Emotional Labor: the condensed MetaFilter thread

First off, let's admit that LinkedIn is a strange, strange medium. What is it that LinkedIn employees do all day? Improving the UI certainly isn't it.

Most of the posts here are blatantly self-promoting or are listicles about job-related 101s: questions to ask in an interview, five things to do when starting at a new job, how to run a meeting, etc, etc.

Much of the content I see seems to be a basic introduction to social norms of business. Useful for the Asperger's spectrum people pervading engineering, no doubt, but not very in-depth.

I found the following PDF to be a very insightful look at "emotional labor", a concept developed to understand some of the ways in which the work that we do is gendered. In every tech startup I've seen, work is highly gendered, with predominantly male engineers doing the "real work", and predominantly female office managers, recruiters, and HR, work that tends to be undervalued. Why is this?

It's because the latter roles involve a lot of emotional labor. This piece is geared more toward understanding the imbalance in emotional labor in mixed-gender relationships and families, but I think it will also help all of us, male and female, understand some of the dynamics within the workplace.

Be warned: this is no listicle. It is a 40+-page selection of comments from a long thread.

Enjoy!

Emotional Labor: the condensed MetaFilter thread (PDF)