Gender equality has become a social ideal and widely studied especially regarding board of directors. Interestingly, existing academic work has left out the role of emotions in the analyses of boardroom gender diversity issues. We develop an emotional labor perspective to explain if and how individual board members experience discrepancy between genuine felt and outwardly expressed emotions when being confronted with the topic of gender equality in the boardroom. We initiated a natural experiment where we analyzed a combination of facially expressed emotion and verbal emotional responses of venture board stakeholders. Based upon the idea that board members suppress and simulate positive and negative emotions in gender equality encounters, we propose and operationalize four different types of emotional labor strategies professionals may engage in to align their external emotion expression with societal expectations that encompass their professional roles. Our research finds support for men being more inclined to suppress genuine negative emotions towards gender equality in the boardroom and simulate positive emotions when experiencing negative ones compared to women. Our study reveals that emotional labor occurs in the boardroom affecting female inclusion.
