Wellbeing, gender and the politics of emotion

For behavioural science to be relevant we cannot be blind to the politically gendered explanations of emotion

Nearly half of working-age women are providing an average of 45 hours of unpaid care every week, while 25% of men provide 17 hours, according to a study from the thinktank Centre for Progressive Policy.  The disproportionate impact of these caring roles on women have serious consequences: one in three women say it blocks their career advancement, and linked to this, 22 per cent of women have persistent low income, compared to approximately 14 per cent of men. In other words, there are very serious structural consequences for women as a result of their caring activities.

Care giving of course involves physical and material assistance but also, at the heart of it, is emotional support.  This is often considered to be a characteristic of human behaviour that is highly authentic, reflecting an aspect of ourselves out of our direct control, as well as revealing of our ‘real’ preferences.  On that basis, it is easy to assume that women, who perform the bulk of the emotional care work in society, are doing this as a natural expression of their authentic spontaneous feelings, a natural part of their personalities.  

Behavioural science can be called upon help us look at this issue more closely, examining the assumptions about how emotion works.  And in doing so, we explore how emotion is treated in behavioural science, setting out how more can be done to develop a broader understanding of the wider based cultural mechanisms shaping the way we understand gender and emotion. We propose that this approach means we have alternative ways to consider the issue of care.

Emotion as authenticity

Much has been written about emotion and the way it is a signifier of something ‘authentic’, in contrast to our self-report that is somehow considered ‘contrived’ by comparison. Sitting underneath this is a view of emotion in terms of innate drives, reflecting instincts that mean we react in particular ways. So ‘anger’, for example, is a built-in defence mechanism of our animal ‘fight-flight-freeze’ pathways reflecting the notion of biological determinants, as shaped by evolutionary pressures.

Of course, as we have pointed out previously, this has long been challenged by people such as Lisa Feldman Barret who suggest that we do not construct our emotional concepts individually but are reliant upon social constructions through the culture we inhabit.  She illustrates this by pointing out that Russian has two distinct concepts for ‘anger’; German has three and Mandarin has five – making that case that if emotion were instinctual states, we would expect there only to be one.

It is easy to assume that our intuitive emotional responses are a marker of the wiring of our brains rather than reflective of the effects of culture.  And yet, it can seem behavioural science shies away from an exploration of what these cultural mechanisms actually look like.  Simply pointing out that emotional concepts are reliant upon our culture does not give us very much information to understand how this shapes behaviours (and therefore how to go about addressing them).

To help address and examine this further we call on the work of writer and organiser Alva Gotby.  In her book ‘They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life’, she sets out a cogent case for the way that, as she puts it “Feelings are not non-political or private.”  She suggests that emotion is impossible to understand without exploring its deeply gendered connotations. 

Gender and emotion

Central to her argument is the way that the social rules for expressing emotion are very different for men and women: women are required to perform the management of good feelings – not only in the workplace but in their personal lives.  As such, women are seen as responsible for the emotional work that keeps everyone functioning at home while men tend to consider they only need to do the non-emotional labour, such as heavy lifting and technical expertise.  This emotional work is essential for communities, yet it is devalued and underpaid. Indeed, the CPP estimates that women in the UK are providing 23.2bn hours of unpaid childcare care worth an estimated £382bn, while men provide 9.7bn worth £160bn.

There is also something else significant going on: women’s emotional labour is seen as a natural expression of their authentic spontaneous feelings, a natural part of their personalities.  As writer Leopoldina Fortunati points out, this notion of women as generous implies that care is its own reward and to perform this work is a sufficient source of pleasure so that no other remuneration is needed. 

In this context masculinity appears as a lack of capacity for care, allowing men to often ignore the needs of others.  Gotby suggests this leads to men being less likely to perceive or be influenced by emotions as they have not had to train themselves in attending to the emotional needs of other people and can therefore put their own needs first. Indeed, this reflects the way in which women can end up acting as ‘conversational cheerleaders’ enhancing the social performance of others.  Pamela Fishman suggests that women are more likely to demonstrate they are actively listening, affirming their partner’s opinions and choices. 

