Are You Ashamed Of Being A Cry, Baby?

Eyes welling up during an important meeting? Chin wobbling at your desk? Shedding tears at work can be embarrassing, but there is no shame in owning your emotions. In fact, it could improve your company’s bottom line.

- Alexandra English

If you’ve never blinked away tears or felt your lip quivering in front of your boss, you may be tempted to flick past these pages. But I implore you don’t. If The Office Criers are to feel safe expressing their emotions at work—the place where we spend most of our waking hours—without feeling like total losers, they need help from The Non-Criers. No-one likes crying, but studies show that if we’re allowed to cry at work, it’s less likely we actually will—which is good news for everyone.

“Women crying at work remains both routine and taboo,” writes Anne Kreamer in her book It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. The American journalist and author specialises in business and women’s work-life balance, and devoted a whole chapter of the book to women who cry at work, fittingly titled ‘Big Girls Do Cry’, in which she tries to remove the shame women feel after expressing emotion in the office. Despite being conducted in 2011, her Emotion in the Workplace Survey is still the most recent and most often quoted statistic about crying at work. Her study of more than 1,000 people across the United States found that 41 percent of women had cried at work during the previous year, and that crying is common among young women (45 percent), pretty rare among young men (nine percent), and even rarer among older men (five percent).