Gender and Emotion
This episode takes a detour away from the standard format of the podcast, exploring a problem that two previous guests identified: There are many more women as guests on this podcast than men… twice as many. Why is that the case? It’s not a pattern that I ever intended to create, but there it is.
What does this gender imbalance suggest about the relationship between emotion and gender? Should I adjust the design of this podcast to compensate, and restore gender balance? This episode explores the available research on the subject, focusing on some of the studies cited in a powerful chapter by Leslie R. Brody, Judith A. Hall, and Lynissa R. Stokes, in the 2018 fourth edition of The Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones.
In a new episode of the popular cable TV show And Just Like That, it’s proposed that “Men are dumb with feelings.” Is that true?
Full Transcript
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that surveys the diversity of subjective feelings that are available for our experience.
This week’s episode is a departure from this podcast’s typical format. Instead of sharing other people’s stories about an emotion of the week, I want to discuss a problem this podcast has been having, and ask for your help in creating a solution.
What’s at issue is a gender imbalance in the voices that are being heard on the podcast. Two of those voices, Laura and Shannon Haskins, were guests in the same episode a few weeks ago, the episode about trust. After the episode was released, both Laura and Shannon pointed out the same thing out to me, which is that all six of the guests in that episode were women.
After my conversations with Laura and Shannon, I went back and checked the gender distribution of previous episodes, and saw that the episodes on the emotions of yugen and compersion featured exclusively female guests. In none of the 14 full episodes released so far have men consisted of more than 50 percent of the voices.
Dividing the gender identity of the guests in the episodes so far into the three categories of self-identified women, self-identified men, and gender fluid or non-binary, the following are the gender distributions of guests for each episode:
Friluftsliv
Women: 2 – 50% Men: 1 – 25% Non-binary/Fluid: 1 – 25%
Compersion
Women: 2 – 100% Men: 0 – 0% Non-binary/Fluid: 0 – 0%
Curiosity
Women: 3 – 50% Men: 2 – 33% Non-binary/fluid: 1 – 17%
Dadirri
Women: 3 – 60% Men: 2 – 40% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Unmasked
Women: 1 – 25% Men: 2 – 50% Non-binary/fluid: 1 – 25%
Yugen
Women: 3 – 100% Men: 0 – 0% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Love
Women: 6 – 86% Men: 1 – 14% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Surrender
Women: 3 – 60% Men: 2 – 40% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Climate Grief
Women: 3 – 50% Men: 3 – 50% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Pride
Women: 1 – 33% Men: 1 – 33% Non-binary/fluid: 1 – 33%
Trust
Women: 6 – 100% Men: 0 – 0% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Flux
Women: 2 – 33% Men: 3 – 50% Non-binary/fluid: 1 – 17%
Arbejdsglade
Women: 3 – 75% Men: 1 – 25% Non-binary/fluid: 0 – 0%
Arrived
Women: 1 – 33% Men: 1 – 33% Non-binary/fluid: 1 – 33%
I’ve interviewed 44 people for this podcast so far. You haven’t heard from all of them yet, but I can tell you that 27 (63%) of those people are women, and only 13 (30%) were men, with 3 (7%) non-binary or gender fluid people making up the remainder. That’s a dramatically unbalanced representation of gender.
From one perspective, this gender imbalance isn’t a problem. After all, it is not the primary purpose of this podcast to provide statistically representative coverage of emotional experience. I’ve intentionally avoided this purpose for several reasons:
First of all, I’m more interested in subjective qualitative experiences than population statistics. That’s why I’m interested in emotions in the first place. This qualitative point of view isn’t superior to a quantitative approach, but it is where my personal curiosity leads.
Second, there isn’t any intellectually coherent, evidence-based approach for measuring the prevalence of specific emotions among humans as a whole, or between different groups of people. There is not any academic consensus about how to define emotion. There also is no credible, widely agreed-upon method for measuring particular emotions. Many researchers have proposed measures of emotions, but these proposals have lacked widespread support among academics, because different groups of academics disagree about the fundamental nature of emotion and about the differences between particular emotions. There are many published research papers that purport to measure specific aspects of emotion, but the methods these studies use are highly controversial because of the way that they dramatically narrow and decontextualize emotions in order to make quantitative measurement possible.
