Opinion: Stop Calling Us Crazy

We all experience emotion.

While I believe it’s important to take ownership of our emotions and keep them regulated and balanced in healthy ways, expressing emotion is an integral part of the human experience and our most primal tool for communication.

So then, why are a woman’s emotional expressions continually under greater scrutiny than those of a man? For women, the path of emotional response is much more narrow.

Especially in the workplace, there is constant pressure for women to maintain their composure in high-stress situations. Women are often discouraged from expressing emotion and encouraged to bottle it all up — always remaining poised.

“We know the extent to which a woman’s credibility depends on her demeanor during crucial moments of scrutiny, and there is one quality that counts above all: poise,” Alexandra Schwartz wrote in The New Yorker. “Never have I heard a man described as poised — unless he is ‘poised for action,’ or ‘poised for success.’ Poise, in the common imagination, is a female quality, the demonstration of steel and grace under pressure.”

Women’s unvoiced expressions lead to missed opportunities and prohibit us from having authentic conversations in the workplace.

According to the Handbook on Well-being of Working Women, gender stereotypes about emotion constrain women’s behavior in the workplace. When women outwardly express emotion, they are often perceived as having a lack of emotional control, which undermines their professionalism and overall competence in the workplace.

Writer, director and producer, Nell Scovell, recounts her experience with the double standard as the only female writer in an all-male writer’s room:

“After a tough notes session with the network, a male writer walked into the room, screamed an obscenity and threw his script across the table,” according to an article Scovell wrote for Oprah.com. “It struck me that anger is an emotion too. But nobody thought he was ‘hysterical.’ When a man storms out of the room, he’s passionate. When a woman storms out, she’s unstable and unprofessional.”

Above all, women are especially discouraged from expressing anger — and are often penalized and criticized for doing so. Society typically does not tolerate anger in women, though anger can be a powerful emotion to express passion and alert injustice.

While people are typically uncomfortable with women’s anger, men are seen as being more assertive and powerful when they showcase the same emotion.

According to one Harvard study, women are subjected to negative backlash for expressing anger in professional environments while men are held to a higher status for the same outward displays of emotion.

In the 2018 TED Talk, “The Power of Women’s Anger” writer Soraya Chemaly explores how women are socialized from a young age to suppress anger.

“Because feelings are the purview of our authority and people are uncomfortable with our anger, we should be making people comfortable with the discomfort they feel when women say no unapologetically,” Chemaly says. “We can take emotions and think in terms of competence and not gender.”

My hope is that one day, for myself and women everywhere, to not be looked at sideways when speaking up with vehemence in a meeting or getting told to calm down when we’re ignited with passion.

I want us to not have to soften our tone of voice as to not sound too demanding or feel the need to coat our assertiveness with cute fonts, smiley faces and exclamation points in email correspondences.

In today’s world, women should have the freedom to be commanding and decisive without being called a b*tch.

If we begin to remove this narrow image of women’s emotions, the range of our acceptable behaviors can widen so that we may reach our full potentials without fear of being negatively judged.