whether appealing to the stereotype of the emotional woman is effective in discrediting us at work.

You’re So “Emotional”

As some researchers recently observed, “[w]omen’s inability to properly control emotions is one of the most salient and consistent stereotypes in the West.” And that stereotype has kept women from positions of power because, as a society, we believe that, because women are “emotional,” they are more likely to make irrational decisions. In fact, even as our concepts of leadership have expanded to recognize that expressing emotions as a leader can be effective, leaders’ displays of emotion are judged differently according to their gender. Women leaders are subject to a double-standard: while they are penalized for more negative and dominance-oriented emotions like anger and pride, they are also penalized for not showing positive emotions that would show that they are warm and communal. (The “likeable badass” dilemma.)

It won’t surprise any woman reader of this newsletter that the stereotypical notions of how we lead have little basis in fact. Indeed, in the Harvard Business Review [paywall] Ivona Hideg, Tanja Hentschel, and Winny Shen recently reported results of research that suggested that, contrary to the notion that women become emotional under stress, men are actually more likely to resort to abusive behavior during stressful moments.

Specifically, Hideg and her co-authors investigated 137 leader-report pairs working in Europe (primarily the Netherlands) in the service (38%), public (28%), and information and technology (23%) sectors during the early phases of the pandemic in 2020. The leaders reported their emotions throughout the pandemic and then their reports ranked their leaders’ behaviors.

The researchers predicted that, because women are socialized to put others’ needs before their own, in uncertain times women leaders might actually be less likely to act on their emotions. They found that, while women leaders reported higher levels of anxiety regarding the pandemic than men leaders, women leaders engaged in low levels of abusive supervision regardless of how anxious they felt about the pandemic. In contrast, men leaders engaged in more abusive supervision—including behaviors such as being rude, ridiculing, yelling at, or lying to their reports—when their anxiety was higher. In addition, women leaders provided high levels of family-supportive supervision irrespective of how hopeful they felt about the pandemic, while men leaders only did so when they felt more hopeful.

In sum, the researchers found that, in the face of uncertainty, women’s leadership behaviors were less affected by their emotions, and men’s behaviors were more affected—even though women reported higher levels of anxiety during the pandemic. “Women may be more likely to experience certain emotions (such as anxiety during the pandemic, as was the case in our research), but that does not mean that they are more susceptible to their negative influence when leading.”

The researchers admittedly acknowledged some significant limitations to their conclusions. Their sample was relatively homogenous, including only leaders and direct reports who identified as cisgender women or men, and most of whom were heterosexual. The sample was also predominantly white. The majority (56%) of the leaders were men, Dutch (59%), white (92%), and heterosexual (95%). The majority of direct reports were women (56%), Dutch (60%), white (89%), and heterosexual (88%).

How Being Perceived As Emotional Affects Our Credibility

When a man calls a woman emotional, or even worse tells her to “calm down,” he intends to discredit her as a speaker. Much research has studied how this happens in situations like gaslighting, where an emotional label can be used to discredit allegations of abuse or rape. Until recently, the discrediting function of the emotional label had not been studied much in the context of the workplace.

However, an admittedly small 2022 study published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly suggested that how this discrediting occurs is not as straightforward as it seems. Researchers Teresa J. Frasca, Emily A. Leskinen, and Leah R. Warner conducted three separate studies where they presented written vignettes to study participants, 86 undergraduates at a small, Mid-Atlantic university. After reading the vignettes, the participants answered a series of questions.

In the first study, a woman was told to “calm down” during a disagreement. In the second study, the woman was labeled as emotional.

The first and second studies explicitly found that the woman speaker told to “calm down” and labeled as "emotional” was viewed as significantly less legitimate. The same was not true when a male speaker was told the same things.

However, when the researchers conducted a third study that presented the same vignettes from the first and second studies via video, the results of the first and second studies could not be replicated.

The researchers suggested that the video vignettes allowed the participants to “paint[] a more detailed picture” of the speakers:

Thus, the researchers concluded that “it seems that sometimes an emotional label can result in delegitimization for women in particular, but not at all times.”

As with the Harvard Business Review study, the researchers noted significant limitations with their study, including but not limited to the fact that the majority of the participants self-identified as white. They also noted that future research should focus not only on how individuals perceive labeling a woman speaker as emotional, but also how a group evaluates those labels. After all, most times that women are labeled as emotional in the workplace happen when there is an audience.

Closing Thoughts

We all know that the stereotype of the emotional and irrational woman doesn’t hold water. But how or whether emotions affect our decision-making at work, or how our perceived emotions affect our credibility are far more complex questions that neither study discussed above definitely answered.

In addition to the obvious limitation of studying almost exclusively white men and women, both studies were small. And, in presenting real and imagined scenarios and then asking questions, they omitted the complexities of the workplace itself. For example - do women make better decisions than men when faced with a negative emotion other than anxiety, the emotion tested in the HBR study? Do people who know us well perceive our emotions differently than those who do not? Does being told to “calm down” in a group affect our credibility differently than when we are told that one-on-one? (It certainly feels different.)

I’m, of course, not suggesting that a man should ever call a woman emotional or tell her to “calm down” in the workplace. The point of further study is not to normalize the use of epithets that still clearly evoke stereotypical ideas about our composure and competence. But using emotions effectively is an important part of being a leader (man or woman)—and it’s therefore important to understand how women can wield that power as or more effectively than men. I look forward to discussing these issues further as there is more research done on them.

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