The disabled toilet has been the beating heart of every office I’ve ever worked in. It’s the theatre of war. The loins of sexual activity and the depository of all known contraband. If something’s going on, it’s going on in the disabled loo. I always cry in the disabled toilet. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
You show me a woman who hasn’t sat in the disabled toilets crying all over her chin, and I’ll show you a liar. ‘Disabled toilets are my decompression chambers,’ says journalist and writer Eleanor Morgan, who is currently working on a book about anxiety. ‘When I feel like I've got the bends and am about to explode with office rage, emotion or anxiety diarrhoea, the disabled toilet is the safest place I know.’
But, of course, it’s not only women. ‘You walk out of a conference room, and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,’ Bo Olson told the The New York Times in their major weekend feature Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace. ‘Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.’ In March, a photo of a male doctor crying outside the Emergency Room went viral. And yet, the stigma of crying at work seems, all too often, to be leveled at the female work force.
In June, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt suggested that female scientists can’t take criticism without crying, making them a pain to work with. But is this fair? Are weeping women really lining the corridors of corporate power? And, if so, why?
‘Tears can signal sadness, or, quite frequently, they can be a cover for other feelings: frustration, anger, a sense of powerlessness, anxiety, poor self-esteem, or negative self-image,’ writes Anna Ranieri, writing in the Harvard Business Review. Preach, sister. Many a time I’ve heard female colleagues describe breaking down at work in frustration at the circumstances of their current job. ‘You guiltily say it’s some relationship trouble, but really, it’s because you want to murder them all with a spade,’ as artist Candice Tripp put it on Twitter. And, with a gender pay gap of 19.1% it’s no wonder if women feel powerless, frustrated and with low self-esteem.
Of course, sometimes it really is relationship trouble. The only times I’ve ever cried at my desk (apart from when I accidentally drank six cups of coffee before 9am and burst into tears when my boss asked me for a ‘quick chat’, because the adrenaline in my system convinced me I was getting fired) was after a break up. I would sit, tilting my head back, staring at the grey ceiling tiles, desperately trying to soak my un-cried tears back behind my eyes. It left me red and puffy-eyed, but it was probably less noticeable than actually splashing tears across my keyboard. At least, nobody ever mentioned it.
Crying at work is, in most cases, a private affair. It is done in the toilets, on the phone in the car park or tucked away in some dimly-lit, hardboard-lined office. Which means we’ll never truly know who is crying – whether women really do outstrip men on the tears front – or what they’re weeping about. ‘I mainly try and hide,’ says a librarian who wishes to remain anonymous. ‘Although I did cry in front of my line manager during a one-on-one meeting about various things that were going on in my life at the time. We hugged and I felt pretty stupid – her saying, “You keep it all inside,” and me feeling embarrassed – because afterwards we had to walk back to the office talking about Dr Martens and sort of pretending it didn’t happen for the sake of the emotionless working world.’
Office tears will happen, whether we like it or not. At the very least, we can stop attacking each other for showing vulnerability. We can offer tissues rather than criticisms. And admit that, unless they were operating a chainsaw at the time, probably nobody ever died from crying at work.
Like this? Then you may be interested in:
Amy Poehler: Sadness Can Be Your Friend. And It Can Help You
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.