Emotion Work at Work: The Effects of Race and Employment Status on Emotion Management in Women

This study explores the impact of race and employment status on the degree of women’s emotion management. Drawing on Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor and feeling rules as well as Kanter’s theory of tokenism, I hypothesize that nonwhite women as well as employed women will report higher levels of emotion management than white women or unemployed women. I utilize data from the 1996 General Social Survey, due to their special module on emotions from that year. After creating a female-only subset and an Emotion Management Scale, which includes data from several questions from the emotion module, I run a regression analysis controlling for respondents’ age and years of education. Unlike previous qualitative studies, my bivariate and multivariate findings suggest that neither the respondent’s race nor their employment status are significant factors in how they score on the Emotion Management Scale. Even though the hypothesis is not supported, the findings do indicate that the theories still hold validity and that it is possible for emotion management to be measured quantitatively