All of this, Gotby suggests, creates a lived experience of our interior selves which feels masculine or feminine, with these gendered feelings appearing to reflect our authentic selves. On this basis, we are taught to see a particular type of labour coming from within the person rather than being externally imposed. 

This can be difficult to see because, as Gotby points out, women are often actively working to erase any signs of emotional labour, disguising it under banners of ‘niceness’ and ‘natural femininity’. This makes the emotional work an invisible backdrop against which more visible forms of labour and production to take place.

Perversely, while women perform more of the invisible work of attending to the feelings of others, Gotby suggests they are deemed to be excessively emotional themselves. This is a function of the circular association of femininity and emotion: femininity is devalued because of its connection with emotionality while emotion becomes devalued when coded as feminine.

Codified into labour

Because emotional labour is so deeply naturalised and seen as inherent in the personality of the worker, then it fails to acquire the status as saleable product separable from its seller. Revealing these mechanisms was the focus for 70’s activist group, Wages for Housework. They suggested, among other things, that women might choose to only smile when paid for it, and through this undermining the assumed authenticity of women’s emotional display.

Gotby suggests that the shift we need to make is to see emotional labour as work that society has imposed on them, which deserves to recognised as work, rather than a reflection of their supposedly natural interior lives. When women voice discontent with their position it is typically individualised rather than, as Gotby suggests, interpreted as acts of resistance. In other words, complaining women “are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in ‘struggle’.”

The Wages for Housework movement suggests an interesting reinterpretation of emotional practices: they suggest that ‘outlaw emotions’ such as anger can be used to broaden the way we see possible emotional practices: the process of pushing back through anger means that emotion moves from something individual to something communal.  As such, emotion is less concerned with the inner truth of an individual and instead we can see it as a collective habit that can become a political tool. 

Interestingly, comments about the collective nature of emotion is referenced in a 2019 paper by David Garcia and Bernard Rimé  that shows how this collective influence of emotion can transform the experiences of certain events (the paper looked at data collected from Twitter users after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015).

Implications for behavioural science

There is so much more that Gotby unpacks in her book than we can do justice to here. But, for our purpose, her work sets a challenge for the discipline of behavioural science. The points she raises run counter to a lot of the way in which emotion is referenced in behavioural science: these issues are either represented in non-mainstream parts of the discipline (such as Gender Studies) or generally ignored. 

Of course, mainstream behavioural science perspective does at times borrow from other disciplines to assist an understanding of broader societal issues. One example is Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs who draw on economics and social exchange theory to offer a theory of sexual interactions.  But there has been little representation from the Feminist, Queer and Trans studies as well as Black Feminism sources that Gotby uses: surely these should be informing conversations in behavioural science? We argue that given behaviour can be understood using these disciplines, then they should be within the remit of behavioural science.

To ignore them and assume, in this instance, that emotions are a reflection on internalised states or simply to wave a hand loosely in the direction of ‘culture’ then we fail to properly understand the behaviours that we all have an interest in from marketers, policy makers to employers and all of us as individuals.

Implications for care

Failure to consider the way the social constructs that elide emotion and gender means we can over-emphasise certain aspect of the issue and not look closely enough at others.  Gotby suggests that there is too much of a focus on equality and the notion that men should help out at home.  Whilst this may be true and important, it does little to spell out the ‘labour relations’ and relations of power that created this set-up in the first place.

It also fails to address the way that women tend to retain the principal responsibility for ensuring domestic work gets done, even when they are shared more equally.  She suggests invisible forms of labour tend to remain unequally distributed even in supposedly egalitarian relationships and masculinity remains the standard against which women’s sameness or difference is measured.

Finding solutions therefore needs a greater focus on the systems that are in place and understanding how these create the outcomes we are seeing (perhaps another opportunity for Ruth Schmidt’s SPACE model).

In summary

Gotby’s book carefully sets out the arguments for the way that a rich and comprehensive literature is available to shed light on a significant range of issues – in this case how we need to understand what Gotby calls the ‘political economy of love’ to help unpack how we manage care.

Failure to bring this literature into a wider behavioural science analysis not only runs the danger of an outdated analysis of how to resolve some of our big societal challenges but also means we fail to properly understand some of the core pillars of the discipline.