On top of these limitations of psychological research, there’s a serious crisis of confidence in the field of psychology, as people are finally owning up to the fact that shoddy research methods have been rife in studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the economic structure of academia has resulted in outright fraud, as appears to be the case with dozens of studies led by the famous and wealthy Harvard professor, Francesca Gino. Psychological studies that have been cited for years as if their results were reliable fact are now under review, and often, it’s being discovered that what psychologists claimed to know hasn’t really been founded in rigorously-established evidence.
Third, even if there were reliable, coherent, fact-based methods for measuring emotion statistically, I would lack the resources to engage in such research. This podcast explores a different emotion every week. To conduct methodologically rigorous, statistically-representative surveys capable of providing information comparing the prevalence of the many specific emotions among different groups would require a massive amount of time and money. No such study has ever been conducted, in part because there’s no sound theoretical basis for designing such research, but also because of the overwhelming investment it would require. So, there’s no reliable material upon which I could base a program for recruiting guests in such a way as to ensure that the people I talk to are statistically representative of the kind of people who most often experience any specific emotion.
Fourth, emotional experience is varied. Different people define specific emotions in different ways. Even a single person may have several different ways of thinking about what a particular emotion is. There is remarkable diversity within even a supposedly simple emotional concept, such as sadness.
Because emotion is inherently ambiguous, I have avoided making claims about patterns in the kind of people who feel emotions. I’ve avoided taking sides in disagreements about the definitions of specific emotions. Instead, I have designed this podcast as a project in qualitative description of the variety of emotions that exist. My goal is to document the range of human emotional experience, presenting a variety of perspectives with each emotion, without elevating any particular perspective as more true than any other. Even within this limited scope, the work of this podcast can’t be definitive.
These are some of the thoughts that nudge me toward thinking that perhaps the gender imbalance among the guests of this podcast isn’t a serious problem, but is just a manifestation of the non-representative design I’ve chosen. Up until this point, I haven’t chosen to interview people because of their demographic identities. I’ve looked for people who are willing to talk about their emotions.
It’s when I think of the implications of this approach that the idea creeps into my head that I shouldn’t be so fast to dismiss concerns about the relatively small number of men speaking as guests on this podcast. I ask myself why there are twice as many women as men that I have interviewed for the podcast. I never intended to seek out women in particular. I reached out to roughly the same number of women as men, asking them to participate in the podcast, but for some reason, I ended up interviewing more women than men.
What is that reason? Why did this pattern emerge, when I had no intention of producing it?
There is more than one possible explanation. The explanation that best fits popular gender stereotypes is that men have less to say about emotion than women do because men feel emotion less than women do.
This stereotype was on prominent display in the recently released first episode of the second season of And Just Like That, the cable TV successor to the long-running show Sex And The City. The show features women having lots of emotions about lots of things while the men in their lives mostly just seem to feel not much about anything.
The writers of the show repeatedly make this theme of male emotional blankness explicit, as when one character states, “You're overthinking this. Men aren't that emotional.”
In another scene, one woman explains her relationship with a man to another woman, saying to her, “We’re not a couple.” The second woman reacts by asking, “Does he know that? Because men are dumb.” The two women conclude their conversation with the declaration that, “Men are dumb with feelings.”
Are men dumb with feelings? Are men just not that emotional? Is that why I have fewer men than women as guests for this podcast about emotion?
Instead of just offering my opinion on the subject, I want to look at what empirical research has to say about gender and emotion. As I discuss this research, I’ll be using a chapter on the topic of gender and emotion from the 2018 fourth edition of the Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. The chapter was written by Leslie R. Brody, Judith A. Hall, and Lynissa R. Stokes., and surveys the state of research into the ways that gender may impact emotional experience and expression. Citations to the relevant studies cited in their chapter are included in the show transcript, if you’re interested in reading further.
