Why Do Women Scream So Much - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

My daughter Evie and I had a rough morning.

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It was a Wednesday and I had to be in Southern California for a work meeting ASAP, but I’d delayed my flight (and kept people waiting) in order to take the kids to school. I wasn’t going to see them for a few days and I desperately wanted that extra bit of momming.

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Evie is always hard to motivate in the mornings but this morning, in particular, she took 20 minutes longer than Eli to get ready for school. Twenty minutes. I don’t even think I could move that slow if I tried. It was like this.

After the usual polite, and then nagging reminders, after the “Let’s go over again how disrespectful this is to me, to Eli, to your teachers…” I was just done. I absolutely lost my temper.

As I explained to Evie in the car, part of the reason I got so angry was that I have spent every morning for at least the last year explaining to her that she’s disrespecting other people’s time and efforts when she can’t get out of the house in a timely manner. I tell her that multiple times per morning. At this point, I told her, it’s hard for me to face that she simply doesn’t care about my feelings when it comes to this. And that’s sad.

But more to the point: I told her that I will always keep doing things for her no matter what she does as her mom. But many other adults in the world will not.

“You see this house we have in San Francisco? You see the fact that I’m able to run a company? Everything I have is a combination of hard work, and people seeing that hard work and giving me a shot. Going out of their way to do things for me. If you telegraph to people that you don’t appreciate their efforts, they simply won’t.”

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I got to school and the kids bounded up to sing with their classmates for assembly. I confided in another founder-mom whose kids also go to our school that I’d utterly lost my sh*t with Evie that morning and how I felt justified in doing it, but it still sucked since I wasn’t going to see them for a few days. Of course I felt guilt and shame.

Then she said something amazing: “I’ve been talking about this a lot lately, why do women have to be pushed to the point where they are screaming or crying or have totally lost it to have their words taken seriously?”

WHOA.

This insight hit me like a lightening bolt. And it immediately shifted the guilt I was feeling to, “Yes… Why did I have to get pushed to that point to be taken seriously?”

I was used to the difference between how a screaming man (passionate!) and a screaming woman (emotional!) were perceived in the workplace. And how much more controlled you have to be in your emotions as a woman.

When I worked at TechCrunch every time I’d argue something passionately the founder Michael Arrington would tell me to “Take it down a few notches.” Meantime, he was someone who’d have such large emotional outbursts, he’d disappear from the business for weeks at a time, or walk off stage at his own event, leaving the steady, reliable and largely female management team to pick up the pieces.

But what I hadn’t thought of was why I yell. I’d been used to seeing it as my weakness, my failing. But maybe it was the world’s.

As the other mom at school commented about why women always have to take things to the extreme to be heard, I thought of not just Evie. I suddenly cycled back through so many instances of my life as a younger manager, and how frequently I had to yell to be heard. How much I had to yell at a company that screwed me over on an embargo. How much I had to yell at everyone to be taken seriously as a female reporter. To make sure they were crystal clear that they couldn’t screw me over. This is, after all, not only a male dominated business but one that encourages “asking forgiveness, not permission.” Screwing people over is part of the code of conduct. And those who look like they won’t fight back get it the worst.

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I have long looked back at those moments with shame that I resorted to the easy out of yelling to be heard. But now, suddenly, I saw it for what it was: An unequal playing field where people just were going to keep pushing it until I yelled. That was—for many years and in many relationships—the only way for me to be heard.

Yelling at kids and yelling in a professional setting are two different things. And, yet, the reason my kids don’t take me seriously unless I yell is that they are so used to me sucking it up when they don’t mind, smiling, and still doing everything for them. Read these stories of emotional labor at work, and you’ll see that women frequently face the same expectation in the office.