You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

In one of my first jobs in television I worked in an open plan office with the boss working in a glass panelled office. When the boss was annoyed with someone they would call them into their glass office and tell them to close the door and then start shouting. When the boss was really angry they would ask the "victim" to leave the door open so the whole team would hear the full extent of their wrath and we could witness our hapless colleague’s humiliation. 

Years later I remember once going to a Current Affairs party with a non-TV friend and when she saw the reporter John Sweeney she didn’t know his name but turned to me and whispered “that’s the angry one”. To be fair if you look up “John Sweeney” on YouTube the first three clips are all him losing his temper on the Panorama programme “Scientology & Me”.

While the behaviour of my old boss was a bit extreme and John Sweeney’s rant has now gone down in television history, unfortunately in the media industry displays of anger are all too common; possibly due to a combination of creativity and high pressure.

Anger however is not just a television issue, it is very much a diversity issue.

It seems that some people are allowed to get angry while other people are meant to bite their tongues. Victoria Brescoll an academic at Yale University in America wanted to test the theory that men are positively rewarded when they get angry while women on the other hand are punished for getting angry in the work place.

She conducted a series of tests; in one of them she got men and women to watch different videos of actors playing out job interviews. In one video a man being ‘interviewed’ described being angry because he’d lost an account, in another the man described being sad because he’d lost the account. There was also another set of videos with women being angry and sad. The people watching the videos were then asked how much money they thought the men should get paid and how much the women should be paid. Roughly speaking the sad men and women were awarded the same salary of approximately $30,000. But when it came to anger the answers were quite different. On average the people watching the videos assigned the angry man a salary of $38,000 and the angry woman was given $23,500. People watching the videos thought angry men displayed authority and deserved more senior pay while anger in a woman displayed a lose of control and so deserved less pay.

So according to the experiment anger paid men $8,000 while it cost women $6,500. Or to put it another way angry men got paid $14,500 more than an angry woman.

As far as I am aware relative tests have not been conducted concerning anger and race, but when I have spoken to black colleagues (especially men) they have often expressed that they feel they are unable to express anger in the work place. They fear that any display of anger will stereoptype them as “angry black people” and they will not be taken seriously. They don’t just fear being paid less they fear losing their jobs.

If people from diverse backgrounds are to break the glass ceilings in the media industry and be paid what they deserve we need to project power and authority. The paradox is that some of the very tools that some people can use to display these qualities actually hinder us.

I deplore  anger in the work place – I feel it is often just one very close step away from bullying – but it is unrealistic to think that in a work environment, where we often spend more time with our colleagues than even our family, emotions are not going to occasionally come to the surface. If we are interested in addressing issues of diversity then when those emotions do bubble up to the surface we need to make sure that everyone is treated equally. Rather than rewarding some and punishing others.

Finally I consciously didn’t reveal the gender of my boss at the beginning of this blog post. How many of you thought my angry boss was a woman and how many of you thought my boss was a man? Whatever you thought let’s make sure our own stereotypes don’t influence  how we treat our colleagues.