Crying in the Commons: why are women’s workplace tears a source of shame?

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was caught on camera crying during prime minister's questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Photograph: House of Commons/PA

Rachel Reeves’s tears this week triggered a fall in the pound and attracted widespread derision from political columnists, mostly male. “What is wrong with Rachel Reeves?” the Telegraph asked. In an article headlined “The meaning of the chancellor’s tears”, a New Statesman columnist told readers that Reeves’s authority was “beginning to melt away”. The Daily Mail spoke disdainfully of her “waterworks”.

But in the longer term the chancellor’s display of distress may prove to have an unexpectedly positive legacy, helpfully normalising a still hugely stigmatised phenomenon: women’s tears in the workplace.