The Empathy Tax Female Leaders Pay

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.

Nearly 59% of women reported an increase in emotional labor at work.

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. The overloaded consulting leader we mentioned earlier said she spent hours holding space for employees after layoff announcements, but her male counterparts weren’t asked to do the same.

This work doesn’t just take time. Whether it’s absorbing stories about difficult or painful experiences, sitting with a crying or angry employee, or being present for someone processing hard news, these types of moments evoke emotions in the listener. It takes a toll on their energy. This work doesn’t end when the conversation does. Leaders carry the emotional residue of these interactions — such as sadness, frustration, and anxiety — with them. As one nonprofit leader put it, “I wasn’t trained in trauma or therapy. I leave these conversations emotionally exhausted and unsure how to set the boundary and not absorb it all.”

2. Getting graded on compassion. Gendered expectations that encourage employees to look to women leaders for emotional support also limit how women can respond and how much space they have to deal with their own feelings. In our respective books, we each interviewed multiple women who spoke about having little room to process their own sadness, stress, fear, or other difficult emotions during times of organizational or societal turmoil.

One consulting leader spent hours holding space for employees after layoff announcements, but her male counterparts weren’t asked to do the same.

CEOs may make the formal statement or claim that “the buck stops here” when an unpopular choice is made. But, in practice, they are often insulated from front-line reactions and are rarely expected to engage deeply with employees’ emotions. Managers — particularly women, as our data shows — take on the organizational work of demonstrating empathy, allaying fears, and reassuring employees that they are being heard.

Also, female managers face backlash when they’re seen as insufficiently warm. As a result, women’s performance of caring becomes central to how they are perceived and valued as leaders. They are, in effect, graded on how much and how well they show compassion.

3. Sacrificing time. The different behaviors that make up empathic labor at work, from listening to offering pragmatic support, take not only effort but also time. When women are expected to take on primary responsibility for expressing care within an organization, they must dedicate a meaningful portion of their work hours to meet this demand, our data shows. One problem is that the time women spend filling this role is time taken away from core job responsibilities.

Additionally, many of the women we surveyed said they were often “volunteered” by others on their team to take on caring responsibilities. A finance vice president shared that she was late to a client meeting because an employee became very upset in her office and her colleagues thought it best that she stay until HR arrived.

Like “office housework” or secondary roles such as leading employee resource groups, organizing team morale programs, and mentoring, the emotional caretaker role isn’t formally recognized or rewarded with concrete benefits like higher pay or high-profile assignments. Yet this work plays a critical role in group functioning and supports the common good.

Balancing these caretaker demands with the typical leader’s roster of meetings, emails, and core tasks can quickly lead to overwork. More than a third of our respondents (35.8%) said that the caring work they do in the workplace increases their likelihood of leaving their current role. That is a tangible consequence of the empathy tax for organizations. Moreover, caring tasks limit women’s bandwidth for other leadership work, such as advancing organizational goals and priorities.

The combination of overwork and emotional strain can lead to underperformance, burnout, and, ultimately, attrition — reinforcing the very pressures organizations hope to avoid by calling on women to provide emotional support.

How Women and Organizations Can Address the Empathy Tax

Emotional labor rarely appears in strategy documents or performance metrics, yet it is often the quiet infrastructure that allows organizations to function at all.

For women, the first step is containment. Before reducing your care burden, you need to recognize and reject the harmful narrative that you have to prove your worthiness for leadership by sacrificing your own well-being to meet others’ emotional needs.

Persistent gender norms that expect women to hold endless emotional capacity are the backdrop to this myth, which means that pushing back can be uncomfortable. Remind yourself that your needs — including time to process your own emotions, rest, and pursue your goals — are as important as those of people asking you for care.

This reframe doesn’t mean devaluing care. Indeed, many women we’ve heard from have noted that emotional IQ and warmth are useful leadership traits, even “superpowers” at times. It means deploying your compassion in ways that don’t deplete you.

Next, define and set boundaries that will enable you to feel centered and focused, not drained and scattered in too many directions. These boundaries are going to look different for everyone, depending on role, team dynamics, and personal circumstances. The important part is reflecting on what boundaries will support your success at work and then practicing them consistently.

Remember that your “no” can be a “not now” that respects your time by shifting a conversation to a day or time when you’re not on a deadline. Or your “no” can direct someone to a resource that meets their needs so you can step away. Your boundary might be a clear limit on how long you can talk through a team member’s feelings about a new initiative.

It may help to talk to your peers about their level of care fatigue and collectively reinforce the value of protecting your time and energy. In an organizational culture where many women are taking on a high caring load, one person shifting their approach is swimming against the tide, but a group can create real momentum toward change.

However, the change can’t come just from women: Organizations have their own work to do in taking action to prevent care fatigue from spiraling out of control. First, they should actively assess the extent to which care fatigue is affecting women in leadership roles, whether broadly or in specific pockets of the company. Every manager should be curious about how much time the women on their team — especially women managing others — are spending on caring work. This means both asking directly and observing interactions as they occur.

Managers should also visibly support the boundaries women set in attending to others’ emotional needs — for example, by redirecting any pushback regarding warmth and ensuring that women aren’t positioned as the default emotional resources.

Organizations can also disrupt a culture that leads to the empathy tax and care fatigue in the first place. One approach is rewarding men who step up in a caring capacity. Gender norms often mean that men are criticized for emotional expression or may be seen as weak for exhibiting caring behaviors that are valued in women. By prioritizing empathy and compassion as core leadership qualities for everyone, organizations can reap the benefits of building multifaceted leaders, without placing the burden on women alone. Organizations can help everyone develop a broader leadership toolkit.

Care fatigue is real, and it can derail hard-won career progress for women and for the organizations that want to retain them. The challenge is not whether empathy belongs at work. It is whether organizations are willing to recognize and share the labor required to sustain it. There are ways to address the empathy tax:

• Name it. Acknowledge that the empathy tax and care fatigue exist in your organization.
• Normalize limits. Remove the stigma around a person expressing limits to caring work or seeking support. Leaders should normalize that emotional labor is real and requires intentional management and that caring, empathic leadership is a strength, regardless of someone’s gender.
• Redistribute workload. Design team practices so that all team members share the workload of providing empathy and support. This helps women perform at their best and organizations realize everyone’s potential.