Serena’s Not Alone. Women Are Penalized for Anger at Work, Especially Black Women.

In the STEM field where I work, I have noticed that women who strongly assert an opinion based on their expertise, are often labeled as "difficult." However, men who do the same, are considered "brilliant". This especially holds true for white men and increases the older they become. No matter how uninformed, the louder they proclaim, the greater their genius factor grows.

I think there is a greater expectation for men to express anger freely. It is the one emotion men are often allowed, in part because anger is perceived as aligned with power. Men are given wide berth to express anger in families, workplaces and sports, and, within reason, the penalties are minimal. But women are expected to be likable and accommodating. It is not that no women get away with being brusque, direct or angry, but the social rule remains in place: women should be peacemakers and pleasers. We are expected to flatter, not challenge. Women often expect this of themselves and other women. The rules are mirrored and intensified in people of color, who are supposed to, even now, keep their place, which is always quiet and accommodating, or "grateful." Most of these rules are tacit, and most of us comply or enforce them without understanding what we're doing or why. What Serena did is highlight it, and the benefit for all of us is that we're talking about it openly. If professionalism means no true expressions of feeling, we might want to think about that. If it means penalizing abusive behavior, I'm on board, but those rules ought to be equally applied to everyone. Anger itself has its place, though -- for everybody. Sometimes it's what we most need to defend to space we occupy, or the values we hold, when they are under assault, tacit or explicit. Denying anyone that is denying them an important part of their dignity and humanity.

I was fired from a managerial position in the early 80s because I was angry with my boss when he did not back me up in a situation where I was verbally harassed. I was told I was "obviously" too mercurial and hysterical to have the wherewithal necessary for the job, a position I had worked years to earn. Meantime, that boss was notorious for going off on people for no good reason, especially after his four cocktail lunches. It took a long time to overcome the blow to my self-esteem. I never again reached the same level in that field, one where rumors and lies abound, and finally changed my career completely to an unrelated industry. Only in the last ten years did I find a similar level of responsibility and salary.

There is emotion, there is anger, and then there is unprofessional behavior: calling an official a liar and thief are certainly in that final category. This is not "speaking directly." It is absolutely unprofessional.

In an act of kindness, the school counselor advised me that some in the school administration found the way I spoke to be “blunt .” She was letting me know that I should soften how I oiced my opinion. No, I have never expressed anger, but speaking honestly cost me. P.S. The other derangement situation is when a woman makes a suggestion to a group and it’s ignored and then several minutes later a man makes the same suggestion and it’s acknowledged, discussed or even adopted!

Wow, someone got sanctioned for breaking the rules. That's not right. Insulting and demeaning an umpire who is paid a couple hundred bucks a day is a God given right. How dare he?

As a trans woman, I can attest that women are punished for behavior that wins praise for men. Once experienced, it is clear to see and happens everywhere.

I don't dispute the fact that a double standard exists and that women get treated differently from men for some behaviors. But making Serena Williams the standard bearer for change is a huge mistake. She wasn't a victim here. The author has intentionally misrepresented the events that occurred at the US Open. It wasn't that the umpire thought that Williams was being coached, her coach admitted that he was guilty of that immediately after the match - despite Williams continued incredible denials. And the fact that Williams smashed her racket isn't an incidental thing to be downplayed - it is an automatic mandatory penalty under the rules. That leaves only the final penalty imposed by the umpire which was assessed only after continuous abuse by a clearly out of control Williams. Williams acted like an entitled, self-centered brat and displayed extremely poor sportsmanship. Nor is this sort of behavior out of character for her. She's actually done considerably worse. She is no role model. I felt disdain and contempt for John McEnroe when he used to behave like a spoiled child and I feel the same way about Williams now.

I've experienced this bias. . .mostly.. believe it or not . . . by other women. When I forcefully (read: assertively, directly, factually) stated a case at a previous job (notice I said previous!) I was told to "watch my tone". This happened on a number of occasions. I was also called out on a review for being "too friendly" with another woman who operated the same way. I did call out the fact that if this were a man saying the same things that these women would have more respect for the person, probably acquiesce, use him as an example of how to state a case, and probably be up for promotion. This was all coming from a female management structure. Sometimes women are the most "judgy" and harsh on other women. In some ways this is even more galling!

