Gendering Emotion Management Strategies: Caring and Boundaries in Hospice Work

• In Event: 512 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Workplace Experiences

Abstract

Caring work requires a great deal of emotion management: workers must respond appropriately to the feelings of others, while also keeping their own emotions within organizationally defined bounds. Previous studies have shown that emotion management practices are not gender neutral, frequently conveying and reproducing gender within the setting. Using ethnographic and interview data, this study examines gendered ideas of quality within hospice work, a type of labor that is often assumed to favor feminine emotion management qualities like friendliness, listening, and caring. I find that these qualities are highly valued by hospice workers, but more masculine emotion management strategies like keeping calm and maintaining boundaries are also highly valued—sometimes even above feminine qualities. Furthermore, because some feminine qualities are applied to men as well as women, while the most valued masculine qualities are only applied to men, these ideas about quality emotion management strategies disadvantage women in two ways: first, women are assessed as more susceptible to burnout than men, and second, co-workers assume women will provide emotional support to their colleagues as well as patients, thus increasing their emotional labor burden.

Author

• Cindy L. Cain, University of Minnesota