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“When a woman is emotional, she’s ‘hysterical’ and she’s penalized for it. When a man does the same, he’s ‘outspoken’ and there are no repercussions.”
That was the message the tennis great Billie Jean King tweeted on Saturday, responding — as seemingly the rest of the internet has — to Serena Williams’s fraught United States Open loss.
In case you’ve been blissfully unplugged: During the match, an umpire penalized Ms. Williams — first because he thought she was coached from the stands, then for what he deemed verbal abuse. (She called him a “liar” and a “thief.”) She’d also broken her racket. It cost her a game, and she lost the match to Naomi Osaka, who then tearfully apologized to the crowd.
As many have pointed out, male tennis players who’ve done similar have not been punished so severely.
It was a microcosm, in so many ways, of what women face at work daily: penalized for expressing emotion (Serena), and apologizing for their success (Naomi). In Ms. Williams’s case, it’s what researchers call “double jeopardy” — a lose-lose situation in which she’s up against both gender and racial stereotypes.
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As a woman, she was met with backlash because she abandoned traditionally feminine behaviors: “modest, self-effacing and nice,” said the scholar Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of the Law. And as a black woman, an added trope that often befalls women of color — loud, angry or simply out of control — was applied to her.
“A woman expressing anger triggers the raging id — or hormones, out-of-control stereotype,” Professor Williams said. “A black person expressing anger triggers the angry black person’s stereotype.”
Research has long proved this is true, especially for women at work.
In one study, of job applicants, called “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?,” researchers found that expressing anger benefited men who were applying for a job — by increasing their perceived influence. If they were hired, the researchers said, those men were subsequently given more power and autonomy in their jobs. The opposite was true for women.
Another study, of women of color in STEM fields, determined that about 50 percent of women reported backlash when they expressed anger at work, including colleagues and higher-ups calling them out for their tone.
As one black female biologist, who called herself a “very direct speaker,” described it: She felt as if she had to “put cotton candy in my mouth.”
Men, of course, speak directly all the time, she said.
“It becomes another one of those invisible escalators for white men,” Professor Williams said.
For her book “What Works for Women at Work,” which she wrote with her daughter, Professor Williams spoke with over 120 female professionals who worked in senior-level roles at mainstream corporations and asked if they had ever expressed anger on the job. Remarkably, only three said they had ever done it.
So I ask you, readers: Have you ever expressed anger openly at work? If so, did it come back to haunt you?
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What we’re reading
• Goodbye swimsuits, hello Miss America 2.0. Inside the newer, woker Miss America pageant — where a “kind of civil war” is brewing from the inside. [The New York Times]
• Regretting “The Help.” Viola Davis said the movie, for which she earned an Oscar nomination, was lacking in its portrayal of her character, and characters like hers. [The New York Times]
• Campaigning while mom. Female candidates with young kids have traditionally faced skepticism. This year, they’re pushing back, arguing that motherhood makes them more qualified. [The New York Times]
• Planned Parenthood’s new president is a doctor. Leana Wen won praise for her steadying hand as Baltimore’s health commissioner during the city’s convulsive protests in 2015. [The New York Times]
• “Les Moonves happened to me.” Linda Bloodworth Thomason, who created “Designing Women,” reveals that the recently ousted mogul kept her shows off the air for years. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Rites of Passage. “I rarely talk about my abortion,” writes Marisa Meltzer. “My silence is not out of shame, but a lack of it.” [The New York Times]
• Diane Leather dies at 85. She became the first woman to run the mile in under five minutes in 1954, a feat that was not recognized by the track and field establishment. [The New York Times]
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More from our Opinion pages
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“Is it any wonder that women, supposedly guaranteed the right to abortion by the Supreme Court, are turning their bitterness to Congress?” posed a 1984 article in The New York Times.
The piece focused on why women’s issues should be a primary focus of that year’s presidential candidates — particularly as they pertained to safe, affordable abortions, which had been legal for 11 years. The article even singled out the town I grew up in, Owensboro, Ky., as an example of a place within a vast region where no facilities existed. “Many women are angry and frustrated,” the article stated.
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Maya Salam is learning to be angrier. Follow her on Twitter @Maya_Salam or write to her at dearmaya@nytimes.com