No. You start out stating things as a given that have already been discredited in this very paper (they ran an article that came to the conclusion that women are not penalized more than men, except for being called out for coaching). Then you throw doubt as to whether she was being coached when her coach admitted he was trying to coach her. Then you throw doubt on verbal abuse which was exactly that. (Should I call you a "liar" now?) Then you intimate that Osaka apologized for Serena's actions, which I seriously doubt. On this foundation, you build a shaky story and I dare say whatever you proceed to say will be biased. You won't get closer to the truth by asking women for anecdotal evidence. You'd have to ask men as well and do some valid statistical analysis. And on the anecdotal side, I can definitely say there are repercussions for directly speaking or being upset at work for men. It depends on your status/rank, your boss, and your colleagues. I've seen men getting fired at the earliest layoff opportunity for having spoken out or voicing disagreements with the boss. As much as you'd like to see a gender double standard, I'm not convinced. You need much more solid evidence.

I would assume that if a black woman, like a white man, behaves like a puerile baby at work they would receive the same response, no? Serena is a rich coddled. 0001% and it's time to stop using her as emblematic of the common person's struggle. why is no one bemoaning John McEnroe's expulsion from the Australian open for similar infantile behavior? don't balding white Irish guys from Queens have the same rights when they behave like obscene ogres?

I've been in the tech industry for 30 years. Being angry in the workplace is unacceptable behavior for both men and women. I've seen displeasure, disapproval, criticism, passive aggressive conniving and outright sabotage, but the veneer of professionalism has always been maintained. Outright emotionalism is plain embarrassing and a serious hindrance to corporate ladder climbing, and a potential ticket out the door. No one should aspire to behave badly and get away with it. I think this conversation is misbegotten and misguided.

I suspect the basis is evolutionary. Long ago angry men could do great physical damage but angry women could do much less, at least to men. Maybe men didn't have to put up with them, so they didn't. Perhaps angry women and children were more an irritant to men than anything else. Of course women were a danger to other women and to children. Anyone out there know about angry women in hunter-gatherers? That could shed some light on any otherwise low-evidence conversation. How are angry women treated in male-dominated societies ? In Saudi Arabia they could be beaten by their husbands with relative impunity up until a few years ago. Becoming angry with the wrong man could be very dangerous for a woman. I suspect I don't need to tell female readers this. I'm not saying any of this is moral--just speculating about an explanation.

And the NYT is just as complicit in promoting the quiet woman stereotype. It ran the Billie Jean King article defending Serena Williams once, but the Martina Navratilova article castigating Williams' behavior ran on line for days.

So many things about this incident are presented wrong: -Serena broke several rules repetitively which was documented on live TV and confirmed later by her coach -after being caught cheating she went on to talk down and accuse the ref in front of a full stadium and millions of people watching on TV -this ref is known for being strict in applying rules (which all should be) in his previous matches -she was loosing heavily at the moment of the incident and it didn't seem like she had any chance of turning it around -she embarrassed Naomi to the point of crying Basically she's a horrible loser and a bad example to the youth watching. I've seen female refs treat the male players much worse. You could never see Michael Jordan act like this. You could see Draymond Green act like this and only GSW fans would like it while everybody else would condemn it. Everybody should fight for their rights but blaming racial or gender discrimination for your bad performance isn't helping the cause. p.s. My wife is black and I do not discriminate against any gender or race.

Serena not a good choice as a standard bearer for this argument.

Totally unconvincing article. If you are doing paid PR for Williams then maybe a decent effort. Event the link only shows that referees are not always consistent- not really a surprise - says nothing about any perceived or real disparities between men and women. And the NYT article specifying actual data on penalties should have been the last word. Unless you have some keen insight into why that is not the case. If so, let’s hear it. That said the down under cartoon was clearly and unacceptably racist. And I’m sure there are inequities in the work force though unbridled displays of anger are unacceptable for all but senior management and big earners - and that doesn’t make it right, it should be unacceptable for them too.

I lost my job at CSU because I got angry one day (once in seven years) at my supervisor for saying sexually harassing things, such as “my wife thinks I’m having an affair with you “ and “if I’d known you when I was young I would have gone for you.” This man did not have a high level job. I was the only supervisee in the office besides work study students. He was incapable of doing the work he was hired to do (curriculum editing), making constant errors that were left to me to fix. He also required me to sit and listen—sometimes for as much as two hours—to stories of his “terrible childhood” and his wife’s “terrible childhood.” When I politely protested he told me that since he was the boss it was okay for me to sit and listen for as long as he wanted to talk. I ended up having to work extra hours just to keep the work flowing. This man had cooked the books for another department in order to build a building, but did not lose his job. His female supervisor lost hers. HR was completely into trumping up a storyline about me being impossible to work with after this one incident. I had witnesses but it didn’t matter. Universities are supposed to be so enlightened, but everyone I knew who worked there said the same thing: keep your head down and don’t ever say anything. They use “writing you up” as a way to keep women down at CSU. I hope Tony Frank (president) is reading this. It is the worst place I’ve ever worked, and I’m not alone in that view.

