SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Don’t let Hillary Clinton fool you – for powerful women, it can still be perilous to cry.

At least, that’s what University of California, Davis, professor Kim Elsbach has been hearing as she embarks on a yearlong analysis of crying on the job.

“I was really surprised at how severe women felt the consequences were,” with some sure their tears had cost them promotions, plum assignments and coworkers’ respect, Elsbach said.

Elsbach, a professor in UC Davis’ graduate school of management, has been collecting accounts about workplace crying and its repercussions as part of a bigger effort to understand the impacts.

So far, the stories she’s heard have surprised her with their intensity – both in how damaging women feel crying can be, and in the lengths they will go to avoid it.

“Even if it means looking rude or strange, people would rather get up and leave in the middle of a meeting than cry in a meeting,” she said. Some abruptly change subjects, bite their lips or even ban tissues from their offices as tear-avoiding strategies.

By summer, Elsbach and a colleague hope to have learned enough to create a survey that could go out to thousands of professional women, in an effort to go beyond anecdotal accounts and better document the career impacts of crying.

They want to investigate how tears affect a woman’s chances of promotion, how colleagues and superiors view her leadership potential, how they treat her once she’s a known “crier” and how she sees herself.

Researchers also are hoping to identify the circumstances in which crying is more – or less – damaging professionally. Elsbach suspects the least harmful episodes involve one-on-one encounters or situations in which others find crying easily understandable, such as when someone is being badgered or bullied.

“The worst case is to cry in a meeting, a group setting … that seems to be the place where it’s most damaging to leadership and promotability,” she said.

Yet when Clinton choked up while talking to voters at a New Hampshire coffee shop Monday, political pundits described it as “humanizing.”

Elsbach suggested the senator’s emotional moment was less damaging for many reasons: Clinton had been the target of attacks in a recent debate; she was responding on a very personal level to a personal question, and she doesn’t have a reputation of being overly emotional.

“Hers was a really good example of a context in which it wasn’t so bad,” Elsbach said.

There’s been very little research on crying in the workplace, with more focus instead on why we cry, and the gender and cultural differences behind the waterworks.

Elsbach, who has been digging through the published studies, said it’s clear crying can relieve stress. It might be linked to cardiovascular benefits. And in both genders, the tendency to cry varies enormously from person to person.

A scale that measures crying proneness – based on how often you cry, how long, over what issues and other factors – is a much better predictor than gender of who is likely to break into tears.

Yet gender plays a strong role, and no one really knows how much of that is cultural and how much biological.

“Everyone is wired to cry, because we all cry when we’re babies,” Elsbach said. She noticed, though, that her young son began being strongly “socialized” against crying once he got to kindergarten.

By the time we reach adulthood, she said, American men are likelier to respond to intense frustration by raising their voices, snapping at someone or pounding a desk, while American women are likelier to cry.

Both genders will more commonly respond to deep sorrow, such as that caused by a death or divorce, with tears.

The differing response to frustration, though, can be problematic in the business world. Elsbach worries that some companies may be underutilizing good performers because their tears have been misinterpreted as emotional instability.

“A significant group of managers are intolerant of it,” feeling that crying is unprofessional, she said.

Until that perception changes, Elsbach’s advice for the job is simple.

If you know you cry easily, try to avoid the situations that move you to tears. And if you feel them coming on anyway, try to make a quick exit.

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(c) 2008, The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.).

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AP-NY-01-11-08 2301EST