Program: Emotional labour with Rose Hackman

Rose
The patriarchy that we live in really expects women to be catering to the emotions of everyone around them constantly.

Yumi
Hey, before we get started on this episode, I want to confess that I've been feeling bad because about two months ago, it was my producer Tamar's birthday and I wanted to make her a cake to mark the occasion, but it landed on a real pinch point in my life and I just didn't have time. I think it's important to show people around you that you care about them.

Rose
Emotional labour is the expectation that someone will be in charge of communal wellbeing. It is the expectation, the responsibility of showing up emotionally for the people around you.

Yumi
This showing up is work that's invisible and deeply undervalued. Being considerate of the emotional needs of your community is often written off as something women are just better at because of our gender, like braiding hair or knowing when it's time to bake a cake. It's a form of work that's never acknowledged even though it underpins our homes, our relationships and even our economy. But emotional labour comes at a cost. By being the emotional heavy lifters, women tend to put their own needs lower on the list, making sure the emotional lives of our loved ones and friends are sorted first. 

Rose Hackman is a journalist and author who's been looking into the concept of emotional labour for over 10 years. Her book is called Emotional Labour. In it, she calls out the lack of recognition women get for doing all this exhausting extra work and makes the case that men need to get their acts together to ease our burdens and to build better, more equal relationships. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies, we need to talk about emotional labour. As part of Rose's research, she looks at how the expectation of emotional labour falls on women in all the different areas of our lives.

Rose
So a woman walking down the street is going to be told to smile. A woman at work is going to be told if she's not constantly smiling at rest that she has resting bitch face. And at home, of course, women are charged with taking responsibility for communal wellbeing.

Yumi
Whether that's diffusing the tension at the family Christmas, mopping the tears on your kid who's just had a horrendous day at school or keeping the work wheels frictionlessly spinning by baking birthday cakes. Rose says that even though expectations of emotional responsibility are highly gendered, they're not related to biological sex. We weren't born this way.

Rose
Neuroscience research, psychological research very clearly shows that the types of skills that are associated with emotional labour are fundamentally human. They're not gendered. So boys, girls, men, women are perfectly able to feel and express empathy. It's just we are incentivizing one gender, one sex to constantly be performing those types of skills.

Yumi
So how did we get to this point where we're expected to put the emotional needs of those around us above our own? Rose says it boils down to the fact that we live in a society that prizes men far more than it prizes women. Picture us as the handmaids of fun.

Rose
It's about women being facilitators of people's experiences, being buffers of shock and pain and about men being the primary enjoyers of experience of life, society, et cetera.

Yumi
I feel like you're describing me, Rose. And I don't necessarily think it's all bad. In terms of helping people have a good time, showing leadership, caring about my community, whether it be a small group of friends or workmates, setting the tone and the same at home. I've got kids really, really managing their emotions and always being attuned, very attuned to the emotions of those around me. It is interesting though, when you think about men being not attuned, I can't even imagine. I cannot imagine for a second what it would be like to be misattuned or non-attuned to the emotional wellbeing of those in the room with you. So how do they benefit from that?

Rose
Totally. I just want to start off by saying that you're completely right that this kind of work is beautifully valuable. The problem is we live in a society that completely undermines, devalues this kind of work. I would say that the biggest way in which they benefit is time. And time might seem very simple, but it's actually huge. You know, over the last few decades, we've seen, especially in dual income households and straight dual income households, we've seen a lot of the domestic labour gap narrow, but not fully. And one of the ways in which I like to think about emotional labour, because of course there's a lot of domestic tasks that are not strictly emotional. It's not just emotional development and literacy in the household.

Rose
Although women are still expected to take charge of communal wellbeing, which has all sorts of knock-on effects in terms of what they do or what we do, all sorts of activities that no one wants to do, we will take on, you know, taking an aunt to the airport, making dinner, cleaning. Those tasks are not strictly emotional, but fundamentally we will do them because we often are saving other people from doing them or someone's got to do them. And also we understand that those simple tasks and actions fundamentally contribute to the makeup of a smooth, happy, loving household.

Yumi
And while driving your aunt to the airport means that she feels loved and you feel more connected to her, this kind of work means there's less time for play. In the US, there's an almost one hour leisure time gap per day between men and women. And it low key annoys me to think that they could have been driving Aunty Bobo to the airport and I could have been the one at home playing with myself.