Look: Serena has an anger management problem. No feminist can claim that threats to "kill" a line judge are appropriate, for either sex or gender. I've watched the full tape of the USAO final, and Serena had a meltdown. I've had a meltdown, you've had a meltdown, it's a human thing. But she was clearly not in control of her *thinking* about what she was *feeling*. Time for a penalty. As for sexism: let's cut to the chase and say that tennis has become a dirty sport. The screaming ("grunting") during serve and volley, the absurd grimaces and fist pumps, the coaching, the pouting and scowling, it's become a tatty charade of pseudo aggression. So yeah, clamp down hard on every player, male or female, who gets out of line. And clamp down on the (yes) female players whose service has to come with a banshee howl. That means you, Sharapova. Do the men do it? Well, smackdown the males is my remedy. If there's sexism in umpiring then demote the obviously sexist umpires. Chair umpire Ramos, by the way, is known to be strict with all players, male or female, and he was patient with Serena's emotions until she called him a "liar". When the broadcast feeds actually show the coach doing the coaching, it's hard for the umpire not to make the call. I think we are reading sexism into a sport that has lost its sense of standards. Clamp on the screaming and anger outbursts and pseudo violence, do it equally and equitably with both sexes, and all us tennis spectators will be happy campers.

Serena Williams' performance in the closing minutes of the US Open was a nightmare to behold. If we fast forward to the awards presentation and Ms. Williams comments during the post-game interview, it would be impossible to recreate or imagine what took place that would even roughly correspond to the way she behaved on the court or related to her opponent, Naomi Osaka. No player--male or female--has ever quite sucked the oxygen out of a stadium the way Serena did that evening. Tension was so high that it seemed that though the end was inevitable, we would never get to it. Serena's self-depiction as an innocent victim, a sainted madonna figure incapable of deception took on a level of histrionics any portrayer of Medea would be proud of. Unbelievably, there was more to come. Serena assigned herself the additional role of consoler to her opponent, putting her arm around her with a look of utter calm as if to say, "Don't worry. I don't blame you." Poor Naomi didn't know how to react. Serena then went to her post-game interview looking calm and chipper to announce that all she had done was in the cause of women's liberation. Serena Williams is an amazing athlete. Can some among her admirers be faulted however for wondering how much more her career would have meant for women and for African-Americans as well if the iron discipline she brought to her chosen sport had been matched by the kind of discipline it takes to keep her larger than life personality in check?

Paraphrasing what appears to be a common perspective on display in the comments: "As a man, I never notice myself losing my temper, and I am quick to judge those who in my opinion act badly. I believe that women and men should be judged with equal severity, and for only that reason I am among the first to judge Serena Williams harshly." Hmm.

This happens in higher education, too. I once had a male assoc. prof. tell me I was "out of control" when I expressed my indignation at a negative group project evaluation by the group's other two members, both male. I had done probably 90% of the work with little input from them, yet they labeled me as "uncooperative" because I declined to meet for a practice presentation requested solely for the convenience of one member (his place, his time). Oddly, the third member declined as well, but that somehow got overlooked. I was proud of the presentation and to be unjustly criticized was bad enough. To have the prof. then completely mischaracterize my reaction--I was nowhere near out of control--sticks in my craw to this day. One of the ironies is that this prof. often dealt with sexism and female oppression in literature, but was completely blind to his own.

I agree with most of what you said however the NYT presented a great article last week detailing that men tennis players are fined at a staggeringly higher rate than their women counterparts. Women and Men should be held to the same standard and if there is inequity, it should be brought to the forefront and dealt with immediately.

As a man, I do not lose my temper at work or at home and I expect the same from those around me. I'm not denying that there are a lot of angry men (and women) out there who get away with bad behavior, but there are also a lot of angry men (and women) who get punished for it. Pointing to others who behaved badly and got away with it is never an acceptable response to being called out on your own bad behavior.

