Four words have echoed across every boardroom, dating app, and city street in the world: You should smile more.
Anastasia Ryan has heard it her whole life, but perhaps never more than in a role where the people she was speaking to couldn’t see her at all. “The majority of what I did was over the phone, and I still had my supervisor coming through and making gestures that I needed to smile while on a call,” she says. “And then eventually, I was told that my facial expressions weren’t appropriate in the office.”
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After being let go, Ryan channelled her rage into a novel called You Should Smile More, a workplace revenge fantasy about a telemarketer who’s fired for her neutral expression. Through its protagonist, Ryan was able to say all the things she wished she’d been able to say when those smile directives were lobbed at her.
The same remarks might have inspired a rewarding career turn, but that doesn’t negate the damage they caused. “It is absolutely infuriating because it’s being singled out for your appearance and for the way you’re presenting yourself, in a way that’s not equal across gender standards,” she says. “It’s frustrating because we’re so much more than that.”
Why it happens
People (usually men) have been advising other people (almost always women) to smile more for as long as anyone can remember. “Men feel that it’s OK, if not entirely required, to tell women to smile, which is a really interesting assumption,” says Marianne LaFrance, an emerita professor of psychology and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University, and author of Why Smile? The Science Behind Facial Expressions. “The gender status quo is that women should smile more.”
That stems largely from a sense of entitlement, she says. “Men laugh it off, as though it’s a male prerogative to tell a woman what to do with her body,” LaFrance says. People in certain industries, like health care workers and service…
