Crying in the Commons: why are women's workplace tears a source of shame?

The Guardian

a day ago

Rachel Reeves's tears this week triggered a fall in the pound and attracted widespread derision from political columnists, mostly male. 'What is wrong with Rachel Reeves?' the Telegraph asked. In an article headlined 'The meaning of the chancellor's tears', a New Statesman columnist told readers that Reeves's authority was 'beginning to melt away'. The Daily Mail spoke disdainfully of her 'waterworks'.
But in the longer term the chancellor's display of distress may prove to have an unexpectedly positive legacy, helpfully normalising a still hugely stigmatised phenomenon – women's tears in the workplace.
Until now, tearful outbursts at work have mostly been mired in shame, the source of acute embarrassment. This week's live broadcast of the chancellor's silent tears could help shift the taboo, highlighting a little-discussed truth: sometimes women cry at work, and it's no big deal.
Reeves reflected on her own tears with a shrug a day later. 'People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday. Today's a new day and I'm just cracking on with the job,' she said on Thursday. She declined to explain what had prompted her distress, describing it simply as a personal issue and refusing to go into details. Within 24 hours the markets had bounced back with the assurances of the prime minister, Keir Starmer, that she would remain in her job for the long term.
Clearly it is far from ideal to be filmed in tears during the week's most-watched exchanges in the House of Commons, but ministerial jobs are immensely tough. Some of Reeves's male predecessors have exhibited the strain of their roles in more extreme ways – while attracting less attention, because their behaviour is classed as routine and acceptable machismo.
When Britain's former prime minister Gordon Brown was exhausted and under pressure he was known to be prone to volcanic eruptions. One biographer described how Brown would stab the seat of the ministerial Jaguar with his pen in fury. Bloomberg reported that a new aide was warned to watch out for 'flying Nokias' when he joined Brown's team (although a spokesperson for Brown said at the time that this was 'not an account that I recognise').
Reeves's tears were widely seen as a sign that she was losing control. Brown's fury was forgiven by many as just a regrettable quirk displayed by a leader under pressure.
Research consistently confirms what we instinctively know – that women cry more frequently than men. So it stands to reason that as we see more women in senior leadership roles, the sight of a powerful woman in tears should become less remarkable. It would be odd to celebrate it, since it's an exhausting and often mortifying phenomenon, but Reeves's outburst may help it to be better understood as simply a different way of expressing professional frustration or responding to pressure.
Polling conducted by YouGov in the UK revealed that 34% of men claim not to have cried at all in the previous year, compared with only 7% of women; 18% of women said they cried at least once a week, compared with only 4% of men. Behaviour varies between cultures, but this remains a broadly global phenomenon: a 2011 study of 5,715 participants from 37 countries found women were more prone to crying and were more likely to have cried recently.
This week, Germany's former leader Angela Merkel revealed that she 'burst out crying from the pressure' during a meeting with the then US president, Barack Obama, on how to handle Greece's mounting debt crisis in 2015. Theresa May was on the brink of tears when she stepped down as the UK prime minister in May 2019, her voice cracking and lips wobbling as she stood outside Downing Street, telling assembled journalists that it had been the honour of her life 'to serve the country I love'. Margaret Thatcher was in tears when she was driven from Downing Street in 1990s. By contrast, David Cameron hummed his way back inside No 10 after his resignation speech in 2016.
Obama wept occasionally when president but these were mostly dignified occasions, prompted by the memory of tragic events, such as the shooting of schoolchildren during a speech about gun control. His tears were not the unattractive and uncontrollable, messy and humiliating variety, but were mostly seen as commendable expressions of his humanity. Vladimir Putin appeared emotional a decade ago during a soft-rock song honouring the bravery of the Russian police force, but these too were a different kind of tears.
Political behaviour in Britain has been slow to change, despite the rapidly evolving makeup of the Commons. In 2024, the UK saw the election of the highest number of female MPs ever recorded. There are now 264 women in the Commons, holding 40% of the 650 seats. Since the 1997 election of the Labour party saw the proportion of women double from 9% to 18%, there has been a steady rise – but the institution's combative culture has barely changed.
'We've had years of men shouting, scoffing, braying, even sleeping in this chamber, so we shouldn't overreact to a woman showing her frustration with one tear,' said Penny East, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, a feminist campaigning charity. 'It shouldn't be interpreted as a sign that she's not up to her job. These criticisms feel riddled with sexism and stereotype.'
Ask any female colleague, and they will probably reluctantly admit to having wrestled with the challenge of holding back tears at work, often prompted by professional frustration rather than sadness. I've done it, during a difficult conversation with an editor, raising my eyes to the ceiling and tilting my head back, hoping that gravity would somehow suck the tears back inside the ducts and that no one would notice.
Women know it can be damaging professionally because crying remains categorised as a sign of incompetence and weakness, an unacceptable manifestation of stress. One accomplished acquaintance in a senior role was unfairly nicknamed Tiny Tears in private by her staff because occasionally she responded to challenging situations with involuntary tears. Her colleagues were less familiar with this manifestation of professional dissatisfaction than they might have been with a display of male anger.
Another woman described crying on her third day at her new job as a chief executive of a large organisation. 'It wasn't live on the media, but it was in an open-plan office and I was surrounded by senior and junior staff. I'm not remotely comparing my job to the job of the chancellor, but there was a huge burden of responsibility and I was having to take difficult decisions,' she said.
She was embarrassed by her own tears because she could see how uncomfortable it made her team. 'But I didn't see it as a loss of control. We shouldn't assume that displays of emotions represent a loss of control over ability to do your job.' She thinks, however, the episode may unexpectedly have helped her win colleagues' respect. 'They could see I really cared about what we were there to do.'
Although there is no difference in the amount male and female babies cry, women cry more frequently than men because of a complex mix of social conditioning and biology. Ad Vingerhoets, a professor of clinical psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has studied the science of tears, and notes that testosterone acts as a 'brake' on the crying response.
Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, who specialises in analysing how emotions are expressed through laughter and tears, said: 'How we experience and express our emotions is influenced by our biology and by how we've grown up.'
Scott made a distinction between tears produced as a result of sadness and tears triggered by anger, noting that these tears of frustration and fury seemed to be more frequently something experienced by women. 'If you're angry and you feel you can't do something about it, there's a helpless, frustrated feeling that pushes you to tears,' she said.
Women seemed to find themselves more frequently fighting tears of frustration than men, Scott said, adding that this might be because 'angry and more aggressive responses are more acceptable in men'.
Unusually, Reeves's misery was caught playing out over the 30-minute duration of the prime minister's question time session, allowing viewers a rare and uncomfortable view of someone attempting and failing to stem the flow, lips twitching and turning downwards. 'A big difference between my job and many of your viewers' is that when I'm having a tough day it's on the telly, and most people don't have to deal with that,' Reeves told the BBC.
Scott said many forms of tears were hard to control, adding: 'Crying is a very truthful signal. Once it gets hold of you, it's very hard to stop it. It's involuntary.'
Rosie Campbell, a professor of politics at King's College London, said she was staggered by the negativity triggered by Reeves's tears. 'In our society, women are more likely to cry. That doesn't make them worse leaders,' she said. 'I don't want to see politicians crying in the chamber every day, but if it happens a couple of times in a parliamentary career, that should be no big deal.
'I'm more worried about emotionally repressed leaders than about someone who realises that the financial security of the nation is in their hands and they feel the weight of that.'