Though I am not a black woman, I have been in the working as an administrative professional for the past 20± years for several international companies. In several separate incidents with different companies, every time I have pushed back against unfair treatment, for myself or for colleagues who were treated unfairly, I have been promptly let go from the company, even after complaints to HR. Perhaps because there have been layers to management over me who didn't want to deal with the problems, perhaps because the positions I have held have always been viewed as highly expendable. My years of experience have taught me ,"Women should be seen but not heard."

I am a woman of color and I am very direct, whether expressing happiness or irritation. I have received two very opposite reactions: In very liberal, feminist settings (i.e. left-wing publications, music or art venues), I am celebrated and looked up to for being strong, courageous, and authentic. In more traditional, conservative settings, I've been fired for doing nothing else but objecting to unfairness in an "unacceptable tone" (which included no expletives, no raised voice, no violence, no threats, no personal attacks, nor any other objectionable behavior--just stating the facts and standing my ground). Needless to say, I avoid those types of workplaces like the plague.

Punished for passion, punished for holding self and others to high standards, punished for expressing disappointment in others. I have been there too. I was moved deeply by Serena’s observation that this didn’t work out for her this time, but the next woman would act in a more woke world. I was blown away by her vision of the larger project we all engage when when we fight this battle, lose a skirmish, and get back up again.

I had the misfortune of sitting in an office next door to a male colleague who spent most of his days on the phone rage whining about other people (who mostly happened to be women, and some of whom even had the same first name as me, which as you can imagine was very disconcerting). At one point I went into his office to let him know I could hear every word and asking him to please tone it down. He responded by requesting that our company sound proof our shared wall, a cost that our notoriously frugal company promptly agreed to bear. No one from our company said a word to me about it, and he continued his tirades unabated. He got away with it because he was supposedly well-respected in his field. At least, that is what he was constantly boasting. But was he actually so respected, when he constantly behaved so badly? None of it added up to me, but I chose not to push the issue with my company. As a woman in a male-dominated company and male-dominated career field, you learn early on that you have little to no voice, and if you dare complain, there are consequences. The women who rise up in these types of environments are the ones who do not challenge the status quo on gender issues. My company currently has only one woman on the Board of Directors. She is a very nice, mild-mannered, thin, polite, blonde woman. Men on the Board tend toward gregariousness, personal intensity and being out-spoken, but not her.

I've been in the workforce for five decades now, being supervised and supervising what is by now a list of over a hundred employees. I've told all of my employees and one of my supervisors that I not only expect, but demand professional behavior. I get angry on occasion. We all do. Sometimes it's a struggle for me to maintain my composure, but I think about the example that I give, and that helps me through the struggle. Twenty five years ago, I had a boss who yelled and cursed at me in one of his staff meetings. After the meeting ended and the room had cleared, I told him that in more than two decades in the workforce, I'd never been treated like that, and that I didn't expect to be again. I said that he could fire me anytime he chose, but no matter what, I expected to be treated like the professional that I am. I tell my employees that I expect them to behave like the professionals they are. I understand Ms. Williams' anger. It seems that Mr. Ramos was, indeed, capricious and haughty. I don't understand her outburst, though. I hope that she, as a new mom, considers the example that she gives to her daughter and to all little girls growing up. There are professional ways to express anger, and there are tantrums.

About 30 years ago, I had a boss who kept telling me to smile at work. I have no idea why but I guess it had to do with working with mostly men. They just wanted women like me to smile to reassure them or something. Maybe it's a fear of their mother being angry with them(?)

Yup. I'm a professor, black, woman, and I've faced the very real and punishing consequences of simply saying, 'this is unfair and wrong.' I paid a dear price for speaking up about the misogynoir common in my workplace. Things are better now as a result of speaking up but I'm still paying for it. The body remembers. It was amazing but not surprising how easy my white female attackers were able to label me angry, violent and dangerous for simply speaking out. And how easy it was for them to be believed. Likewise how difficult it was for me to be believed when SHOWING with real evidence, as opposed to their non evidence, the injustices. They were saints and I was the devil who deserved punishment. Conditioning people. It's powerful. Please look at how we are conditioned to view black people and black women in particular.

Literally last week when I was negotiating with another attorney for my share of attorney fees in a lawsuit, the attorney yelled at me “this is nothing to be telling and screaming about.” I had to bite my tongue and politely say “I am not yelling or screaming.” I knew there was nothing I could do and that it was his power play. I’ve experienced this over 25 years as a lawyer, in the office, in depositions, before judges both young and old and especially before juries. Until men - and women - learn to affirmatively stop and counter these ingrained biases, equality will be stifled.