Labeling Women as Emotional Undermines Them

Why do we use the word Emotionality as a personality trait?

It’s Not a Compliment to Call Someone Emotional

The idea that women are emotional but not men got codified in the 19th century when physicians attributed women’s problems to hysteria—a term referring to a wandering uterus—which caused ungovernable emotional excess. Hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women who were seen as emotional and unstable, and likely to develop behavioral problems. Of course, men couldn’t be diagnosed with ungovernable emotional excess because they didn’t have a uterus!

The idea of women’s emotionality didn’t get challenged until the feminist movement in the mid-20th century when increasing numbers of women in the biological and social sciences began to challenge this characterization of women along with many other traditional ideas about women.

Challenging the Concept of Emotionality

Psychologist Agneta Fischer has challenged the way that we use the concept of emotionality. She offers four arguments for the misuse of emotionality:

• First, emotionality is treated like a unipolar disposition or personality trait, which is stable over time and independent of any social context. A trait is a specific characteristic of an individual like eye color or height. For women, it is seen as a defining personality characteristic.
• Second, emotionality is associated with being relationship-oriented—being emotional means needing to be intimate with others and or dependent on others.
• Third, the concept of emotionality is not specific, rather it can refer to many different aspects of emotions without specifying any particular emotion.
• Fourth, the emotionality concept is vague and often gets confused with notions like impulsivity instability, or irrationality.

Emotionality is a descriptor of people, particularly women, and reduces all our emotional experiences to one personality characteristic. It doesn’t tell us if the person is sad, happy, angry, lonely, or joyful, nor why he or she is experiencing such a feeling.

Fischer admonishes us not to speak of emotionality as a sex-specific disposition or personality trait. Instead, we should acknowledge that emotions are largely social reactions that occur in specific kinds of situations.

The Trait-Situation Debate

As Fischer notes, emotionality is treated as if it were a basic trait that characterizes people, mostly women. Personality psychologists believe that traits, defined as distinguishing characteristics of people, determine consistency in the thought and behavior of people over time and across different situations.

In ordinary life, we tend to think about our friends, enemies, family members, and colleagues as having certain characteristics or traits. You might think your best friend is cheerful, extroverted, and honest. You might describe your partner as quiet, kind, and helpful. We think these descriptions are accurate and reflect true characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—their personality.

Other psychologists, identified as situationists, argue that our actions are not consistent enough from situation to situation to be characterized by broad personality traits. For example, a person who might cheat on tests in algebra class will not cheat on English tests. They might steadfastly comply with rules in games, and they would never lie to their partner.

Different actions in different situations suggest there is no general trait of honesty, for example. As far back as the 1960s psychologist Walter Mischel challenged the idea that personality traits determined our actions. He argued that we can better understand what people think and feel, and why they behave as they do if we look at people’s distinctive reactions to specific situations. A husband may be quiet at home, particularly after working a full day, but be talkative and outgoing at a party.

After many years of debate, psychologists propose that specific behaviors are driven by the interaction between situations with specific psychological meaning to that individual and the general tendency to act in a way that the individual brings to the situation.

We need to be aware of the tendency in everyday life to think about people as having distinct traits (honesty, extroversion, openness, kindness, and emotionality) that account for why they think, feel, and act as they do.

Labeling Women As Emotional Undermines Them

Labeling a woman as emotional or telling her to calm down makes her point of view seem less credible. Ask Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris. Oprah was critiqued when prepping for a 60 Minutes interview for expressing too much emotion—even in how she said her name. Female politicians are easy targets for undermining their opinions. A campaign adviser of an opposing candidate called Harris hysterical when she asked a pointed question of an opponent. Yale management professor Victoria Brescoll reports that invoking a woman’s emotionality can be a barrier to getting and succeeding in leadership roles in business.

Recent research demonstrates that when women engaged in an ordinary disagreement with another person were identified as either emotional or were told to calm down, the argument they were making was considered less legitimate than that of a male participant. Labeling women emotional or telling them to calm down invokes the idea that women are not rational, delegitimizing their arguments.

In the research study described, the arguments made by the men labeled as emotional or told to calm down were not delegitimized. The participants in the study didn’t buy that the men were being emotional.

Women can’t win! If we are labeled emotional we lose credibility. If we are not emotional we risk failing our prescribed communal role—being warm, caring, and concerned about others.

Let’s Stop Using Emotionality as a Personality Trait, Particularly to Characterize Women

Using concepts like emotionality as traits to characterize people is a disservice to them and a barrier to effectively relating to them. Emotionality used as a trait that characterizes women is a particular disservice to women.

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