The distinction between emotional experience and emotional expression is one of the central ideas discussed by the authors. The way that people feel on the inside doesn’t always match the way they present themselves to the outside world. It isn’t necessarily the case that the people who make the most dramatic displays of emotion are, in fact, more emotional than people who appear more subdued. So, if one gender tends to make a more prominent outward display of an emotion, that doesn’t necessarily mean that gender actually feels that emotion more than other people do (Kring, A. M., & Gordon, A.H. (1998). Sex differences in emotion: Expression, experience, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 686-703 and Dunsmore, J.C., Her. P., Halberstadt, A.G., & Perez-Rivera, M. B. (2009). Parents’ beliefs about emotions and children’s recognition of parents’ emotions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 121-140.)
The authors emphasize this point by citing a study published in the year 2000 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly journal, finding that adherence to gender stereotypes about emotion is stronger in the expression of emotion than in the internal experience of emotion itself (Plant, E. A., Hyde, J. S., Keltner D., & Devine, P. G. (2000) The gender stereotyping of emotions. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 81-92.) In two other studies, the facial expressions of emotion by research participants appeared to be different on average between men and women as they watched a film, even though there were no gendered differences in the emotions that research participants said that they felt during the film.
This direction of research suggests that men and women can experience the very same emotions, but express them differently, or express their emotions to a different extent. The gender stereotype expressed in the TV show And Just Like That is that women are more emotional than men, and that “men are dumb with feelings”, but it could just be that there is a tendency among men to express emotion less, even if they feel emotion just as keenly as women.
In fact, several studies indicate that men have a higher level of physiological arousal associated with emotional experiences, measured through neuroendocrine function and blood pressure. Other studies attempting to measure levels of emotional experience through other physiological markers, such as cardiovascular reactivity and skin conductivity, show inconsistent differences between men and women (Chentsova-Dutton Y. E., & Tsai, J.L. (2007). Gender difference in emotional response among European Americans and Hmong Americans. Cognition and Emotion, 21, 162 - 181; Fernandez, C., Pascual, J.C., Soler, J., Elices, M., Portella, M. J., & Fernandez-Abascal, E. (2012); Kring & Gordon, 1998; Labouvie-Vief, G., Lumley, M. A., Jain, E., & Heinze, H. (2003) Age and gender differences in cardiac reactivity and subjective emotion responses to emotional autobiographical memories, Emotion, 3, 115-126; Neumann, S.A., & Waldstein, S. R., (2001) Similar patterns of cardiovascular response during emotional activation as a function of affective valence and arousal and gender. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 50, 245-253; and Polefrone, J. M., & Manuck, S. B. (1987). Gender differences in cardiovascular and neuroendocrine response to stressors. In R. Barnett, L. Biener, & G. Baruch (Eds.) Gender and stress (pp 13-38). New York: Free Press.).
Further confusing matters are studies of emotional dynamics in heterosexual relationships which observe that men, when confronted with emotionally-provocative interactions with their partners, have a higher tendency than women to become less emotionally expressive. So, it could be that at the very times when men’s emotions are being provoked, women experience men as less emotionally expressive, contributing to the stereotype that men feel fewer emotions (Vogel, D. L., Wester S. R., Heesacker, M., & Madon S. (2003). Confirming gender stereotypes: A social role perspective. Sex Roles, 48, 519-528; and Baucom, B. R., McFarland, P. T., & Christiansen, A. (2010). Gender, topic, and time in observed demand-withdraw interaction in cross- and same-sex couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 24, 233-242).
In describing this body of research, I’m using phrases such as “it could be”, because there needs to be a good deal of caution in interpreting psychological research. The association of events measured by researchers doesn’t always suggest a causal relationship between those events. Furthermore, the link between externally measurable factors and internal experience of emotion is not well established. Even the interpretation of external expressions of emotion is fraught with difficulty, as a single facial expression can be interpreted as having many different emotional meanings. Other studies rely on self-reporting of emotional experiences, but researchers have found that both men and women tend to reinterpret their emotional experiences over time to become more aligned with gender stereotypes about how emotions should be experienced and expressed (Robinson, M. D., Johnson, J. T., & Shields, S. A. (1998) The gender heuristic and the database: Factors affecting the perception of gender-related differences in the experience and display of emotions. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 20, 206-219.). Many studies of emotion are small in size, based only on research participants from particular cultural and social groups, while researchers have found that patterns of gender influence on the expression of emotions differ between cultures (Durik, A. M, Hyde, J. S., Marks, A.C., Roy, A. L., Anaya, D., & Schultz, G. (2006) Ethnicity and gender stereotypes of emotion. Sex Roles, 54, 429-445.)
