At a recent forum on women and the workplace I spoke at, a woman in middle-management explained to the audience how her manager had become increasingly irate during a pay negotiation.
He wasn’t angry, it turned out, because of anything she’d done but because his wife wasn’t paid as much as her (no matter that his wife was working in a completely different sector and job).
His incensed reaction surprised his female colleague but in hindsight it appears the pay discrepancy challenged his view of how the world should work – a very traditional view when it came to gender.
I wish men wouldn’t get so emotional about these things, I couldn’t help but quip after we heard the story. Most of us have been told for so long that women are the volatile gender that it takes a while to recognise that these outbursts of vitriol from some men come from a very emotional and often irrational place.
There’s a serious and often very harmful reality at play in these interactions, which was evident in the extreme levels of anger and outrage in the misogyny directed at former PM Julia Gillard.
The same problem rears its ugly head on twitter and in the reaction to high-profile women in business, politics and in the media.
As television journalist and Today Show co-host Lisa Wilkinson explained in her Andrew Olle lecture last week, there is an almost hysterical level of criticism about hair and clothing that is hurled at women who appear on air and it’s certainly not all from women. And you could hardly describe it as calm and considered.
This disproportionate and heated reaction needs to be called out. If anger isn’t an emotion then what is it?
Continuing to label women, on the other hand, as suffering from an overdose of emotions in a weepy, moody kind of way — and by association less capable of logic and leadership — is simply retrograde stereotyping.
What’s more, there’s virtually no solid evidence from increasingly sophisticated brain research to back up this tired old cliché.
In Delusions of Gender, Australian cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine deconstructs the supposed ‘neuroscience’ that supports biological gender differences and has been featured in the whole “Women are from Venus, men are from Mars” genre.
To cut a long and very interesting analysis short, Fine found very little evidence to show men are more rational and women more emotional in studies of brain reactions. The evidence showing men and women have different innate thinking patterns or skills is not just miniscule – it really doesn’t exist, she says.
Yet we’ve also kidded ourselves for years that the world of paid work operates in a consistently rational way with no room for human emotion, and that men are therefore just better adapted to this environment.
But the workplace is often an emotional arena because it’s where we negotiate our income, status and increasingly our identity.
When I wrote a book examining this idea (Better than Sex: how a whole generation got hooked on work with Helen Trinca) the most vehement critics of the idea that we have a strong emotional investment in our jobs were workaholic men who I knew poured every bit of themselves into their jobs, which meant the world to them.
Emotion is part and parcel of everyone’s behaviour and not something we park at the office door. It is a strong driving force with good and bad consequences.
When women are labelled as emotional in the workplace, however, it’s also crystal clear they are not being complimented but reminded of another reason they are not equipped for high office.
So recognising that men can be just as emotional – jealous, angry, elated – and do not have a monopoly on cool, clear-headed behaviour at all times is just a bit overdue.
We all have emotional responses when values and ideas we care about are challenged and that’s no doubt why there’s such a strong reaction when gender equality is up for discussion.
You could even say the strength of the reaction proves this debate is hardly trivial, nor a case of political correctness. It’s about fundamental change to the traditional order of society and the distribution of power so it has plenty of potential to be deeply unsettling to some.
The anger that fuels much sexism is alarming but also clarifying. This kind of lashing out prevents a proper discussion and is rarely evidence-based. It is driven by fear and resistance to change.
And once you know where something stems from you have a much better chance of tackling it.