Leaders Are Crying on the Job. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.

Eric Garcetti, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, choked back tears while discussing the coronavirus’s impact on his city.

Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, has been crying frequently in meetings with White House staff, while Andrew M. Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, has teared up on more than one occasion during his daily televised coronavirus briefings.

After Howard Stern asked Mr. Cuomo about it — “Yes” he has cried, the governor said — a local radio show revisited the subject. “I was a little surprised by the question,” Mr. Cuomo said, noting that his father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, was reluctant to admit he cried. His son was not. He had cried, he said, “about the death toll.”

Crying on the job, especially in politics, used to be considered a liability.

“We tend to like our leaders to appear confident and assured,” said Alicia Grandey, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied emotion in the workplace.

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Crying in public was once seen as a strength.

According to Tom Lutz, the author of “Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” it was common in the 18th century for upper-class men to cry — in fact, “they were viewed as brutes if they didn’t,” he said.

It was only in the 19th century that the idea of male stoicism emerged, and it was not until the mid-20th century that tears were used to suggest that “candidates for public office were not manly or stable enough” to be there, Mr. Lutz said.

Which might help shed light on why, while little boys and girls cry equally when they are young, men tend to cry less than women as adults — and far less than women at work.

According to research conducted in the 1980s by the biochemist William H. Frey, women cry five times as often as men, for an average of five times per month. They also cry for longer lengths of time. Newer research has yielded similar results.

There are myriad reasons for that crying gap, including cultural conditioning — it is more acceptable for women to cry — and the fact that women’s tear ducts are anatomically shallower, leading to spillover, which makes their crying more visible.

Still, the societal expectations of men in public life — especially in politics — have traditionally been pretty clear on the crying front. Namely, do not do it.

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“We have very narrow boundaries of acceptable emotional expression at work in general, and even more narrow for our leaders, male or female,” said Professor Grandey, the psychologist at Penn State.

So narrow are those boundaries that they may boil down to the literal amount of tears. A tear or two — not a sob, Professor Grandey said.

It also depends on what the emotion is about.

Religious tears tend to be OK, as do heroic tears (think: war, sports). Patriotic tears are generally welcome, while personal tears are more risky.

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