Given the many limitations in the scope of the studies that have been done, and the crisis of data fraud and methodological inadequacy in social research, the most responsible approach is to regard current academic understandings about the relationship of emotion and gender to be tentative and suggestive. In contradiction to the confidence with which stereotypes about gender and emotion are presented, there’s actually quite a bit about the subject that remains uncertain.
One thing to keep in mind is that gender is a great deal more ambiguous than biological sex, and even biological sex isn’t just as simple as a division between men and women. I’ve been talking about men and women, because I’m trying to grapple with gender stereotypes about emotion, but there are many different kinds of men and women, and some people who identify as neither men nor women, or a bit of both.
The presumption that there are significant, biologically-based differences between men and women is associated with a particular, traditional gender ideology. Other ideologies propose different ideas about gender differences and their causes.
In addition to all the caveats I’ve already mentioned, when we see an academic study that describes gender differences in emotional expression or experience, we need to be cautious and not jump to conclusions about the causes of those differences. Even if researchers definitively concluded that there are differences in the emotional dynamics of men and women, we still wouldn’t know the cause of those differences. If men and women have differences in emotional experience or expression, those differences might have their roots in biological tendencies, but they also might be a result of cultural and social factors.
I want to make it clear that, although I am a professional researcher, I’m not an academic. I’m not a scientist. I’m a research consultant, and the kind of research I do is purely qualitative. That means that I study emotions as ideas, not through quantitative representations of ideas. I use interviewing techniques that are designed to help people talk about their experiences in terms of their emotional significance. The interviews I do are purposefully long and slow, creating an immersive experience within which people are able to revisit emotionally pivotal moments in their lives.
Over three decades of this work, I’ve personally done many thousands of these kinds of interviews. I’ve interviewed roughly the same number of men as women. Because I don’t do quantitative research, I can’t claim to have come to any objective conclusion on the subject, but my overall impression is that men are just as emotional, and just as capable as talking about their emotions, as women. This is an anecdotal perspective, but one based on a very large number of anecdotes over a long period of time. Yes, I’ve interviewed men who have difficulty talking about their emotions, but I’ve also interviewed women who have difficulty talking about their emotions. I’ve seen a wide variety of emotional experience and emotional expression within each gender, and the impression I’ve arrived at through decades of interviewing is that women and men have much stronger similarities than differences when it comes to emotion. Of course, as a qualitative researcher, my work is not designed to identify differences. Quantitative techniques are required to come to reliable findings about differences.
So, even as I urge you to critically question the academic research that’s been done on the subject of gender and emotion, you should also take what I have to say on the subject with a big grain of salt. That said, if you listen to the men who have been guests on this podcast, I think you’ll find them to be quite capable of feeling and expressing emotion. I can tell you that I didn’t need to do any extra work to get them to talk about their feelings.
Given how much we don’t know about emotion and gender, it’s especially important to avoid the posture of false confidence. One helpful step in communicating about this issue is to be more precise about the language we decide to use to describe patterns in gendered expressions of emotions. Instead of saying “Men are less emotionally expressive than women,” for example, we could say that, “As a group, men tend to be less emotionally expressive than women as a group,” or “On average, men are more likely to exhibit low levels of emotional expression than women.”
If we simply declare that “men are less emotionally expressive than women,” we’re making a definitive statement about all men, on the order of saying something like, “giraffes are bigger than beetles”. This kind of statement communicates an absolute distinction between men and women, so that if a person is a man, we can be certain that person will be less emotionally expressive than women, in the same way that we can be sure that whatever size a giraffe is, it’s going to be larger than a beetle.
