Emotional Labor in Mathematics: Reflections on Mathematical Communities, Mentoring Structures, and EDGE

TL;DR

This paper examines emotional labor in academic mathematics, highlighting its impact on mathematicians' well-being and how mentoring programs like EDGE can mitigate negative effects while emphasizing positive aspects.

Contribution

It extends existing frameworks to analyze emotional labor in mathematics and explores how community and mentoring structures influence this labor.

Findings

Mentoring programs like EDGE reduce negative emotional labor effects.

Mathematical communities can both challenge and support emotional labor.

Understanding emotional labor helps clarify the social dynamics of mathematical careers.

Abstract

Terms such as "affective labor" and "emotional labor" pepper feminist critiques of the workplace. Though there are theoretical nuances between the two phrases, both kinds of labor involve the management of emotions; some acts associated with these constructs involve caring, listening, comforting, reassuring, and smiling. In this article I explore the different ways academic mathematicians are called to provide emotional labor in the discipline, thereby illuminating a rarely visible component of a mathematical life in the academy. Underlying this work is my contention that a conceptualization of labor involved in managing emotions is of value to the project of understanding the character, values, and boundaries of such a life. In order to investigate the various dimensions of emotional labor in the context of academic mathematics, I extend the basic framework of Morris and Feldman [33] and then apply this extended framework to the mathematical sciences. Other researchers have mainly focused on the negative effects of emotional labor on a laborer's physical, emotional, and mental health, and several examples in this article align with this framing. However, at the end of the article, I argue that mathematical communities and mentoring structures such as EDGE help diminish some of the negative aspects of emotional labor while also accentuating the positives.