Abstract
Despite emotional labour being categorised as women’s work or ‘pink-collar duties’, whether women and men perform and experience emotional labour differently remains an ongoing debate. Most extant studies have explored this phenomenon in Western contexts, with limited research in non-Western contexts. Therefore, this paper explores how male and female nurses performed and experienced emotional labour in a non-Western context, namely Sri Lanka. Utilising 56 interviews with nurses, this qualitative study found that though nursing was perceived as women’s work in Sri Lanka, there were instances where female nurses performed stereotypically ‘masculine’ emotional labour and vice versa. However, constant exposure to service recipients’ aggression, psychologically ‘taking work home’, and having to combine household and caring responsibilities led female nurses to suffer greater emotional exhaustion than men.
Highlights
This study explored how male and female nurses performed and experienced emotional labour in Sri Lanka’s public and private hospitals
Emotional labour has been stereotyped as associated with women’s work because men often undertake more privileged and economically viable roles while women undertake a higher proportion of nurturing, caring, or service responsibilities, known as ‘matters of the heart’ (Evers, 2018; Lively, 2013). This idea overlooks several significant aspects - emotional labour is performed by men in stereotypically ‘masculine’ and male-dominated industries (Thurnell-Read & Parker, 2008; Vaccaro et al, 2011; Yarnal et al, 2004) as well as in female-dominated and stereotypically ‘feminine’ occupations (Cottingham, 2015; Simpson, 2004); some performances of emotional labour may require stereotypically ‘masculine’ emotions, such as intimidation or aggression (Ward & McMurray, 2016; Ward et al, 2020)
This study explored how male and female nurses performed and experienced emotional labour in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka
Summary
This study explored how male and female nurses performed and experienced emotional labour in Sri Lanka’s public and private hospitals. Since most of the extant studies (Cottingham et al, 2015; Cottingham et al, 2018; Elliott, 2017; Søgaard & Krause-Jensen, 2020; Thurnell-Read & Parker, 2008; Torland, 2011; Ward et al, 2020) have explored the gendered nature of emotional labour in Western contexts, little is known on the same in non-Western cultural contexts (Brooks & Devasahayam, 2010; Nixon et al, 2011; Pandey et al, 2018; Syed & Ali, 2013; Yang & Guy, 2015) To bridge this gap, this study explored how male and female nurses performed and experienced emotional labour in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka
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