Here's why weeping at the workplace is not as unprofessional as you think

If you’ve never blinked away tears or felt your lip quivering in front of your boss, you may be tempted to flick past these pages. But I implore you, don’t. If The Office Criers are to feel safe expressing their emotions at work—the place where we spend most of our waking hours—without feeling like total losers, they need help from The Non-Criers. No one likes crying, but studies show that if we’re allowed to cry at work, it’s less likely we actually will—which is good news for everyone. 

“Women crying at work remains both routine and taboo,” writes Anne Kreamer in her book It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. The American journalist and author specialises in business and women’s work-life balance, and devoted a whole chapter of the book to women who cry at work, fittingly titled Big Girls Do Cry, in which she tries to remove the shame women feel after expressing emotion in the office. Despite being conducted in 2011, her Emotion in the Workplace Survey is still the most recent and most often quoted statistic about crying at work. Her study of more than 1,000 people across the United States found that 41 percent of women had cried at work during the previous year, and that crying is common among young women (45 percent), pretty rare among young men (nine percent), and even rarer among older men (five percent). 

Anecdotally, those numbers are just as accurate a decade later and half a world away. “Women are, by nature, more expressive and more emotionally intense,” says Sarah Godfrey, a psychologist and the Director of Moving Mindsets Psychology Clinic in Melbourne. “We’re being asked to go against our nature to fit into the workplace because traditionally, if you’re a woman crying at work, you’re seen in a patriarchal environment as weak, over-emotional, and unable to cope.”

There are several reasons women are predisposed to shedding more tears in the office, which Anne began exploring after her own tearful incident. “I conducted several large surveys to get a snapshot of the sociological and organisational reasons, as well as the physiological and neurological reasons, behind women being more likely to cry at work,” she explains. Anne discovered that when angry at work, women experience an “emotional cascade”. The initial impulse is to express their feelings physically, but when they’re restrained by polite society, the next urge is to lash out verbally. But then they’re held back by Miss Manners, which is why they end up crying. “We’re angry, we don’t know how to express it. We cry, we get ashamed because we cried, and then we’re mad at ourselves because we didn’t express our anger; because we cried,” Anne says. 

“When men are experiencing frustration, they can become verbal,” explains Melbourne-based Life and Relationship Coach Megan Luscombe. “They may not turn to tears because society, over time, has taught them not to. Women have been encouraged not to express their emotions verbally, so they will cry. The discrepancy in emotional encouragement is massive.” Sarah agrees. “It’s not that women are emotionally driven and men aren’t—it’s that men are allowed a bigger range of expressions. We’re allowed a finite amount to express in the workplace before we’re seen as being hysterical.” 

Another element working against women is our biology. Compared to reflex (irritant) tears, psychic (emotional) tears are made with higher concentrations of the protein prolactin, of which women produce six times the amount than men (as Heather Christie so rightly points out in The Crying Book—what would happen if we asked “why males suffer from a prolactin deficit and a corresponding inability to cry?”). Anne also found that women’s tear ducts are smaller, “So a guy could be feeling just as upset about something, but the woman looks ‘out of control’, because her tiny tear ducts mean the tears come down her face,” she says. Given that crying is not inherently bad, and that it’s a  biological mechanism designed to reset “our emotional equilibrium” and stimulate dopamine to make us feel better, while flooding an observer’s brain with oxytocin to increase their empathy, the stigmatisation of it in the workplace is strange. It’s considered as “a nonverbal form of TMI”, writes Anne. 

An Internet search for ‘crying at work’ throws up hundreds of results about how not to. Article after article quotes women CEOs who’ve cried in front of male colleagues and regretted it, because they’ve been perceived as weak or unable to cope. They’re sending out warnings to the women coming up the ladder behind them: “Whatever you do, don’t let them see you cry. Hide in your office; go to the bathroom.” There are myriad problems with this messaging, the first of which is: who has an office door anymore? Second: the women who’ve made it to the top have an opportunity to change attitudes around emotional expression at work and should be encouraging women to communicate how they feel rather than suppressing it. And third: crying is an uncontrollable impulse—how can we be expected to control it? 

As the US-based author and neuroscientist Robert Provine told The Cut, crying is like blushing: it’s “an emotion-related psychological response, for which our bodies don’t really have reliable on or off switches.” Anne quotes Erika Anderson, a Management Consultant and author: “A person can decide not to scream at someone...it is very hard to decide not to cry.” “If you’re searching ‘How not to’ for emotions, stop!” says Megan. “It’s a sign that you need to stipulate a boundary. Crying is not always a sign that something is terribly wrong; it can be a sign of frustration, and you can be transparent about that with your colleagues.” For Sarah, owning the cry is a movement towards greater empowerment for women at work. “We need to not see crying as a weakness, and stand proud” she says. “Use the ‘name and notice’ technique and say: ‘I am crying because I am angry with x, y, or z.’ If we can relate our emotions to what’s happening around us, we can stop making crying the problem and focus on a solution.” 

Of course, cultural change needs to come from the top. “We want to have environments where everybody feels safe to express a range of emotions without fear, which requires a leader to say, ‘If you’re experiencing any stressors, it’s better for you to let me know so we can find the adequate resources,” says Anne. Megan agrees. “If you allow people the space to cry, they won’t feel the immense pressure of trying to hold it in, which exacerbates the situation,” she says. “So if you create a safe environment, that will take some pressure off and people are actually less likely to cry.” Sarah is optimistic that now that we have returned to the office, we have the opportunity to change this. “With the pandemic and the past few years, there’s been this huge shift for empathy,” she says. “The acceptability of raw emotion is becoming normalised. We have this great opportunity coming out of the lockdowns to change the workforce and push this empathetic, compassionate leadership style. If we don’t grab this moment, we will lose the momentum that the pandemic has opened up. We can’t let it default back to where it was.”

Anne says the pandemic could be a catalyst for a more supportive—and therefore productive and profitable—workplace. “We’ve had to rethink so much of the work culture and the work-life balance, so Covid-19 could be the bright light to help lead people out of the forest.”