To Cry or Not to Cry

Younger corporate women used to be aghast at this and say in shocked tones,“how unprofessional”,and you could see that many of them were bitterly disappointed as one more woman role model bit the dust. Being so much older,with many years of seeing badly behaved men at meetings,I thought differently,though I can’t say that I had total comfort in the position I took. I told them that I had seen equally senior corporate men storm out of the room,shout,use bad language,slam papers on the desk. And if we accepted all that as par for the course,or,at worse,treated it as a character flaw,why couldn’t we extend the same courtesy to women crying at meetings? In any case,if a woman did all those other things,she would promptly be termed a “she-male” and that would go against her. So how does a woman express her emotions in tough work situations?

But my niggling discomfort with my logic remained,so I discussed it with a senior bureaucrat woman friend,who has such a different take on things that you want to hit her on the head for finding the Achilles heel of your argument. In an earlier column,I had written about my illogical discomfort with a woman from a professional services firm who wore tinkly anklets to the board meeting she was invited to present at. Illogical,because I didn’t have a problem with glass bangles tinkling at meetings. Bureaucrat lady had unerringly gone for the jugular. “That’s the trouble with your corporate world,” she says. “Had she been clicking high heels around the board room,you would have seen it as a symbol of power.” On this one,she heard me out impatiently and said yes,women must be allowed to express their emotions in any way that works for them,even if it is different from men. “But tell me,what was the atmosphere in the room after this happened at your last meeting?” I said that the men immediately changed their earlier behaviour. One said “since she is so upset about this let’s not oppose this proposal any more”.

Some of them got patriarchal and shifted to the parent- child mode of transaction and quietly took over the reigns,and yet others looked very uncomfortable and retreated behind their Blackberrys. “There you go”,she says. “In your world,when a woman cries at a meeting,the whole atmosphere gets gendered after that. That’s the reason for your niggling feeling of annoyance.”

I asked her how it happens in her world. She gave me the example of a woman colleague who burst into tears at a meeting when the going got tough. The men look on impassively,silently. The chairman of the meeting declared a five minute ceasefire break ,cleared the room,asked for a glass of water and told her to compose herself. After the meeting resumed,it was back to business as usual.

So Shombit is right in that we need to teach men how to deal with women expressing their emotions differently. If Bollywood,which now shows men unabashedly crying,is a mirror of things to come,we may see men expressing their emotions at meetings with tears; and making tears a part of corporate meetings. And we women will have to adopt storming out of them as our thing,tinkling anklets,clicking high heels et al.