{"id":529555,"date":"2026-04-14T02:03:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T02:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/529555\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T02:03:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T02:03:08","slug":"the-real-reason-emojis-get-judged-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/529555\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Reason Emojis Get Judged at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cUsing Emojis at Work? You\u2019re Not Going to Like This Study!\u201d That\u2019s the headline of a recent Gizmodo<\/a> article about new research from the University of Ottawa<\/a>. With a headline like that, you may be worried that the message you sent yesterday afternoon with a smiley face \ud83d\ude42 at the end could land you in hot water with the recipient. Yet, as is often the case with science reporting, the findings are much more nuanced than the online headlines would lead you to believe.<\/p>\n

In fact, the real takeaway from the work led by Dr. Erin Courtice and colleagues is that emojis at work aren\u2019t inherently bad, but the ways we express ourselves in the workplace are shaped by unspoken rules. Failing to follow those rules could result in penalties, but following them might improve how you are perceived by colleagues. <\/p>\n

Courtice and colleagues ran a simple yet elegant experiment in which 243 undergraduates were asked to evaluate hypothetical or simulated workplace instant messages (IMs). Each message varied in tone (positive, negative, neutral), emoji type (positive: grinning face \ud83d\ude00; negative: angry face \ud83d\ude20; no emoji), and the message sender’s gender (man or woman). The researchers then explored how participants\u2019 ratings of the sender’s competence and the message’s appropriateness for a workplace environment varied across combinations of the three variables of interest and the participant’s gender. <\/p>\n

Although messages without emojis were consistently associated with high ratings for competence and appropriateness, matching emojis to the content of the message was very important to overall ratings. For example, a positive emoji paired with a positive or neutral message resulted in competency and appropriateness ratings that were virtually identical to those for messages sent without an emoji. The problems arose when the meaning of an emoji did not align with the message’s content. Thus, pairing happy faces with negative messages resulted in lower ratings, perhaps because they were read as confusing or even passive-aggressive<\/a>. <\/p>\n

What About Gender? <\/p>\n

In general, there were very few differences as a function of the participant\u2019s gender or the gender of the hypothetical employee sending a message. In other words, the findings that positive emojis paired with positive or neutral text enhanced perceived competence, and that negative emojis paired with positive or neutral text detracted from perceived competence, held regardless of the participant’s or sender’s gender.<\/p>\n

However, women in the study judged the use of negative emojis sent by other women as less appropriate than the similar use of such emojis by men. Men in the study did not show a similar pattern. The authors discuss how such a finding aligns with existing research on face-to-face workplace interactions, suggesting that women can sometimes police each other\u2019s adherence to gender norms (i.e., do not be negative) even more strongly than men do. <\/p>\n

Why Might Women Judge Other Women More Harshly?<\/p>\n

Perhaps even more is at play. Although not directly assessed in the Courtice et al. (2026) study, femmephobia, or the societal devaluation and regulation of femininity (Hoskin, 2017), may shed further light on the dynamics shaping how people perceive the appropriateness of emoji use in work contexts. Femmephobia differs from sexism<\/a> in that while sexism targets women as a category, femmephobia targets femininity itself, regardless of who expresses it (i.e., man, woman, non-binary<\/a> person). Consequently, traits associated with femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, warmth, and relational maintenance, tend to be devalued, regardless of the gender of the person expressing them. <\/p>\n

Conversely, concepts such as professional behavior, expertise, and authority tend to favor masculinized defaults, such that the masculine approach is viewed as neutral and most appropriate. When it comes to defining workplace communication norms, this translates into professional decorum favoring direct, non-emotional communication that is more restrained and task-focused. Given that emotionality and expressive communication are both considered feminine traits, their use is subject to strict regulation. This can create quite the double bind for women, who are simultaneously expected to adhere to gender norms of feminine behavior, while also adapting to the dictates of professional decorum that tend to devalue those very same behaviors. Consequently, the pattern observed in Courtice et al.\u2019s (2026) study of women viewing other women\u2019s use of negative emojis as less appropriate than men using the very same emojis suggests a degree of internalized femmephobia.<\/p>\n

Other research<\/a> has shown that the most common response to an experience of femmephobia is to suppress one\u2019s femininity. In the workplace, this often translates to women cautiously navigating a tightrope strung between adhering to appropriate gender norms and avoiding violations of proper femininity (e.g., expressions of negative or otherwise excessive emotions). As the authors of the recent emojis at work study note, expressing negative emotions at work can violate not only workplace emotional display rules but also those associated with being a proper feminine woman. Thus, such expressions may have been perceived as less appropriate by women in the study who remain attuned, consciously or otherwise, to the double standard that gives men more leeway to have their negative emotions read as assertive<\/a> or dominant rather than inappropriate. <\/p>\n

The good news is that if femmephobia were shaping the response patterns of all the participants, we would expect to see all use of emojis associated with perceptions of incompetence and lower appropriateness. The fact that Courtice et al.\u2019s sample of undergraduates ascribed equal or greater competence to users of positive emojis suggests that the tide may be turning in how the next generation entering the workforce views the appropriateness of expressive communication in the workplace. Overall, participants seemed to penalize the confusing or ambiguous use of emojis (i.e., pairing a negative emoji with a positive message), rather than the use of emojis themselves. <\/p>\n

The headlines scaring you away from your emoji shortcuts are misleading. The true story of this research is one that we already know: effective communication is thoughtful communication. Your emojis should match your message. Avoid adding unnecessary ambiguity to your written communications with emojis that run counter to the overall valence of your message. Indeed, it\u2019s possible that the participants in Courtice et al.\u2019s study were not so much assessing the overall competence of the hypothetical employees as they were assessing communication competence, such that unclear and mismatched emoji use was a clear demonstration of poor communication competence in a technology-first workplace. <\/p>\n

Even more promising is the finding that embellishing a positive message with a smiley face was seen as both competent and appropriate. So rather than abandoning emojis for fear<\/a> of making a negative impression, simply be intentional with your emoji use. Perhaps future research will include a broader spectrum of emojis, giving us greater insight into which ones are most appropriate for the workplace (prediction: probably not the eggplant emoji!). For now, if even the thought of an emoji in a workplace communication is making your head spin, you may enjoy a recent satirical post in The Economist’s Bartleby column: “Welcome to Emoji School<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cUsing Emojis at Work? You\u2019re Not Going to Like This Study!\u201d That\u2019s the headline of a recent Gizmodo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-529555","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}