Rose
Women come home from work and instead of a man might be able to take an hour to meditate or to go to the gym or to read a book. And still to this day, women are expected to be putting their extra time, their leisure time to work for the benefit of others. And I think that for those of us who sometimes feel exhausted, whether it's because we have children in our home or a lot of obligations that can really add up, one hour is really a life lived for yourself versus a life lived for others.

Yumi
If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll have heard me talking about the mental load. And yes, although there is some overlap between the mental load and emotional labour, they're not the same thing.

Rose
So the mental load really refers to specific part of overwhelmingly something that happens to women at home, which is the idea that they are responsible for the household. And that I like to illustrate it as the idea of having a lot of tabs, like computer tabs open in your brain at all times. They're keeping tabs on, do we need more soap? Who's picking up Susie from practice? Are we on top of the groceries this week? Oh my gosh, I need to check in with this cousin, this next door neighbour, this immediate family member. So that's the mental load. This idea that overwhelmingly very often women are tasked with being responsible for the household. And that means so many invisible, exhausting, interminable activities that they have to shoulder. Emotional labour is quite different. Emotional labour is the expectation that someone will be in charge of communal wellbeing. It is the expectation, the responsibility of showing up emotionally for the people around you.

Yumi
The term was first coined by academic Ali Hochschild in the 1980s, who was researching the work of managing feelings in the service industry.

Rose
She famously took the example of flight attendants who were not so much tasked with handing out food and beverages on airplanes, but were tasked really with conveying a feeling of safety, of care, of sexiness. And Ali Hochschild equated this emotional labour in the workplace to a form of emotion work, what she called it, that we'd long been accustomed to seeing women provide in private.

Yumi
So I think the flight attendant example is good because it's so clearly the management of people's experience emotionally. But can you talk us through a more rudimentary job situation like for instance, where I work, where we're not so much public facing, we're just dealing with people from our organization. How in a situation that's less about the service industry, are women expected to shoulder all the emotional labour?

Rose
There's been all of this research that shows that in male dominated industries, specifically white collar industries, where you might think that emotional labour is not a central part of the job. So a lawyer, an engineer, a journalist, men in order to get ahead need to do two things. They need to be confident and competent. So they need to be really good at what they do and really loud about being good at it. And women in order to be promoted, to get ahead in the workplace in white collar industries, they have to be confident, competent, and they also have to do emotional aid. They have to be other oriented. They have to be constantly providing an extra layer of other oriented traits of, you know, being a team builder. They have to actually be constantly performing often subservient expressions that reassure everyone around them that they're not actually threatening while also trying to show that their confidence of being good at their job. So it can often feel for women in white collar sectors, like they're very much stuck between a rock and a hard place and they're effectively being set up to fail. There is a litmus test that we apply to women in these white collar industries that absolutely do not apply to men.

Yumi
Further to that, in my two and a half decades of working in media, I don't think it's ever been a man who baked and brought in a cake for a colleague, ever. And yeah, making cakes is a real thing, as he's remembering that Tamar, my producer, has a dairy intolerance and he's also a great baker herself. So no packet mix nonsense here. That's all emotional labour. But the cake is also a stand in for all the labour we do in making sure people feel happy, included and cared about in a workplace. It mightn't be baking. It might be listening to people whinge. It might be making sure there are enough spoons in the office kitchen. Let's take the labour out of the workplace and into the home. When it comes to emotional work in heterosexual relationships, Rose says her research points to a pattern, that while men might be emotionally engaged early on in a relationship, as things progress, the burden of this labour falls to women. And in the long run, both sides miss out.

Rose
Because these are essential skills. If you don't train people to practise essential skills, you're effectively making them really not great at preserving positive relationships. So I know that the statistic here is that 70% of the time when a divorce is filed, it's a woman filing it. And there's been a huge discussion about a male loneliness epidemic, and the tragedy, the very real tragedy of male deaths of despair. The problem is when you cast one gender as being really good at emotions, and another gender of being not emotional at all, the problem is we're setting up boys and then men for failure. Because the skill set of forging positive relationships, of being someone that other people want to be around, of being thought of as someone who's really a kind, thoughtful, empathetic person. If someone doesn't have those skills, they're probably not gonna be able to maintain as many relationships as someone who does. And that is a huge driver for sickness, for isolation, for loneliness, and then all sorts of mental health diseases that end up being extremely dangerous to the people themselves and maybe even the people around them.

