Why is it almost always women who get told to smile on the street?

Many women say they have been told to ‘cheer up’ or  asked ‘why don’t you smile?’ by random men. While by contrast, it is something that happens to very few men. 

On The Hard Shoulder, journalist Saoirse Hanley recalled how the seemingly innocuous remark left her ‘fuming’. 

 “I might have had an earphone in or something, I was just walking along anyway,” she said. 

“And do you know when you almost have to kind of think, ‘Did I actually hear what I think I just heard?’

“Because this is a random man I don't know, who just passed me in the street and was like, ‘You’d do well to smile.’

“I remember thinking, ‘Sorry, while I'm walking down the street? I’d look demented.’” 

Before she could reply, the man disappeared and Ms Hanley kept walking but “fumed the whole way”. 

It is, she explained, a completely inappropriate thing to say to a stranger, whose life you know nothing about. 

“I mean, first of all, to say it to anyone is just a bit of an overstep anyway, because it's their own business what they do with their face,” she said. 

“But it's the fact that it is only ever delivered to women; it's not that we're telling people in their place of work to just smile more, to be more palatable, to be more approachable, all these things.

“It's that we're exclusively saying that to women who are at work or indeed just existing on the street.” 

'Stay in that lane'

Ms Hanley added that it is also a gendered remark as it is “just something that we inherently and intrinsically only ask of women”. 

“It is because we want women to kind of stay in that lane, to look nice, to kind of be seen and not heard almost in that way?” she said. 

“Because if you're not having a good day, that doesn't really matter - you should just be smiling anyway.” 

Before she became a journalist, Ms Hanley worked as a waiter for 10 years and agrees that things are different when you are at work. 

“That was a really, really hard part of my job,” she said. 

“I would have a really awful day, you'd have something horrible happening in your personal life. 

“But that kind of doesn't matter to the customer.”

Main image: A woman talking on a phone. Picture by: Alamy.com.