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The consulting manager took a call at 7:30 p.m., while volunteering at her son’s soccer practice, from an employee who felt “on the verge of quitting.” Later that same week, she responded to texts sent at 2 a.m. from team members who could not sleep amid corporate restructuring and AI uncertainty. On Sunday, she sent notes of encouragement before the workweek resumed.
This is the reality of a climate in which expectations for leaders to show humanity, compassion, and empathy have intensified. Across industries, employees are feeling stressed, worried about economic headwinds, and unsure how AI will reshape their jobs. Organizational fear has always existed, but it’s becoming more visible as the pace of change accelerates.
Leaders are expected to steady anxious teams, absorb emotional fallout, and respond to employees’ increasing mental health needs. These expectations are redefining leadership roles. Yet the burden is being shared unequally: Women are carrying a disproportionate amount of caring tasks at work, often at the expense of their own well-being.
When we polled more than 350 professional women in managerial roles as part of our research, 81.6% told us they spend at least 30% of their workweek on caring tasks, such as listening to colleagues’ anxieties, offering encouragement, or monitoring how people around them are feeling. That’s more than a business day’s worth of work in a five-day week. Increasingly, such work is no longer incidental. It’s becoming part of how organizations function. This level of emotional labor is equivalent to a part-time job layered on top of a person’s existing formal responsibilities. These findings mirror what we’ve consistently heard in one-on-one interviews and group sessions.
We call this the empathy tax, or care tax: the invisible emotional toll women leaders pay when they shoulder most of an organization’s caring labor. This labor causes care fatigue — exhaustion that stems from constantly absorbing people’s stress, frustration, and anxiety. Care fatigue is rarely discussed in leadership circles, yet many managers recognize it immediately when it’s named. It’s the slow accumulation of small stabilizing acts: calming a worried employee, translating a confusing strategy shift, reassuring a team after another round of change.
To be clear, compassion is a valuable component of leadership; when employees feel seen and supported, that’s a good thing. Compassion has positive organizational impacts, including increasing trust, engagement, and resilience. But when women are expected to shoulder an outsize share of caring work, it undermines their well-being and feeds burnout, exposing companies to higher risks of attrition and disengagement among women in managerial roles.
Care creep — the expansion of emotional and support work that becomes expected but not formally recognized — also tangibly hits organizations as women spend more time on caring work. That’s time that would otherwise be spent on core responsibilities and advancing organizational goals.
An Increasing Burden
The caring burden is clearly growing, according to our research. When we asked women how their time spent on caring tasks had changed since the previous year, 20.1% of respondents said they were spending “much more” time on caring tasks, and 38.8% said “somewhat more.” In other words, nearly 59% of women reported an increase in emotional labor at work. Our findings suggest that, at a time when workplace stress and uncertainty continue to rise, it’s women who are increasingly being called on to absorb the emotional energy of their teams.
People may experience additional or different expectations related to race, ethnicity, and cultural and organizational contexts; this article focuses on the gendered pattern that first prompted our research.
What about the men? In our early conversations with professionals of all genders, men did not describe feeling the same pressure to provide emotional support. In many cases, men didn’t even observe such work happening around them — whereas women described it as commonplace.
That dynamic shows that emotional labor often goes unnoticed. So to surface its scope and impact, we asked women about the extent to which they were performing emotional care at work. We heard many stories like the one from the consulting manager at the beginning of this article.
Why are the empathy tax and care fatigue hitting women so hard? A large body of research in social psychology and management has found that women are expected to demonstrate warmth and caring in the workplace and are viewed negatively when they fail to do so. Gender norms that associate women with caring, compassion, and warmth are deeply ingrained. A notable 76% of respondents reported that emotional and caring work in their organizations is performed mostly by women, while only 10.6% said it is shared equally and just 1.7% said it falls primarily on men. These findings underscore how deeply gendered expectations shape the distribution of emotional labor, amplifying the pressures on women leaders.
This dynamic isn’t just statistical; it plays out in everyday life. Researcher and author Brené Brown described being stopped by strangers eager to share their most painful and traumatic stories, a dynamic her fellow academic, Adam Grant, said he hasn’t experienced. Despite having similar platforms, they’re expected to demonstrate empathy in very different ways. When one of us shared this example on LinkedIn, dozens of women responded with similar experiences.
Research shows that in occupations where emotional labor is high, women in senior roles report feeling more overwhelmed than their male peers. This dynamic isn’t new, but as the load increases, the labor is spreading. Caring work has long been expected in functions with a high percentage of women, such as human resources and communications. But as societal stress and mental health challenges rise, especially among Generation Z and younger workers, empathy has become a broader organizational imperative and companies are leaning on a larger group of women.
Three Ways the Empathy Tax Shows Up
Here are some of the invisible ways women leaders shoulder emotional labor at work.
1. Absorbing others’ emotions. Gender norms that cast women as naturally warm and attuned to others’ feelings create an expectation, conscious or not, that women will provide support and compassion when colleagues raise concerns or share their challenges. Research has shown that women in managerial roles are acutely aware of these gendered expectations and work to meet them.
These expectations result in female leaders spending significantly more energy listening to others and soothing and managing their emotions, such as stress, worry, and frustration, than their male counterparts do. Some women reported to us that they were expected to have an endless well of emotional availability and the capacity to constantly absorb others’ stories and stresses