Yumi
I just want to agree wholeheartedly in what we see, which is men who are middle-aged and upwards really struggling to connect with others if they don't have a partner there to facilitate it for them. And you can see them floundering. There's so much dysfunction there.

Rose
Totally. And I think you hinted at what happens. I think a lot of the time, that expectation that women should be the emotional facilitators for men in romantic relationships, that ends up making a woman effectively the broker of social relationships, the broker of communal activity.

Yumi
And it's not just communal activity. Women are also charged with the role of bringing other people's emotions into equilibrium, especially our male partners.

Rose
There is some part of this that is weaponizing competence, and we can talk about it in a very light way. And then there is a part of this that is effectively you're training women to be buffers of tempers, to basically either try and get someone who's depressed back up or someone who's very volatile down. This is actually a very kind of dark, sordid training that we are enforcing as a society when we offhandedly tell a girl, a woman on the street to smile. We are telling her, you exist to facilitate the emotional experiences of the people around you. And if you're not doing that, we're going to remind you that's what you should be doing.

Yumi
There are real dangers when it comes to men not being able to manage their own emotional wellbeing.

Rose
One of the things that I really get frustrated as is a lot of the conversations that our policy people, our politicians have about divorce rates and marriages and birth rates completely ignores the fact that one in four women is going to be the victim of domestic abuse in her lifetime. So when you say that we need to figure out how to keep marriages alive, you're effectively saying you want to ignore a culture of women who are dealing with very volatile situations because sadly the nature of domestic violence as it stands is men beating up the women or the children in their lives.

Yumi
Does your research include what happens with lesbian couples?

Rose
Yes, my editor, if I'm being fully honest with you, who is actually a queer woman, wanted to make sure that we drummed home how unequal heterosexual couples were as a kind of essential, you know, the beginning of the book. Queer couples are much more egalitarian, but very often the person in the couple who takes on more of the feminized role ends up incurring a lot of the inequality that we are familiar with in straight couples. Very interestingly, actually, the data in the US also showed that among heterosexual couples, mixed race couples tended to be more egalitarian. And what you would maybe ponder for both of those groups, and I'll go more into queer couples in a bit, is that when you don't have a set cultural script, there is more opportunity to renegotiate the script and to have a conversation that feels maybe, you know, more adapted to not necessarily societal expectations, but the specificity of your individual circumstances.

Yumi
Rose isn't just looking at emotional labour from an academic, aloof perspective. As we all do, she has got skin in the game.

Rose
I got married at 24 after a relatively short courtship. And that first marriage was really, it was very clear to me in that very short-lived marriage that the expectation was that I should, you know, play a lot of specific roles, not ask too many questions, adapt to the career of the man I had married, and, you know, be a caregiver first and foremost.

Yumi
This uneven distribution of the emotional work in her first marriage came as a surprise to Rose.

Rose
My dad died at a really young age. It was just our mum and my two sisters. So I hadn't really witnessed on a familial level a degree of gendered inequality the way I then later went on to understand that, you know, it was so prevalent.

Yumi
Let's talk about emotional labour in the bedroom. What does that look like?

Rose
I'm so glad you brought up lesbian couples. A lot of the way in which traditionally we explained away the orgasm gap in heterosexual couples was this idea that women's bodies, which are so mysterious, and orgasms were just so hard for women, and it's just men's, you know, was just like much more straightforward. And also that men's orgasm fundamentally was the main event, which if you think about that, I couldn't think of a better way of understanding emotional labour inequality, the idea that men's enjoyment is central and women are there to facilitate men's enjoyment. And if they can like have a nice time, maybe while that's happening, then good for them, but that's not really what we care about.

Yumi
One of the ways in which heterosexual women put their own emotional needs beneath those of her male partner is by faking orgasms.

Rose
But a lot of us are not necessarily handed a script when we first start having sex. And yet the understanding that the boy slash the man is there to be catered to. And of course, then you have the literature on faking it during sex. You know, what's so fascinating to me when I did this research is I came across academic articles that didn't just show the prevalence of faking it during sex, which for women is still relatively high, but then also tried to understand why it was that they were faking it. And this one study really shows that women are faking it because one, it will actually accelerate men being able to enjoy sex to their full capacity. And two, because they understood that men feeling like they had performed to their women would then be able to have an orgasm themselves. Women, we're not all being told that this is what we have to do. And yet there is this fascinating phenomenon that women know they have to effectively stroke the ego of their male partner. Then if they're told, was it good? They have to say, yes, yes, yes, it was wonderful.

