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.
Colleen Ammerman is the director of the Race, Gender & Equity Initiative at Harvard Business School. She is coauthor, with Boris Groysberg, of Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
Deepa Purushothaman is an executive fellow at Harvard Business School and the founder of The Re.write. She is the author of The First, The Few, The Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America (Harper Business, 2022).
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Colleen Ammerman and Deepa Purushothaman for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.