Business torrents

When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s eyes watered — and became the talking point out of the New Hampshire primary — it made me sad.

Not that she let emotion show. That people talked about it so much.

The ensuing furor stomped over what I thought was old ground for women in politics and, by extension, for women in business.

I work with some men who tear up. They’re human. I appreciate that.
U.S. political history is replete with male candidates who cried because of stresses on the campaign trail.

Sports heroes including Lou Gehrig and Michael Jordan have sobbed publicly. Ditto military heroes such as Gen. Wesley Clark, religious figures such as Jimmy Swaggart, politicians such as George McGovern and Richard Nixon, and countless performing artists.

Except, perhaps, for Edmund Muskie, tears didn’t break a career.

Mind you, I’m not politicking in Hillary’s behalf. I haven’t decided on “my” candidate yet.

I’m commenting on the suggestion that a woman who wells up is too emotional to handle a leadership position. That was, I thought, a Neanderthal notion.

Around the world, women are leading and have led nations and corporations. To suggest that America would be ill served by a woman leader — merely because of the chance she might cry — seems far behind the times.

The reality is that ice queens — just as men who take stoicism to extreme — don’t build consensus and a following as easily as those who let a bit of their humanity show.

Who decided a woman has to be an ice queen to lead?

There’s a problem when talented, ambitious women think they have to stifle emotion online cash advance. And, unfortunately, as the Hillary discussion indicated, many think they do.

The problem is that, to some observers, those tightly controlled women are brittle. They get the b-word attached to them, even though their behavior merely reflects “male” norms.

A couple of years ago, the hot word was “metrosexual,” a not necessarily complimentary term sometimes used to describe heterosexual men who cared about the way they dressed and perhaps exhibited some emotion-baring traits generally attributed to gay men.

The neologism has blessedly waned in use. It was a silly label that ignored the complexity of men.

So, too, is it silly to draw conclusions about the ability of women to lead because someone’s eyeballs glistened.

We are not robots, male or female.

We all are infinitely complex creatures with emotion which, combined with intellect, makes us capable of creating and leading great endeavors.

Woe to any society that writes off the leadership ability — in government or in business — of half of its educated, intelligent and experienced people.

Diane Stafford is the workplace and careers columnist at The Kansas City Star.