Yumi
If there's a woman listening right now who is faking orgasms. And I mean, the whole thing is so fascinating to me as well because I thought we'd all grown out. I thought we'd agreed as a cohort to stop doing that. But if there is a woman who's listening right now who's faking orgasms to stroke and protect the ego of her partner, what advice would you give to her?

Rose
So what I would say is ideally you need to have a very sobering conversation with your male partner because your pleasure, your enjoyment, your time is worth just as much as your partner's time and enjoyment and pleasure. And a new way of living, not just only for yourself, but for yourself and for others. It doesn't need to be either or, starts now. But I will also acknowledge because of the interviews and women I've spoken to over the last decade at this point, that I understand that for some people they're in a survival mode and they can't actually rock the boat. And if they can't rock the boat, what I would invite them to do is reflect on why that is and whether it's time to think about a situation I dynamic in a new way.

Yumi
You mean get the fuck out of there?

Rose
I do. I do.

Yumi
Should we be looking at ways of compensating the work of emotional labour, perhaps financially and in non-financial ways?

Rose
I mean, paying for emotional labour is always a bit of a provocative statement, sadly, in spite of the fact that as I mentioned, it's actually a central part of millions of jobs. Yes, I absolutely think that emotional labour should be paid for in the workplace that looks like actually giving raises to those essential jobs that we so depend on. We all know that more humane workplaces make for better workplaces, make for more resilient workplaces. You know, emotional labour should be part of a job description, very honestly. So that employee, worker doing emotional labour, even if they're an engineer or a journalist, actually have that emotional labour recognized, evaluated on it so it's not just, you know, shoved into the boxes of the women workers, the minority workers who feel like they have to do it. And then those who are good at it get rewarded for it. You know, right now, emotional labour is not part, we don't see it as a promotable skillset. We see it as something actually that's just more part of the support roles. If anything, someone who's really good at emotional labour is going to be less prone to promotion than someone, you know, who's refusing to do it. That's seen as more of a power case. So there needs to be a real adjustment that has to happen.

Yumi
So what Rose is saying there is that if I ever get around to making Tamar's birthday cake and we stick the candles in and we sing happy birthday, that is actually top-notch employee labour going on there, which should be recognized and potentially promoted. I understand the assignment and I'll get baking this afternoon. But what about our personal lives? How could this idea of compensation or reward work there?

Rose
Valuing emotional labour, you know, can look like a lot of different things. It can look like, I mean, ideally we go towards a world of open-ended reciprocity. So a world where we're not counting necessarily tit for tat, but we know that if we're showing up for a person or for a group of people, you know, we are acknowledging through those actions that we're part of an emotional network, that I'm a human being, I'm an individual, but I'm not operating all by myself. I am effectively surviving because of these other people around me. I'm going to show up for those other people, but I have to trust that those other people fundamentally also understand that they're part of the same emotional network and they're going to be giving back to me.

Yumi
I feel like as somebody like you who's so aware of this emotional labour, you'd see it in ways that maybe the rest of us aren't that switched onto yet. Have you ever experimented with going on strike emotionally?

Rose
Hey, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to get better and better at deciding when someone is owed my emotional labour and when someone is not. Another reason why I think the term, the framing emotional labour is wonderful, is because I think that previously we thought of women just being emotionally available 24 seven. That kind of emotional labour is an infinite form of work that should be just delivered to everyone nonstop.

Yumi
You know how Rose got married at 24? Well, she's not with that guy anymore.

Rose
I'm now married again, and I'm married to someone who's wonderful. And I met him in my thirties and we only got married a year and a half ago. And it's much easier to build a relationship with egalitarian aspirations once you understand more of the world, more of yourself and more, you know, the kind of person that is going to be a good fit.

Yumi
The thing I like about this is that there's nothing wrong with doing emotional labour. Things like helping your nut job friends remain on speaking terms with their workmates or hugging your children until they regulate and get all soft and relaxed and trusting. Those skills are gifts that we keep putting back into the world again and again. The thing that Rose helps us to understand is that the work is vital, should be shared across genders, acknowledged and rewarded, and that it doesn't spring from an inexhaustible well. We can get tired. We can say no. Being able to opt out of this labour, recognise that we are deserving of care ourselves and maybe even a couple of slices of that cake, that's the yum yum in this sum sum.

Yumi
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungara and Gadigal peoples. Ladies, We Need To Talk is mixed by Ann-Marie de Bettencor. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.