When workers’ emotions deviate from what’s expected of their gender, they are often left to process the backlash on their own.
Discussions of gender inequality in the workplace often focus on the more visible manifestations of the imbalances between men and women: wage inequality, the motherhood penalty, or the lack of paid leave. These are all important issues that, if fixed, would help women. More difficult to pinpoint and address, however, are the ways that what sociologists call “emotional labor” also reinforces workplace gender inequality.
A key feature of the modern economy and a way work has deviated from what it was in the past is that the outputs of many jobs have become invisible. In her seminal book The Managed Heart, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes how the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy has brought on the commodification of emotions. Hochschild’s argument is that in service jobs, workers do not produce tangible commodities like they did in manufacturing positions. Rather, they are required to provide “good service.”
The ways that this phrase becomes defined and mandated means that organizations expect workers to create and sell emotional states in themselves and in others. This introduces a host of questions, like who “owns” emotions when organizations can require workers to feel happy, pleasant, and congenial in order to earn their paycheck?