This kind of gender absolutism has been promoted in popular media such as the 1992 book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which proposed that men and women are so profoundly, categorically different that it is as if they are alien species, suited to live on entirely separate planets, with totally different emotions and distinct modes of communication. That’s not an accurate depiction of differences in gender.
There are differences between men and women, of course, but these are mostly differences of tendency rather than absolute distinction. Consider the relatively uncontroversial difference in height. Men tend to be taller than women, but there’s a huge range of height among men, and the same is true of women. What’s more, these ranges overlap. So, there are many women who are taller than many men. It is absolutely true that the average height of all men is taller than the average height of all women, but tallness is not exclusive to men. If a man is five feet tall, that doesn’t make him a woman. If a woman is six and a half feet tall, that doesn’t make her a man.
So it is with emotional expressiveness. There are some studies that suggest that women, on average, tend to be more emotionally expressive than men, on average. As has already been discussed, these average differences aren’t as absolute as they might superficially appear to be. Some research indicates that men are more likely, on average, to express certain emotions than women, for example. But, even if we accept the overall finding that women on average tend to be more expressive than men on average, there remains a remarkable overlap in the emotional expressiveness of men and women. There is a wide range of emotional expressiveness within each gender. Some men are extremely expressive of their emotions, and some women are extremely unexpressive of their emotions. Most men and most women exist within a more moderate range of emotional expressiveness.
For that reason, it’s just not accurate to make definitive statements such as “Women are more emotionally expressive than men.” Men and women have more similarities than differences in the ways they express their emotions. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus. They are both from Earth, and the differences are a matter of emphasis within that shared earthly experience.
Still, we have the original question to deal with: Why are there twice as many women as men as guests on this podcast, when I never intended to pursue such a lopsided collection of interviews?
The honest answer is that I don’t know. I don’t think, given the information that’s available, that it’s possible for me to come to a definitive answer. I simply know that there has been a gender imbalance in the podcast, and I’ve decided that it’s worth trying to correct it.
On the other hand, I think of Carl Sagan’s saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. To me, the idea that men don’t have emotional lives that are equal to women’s is an extraordinary claim. It seems strange to suppose that almost half of humanity would be so deeply psychologically inferior as that. As I see it, the simpler explanation is that, for some cultural reason, men as a whole don’t tend to feel as comfortable talking about their emotions as women do. If that’s the case, men’s relative silence about emotions would itself be an expression of an emotion of discomfort. On yet another hand (How many hands do I have?), maybe it’s a manifestation of my bias as a man that I don’t want to think of myself as inferior. Whichever is the case, I think further exploration is called for.
Issues of gender are now at the heart of social conflict here in the United States. Attitudes toward transgender identity and beliefs about sexuality divide Democrats from Republicans. Women are more likely to register as Democrats and to vote Democratic, while men are more likely to register with and vote for the Republican Party. Given the increasing emotional intensity around this gender divide in American politics, it seems irresponsible to ignore in a podcast that’s about emotion.
In order to re-establish gender balance in this podcast, I’m going to engage in a purposeful effort to recruit more men to interview. The purpose of including more men as guests on this podcast won’t be to identify and describe differences between men and women in the experience of emotion. I’m not going to convert Stories of Emotional Granularity into a podcast about gender. Instead, I’ll be making a conscious effort to include the voices of a group of people whose speech about their emotions has been, for whatever reason, subdued and dismissed.
Here’s the part where I ask you for your help.
If you’re a man, and you’re willing to talk about some of your emotional experiences, please get in touch. If you’re not a man, but you know a man who you think would be interested in being interviewed for this podcast, please reach out to him.
I want to make it clear that I am not limiting new interviews for this podcast to men. I just want to bring the podcast back into balance by interviewing more men. So, if you’re a woman, or a gender-fluid or non-binary person, and you’d like to be share your stories of emotional experiences for this podcast, that’s great. Drop me a line, and let’s find a time to talk.
Next week, I’ll be back with a more standard format, exploring just one emotion from different perspectives.
Until then, thanks for listening.