The Hidden Cost of Empathy at Work | Invesloan.com

It took years for Aimee Young to realize she’d been doing a job nobody had asked her to do.

In March 2020, the human resources executive returned from maternity leave just as the world was descending into a global pandemic. She expected to devote most of her emotional energy to her infant daughter. Instead, much of it went to the adults she managed.

Young, who’s now 39 and based in London, was the most senior woman on her team. As COVID-19 upended the workplace, colleagues sought her out to debrief difficult conversations, process their anxieties, and navigate squabbles between them. They brought her their fears, frustrations, and uncertainties — stemming both from home and from work. Almost by default, Young started an unofficial second job as in-house therapist.

“On the surface, it looked like I was thriving because I was connected, respected, and trusted,” she says. “But behind the scenes, nobody was asking if I was OK.” With hindsight, she says, she recognized the emotional labor she had taken on was “the perfect recipe for burnout.”

Of the dozen managers I spoke to for this article, many described strikingly similar experiences of tending to their colleagues’ uneasy psyches.

Kate, a 41-year-old based in Boston, tells me she quit her job in consulting in part because the “therapy” she says she felt like she was expected to provide the people she managed was “untenable.” A 42-year-old manager who works in the healthcare industry in Los Angeles put it bluntly: “My actual job that I’m paid for doesn’t keep me up at night. But this work of making sure the people who work for me feel happy and seen in a super stressful world absolutely does.”

During the pandemic, empathy moved from the margins of management theory to the center of leadership practice. CEOs from Marriott’s Arne Sorenson to Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd publicly emphasized staff well-being and recognizing employees’ whole selves, marking a sharp departure from the hard-charging, Miltonian shareholder-maximizing managerial style that had dominated the previous half-century.

Six years later, that expectation hasn’t disappeared. If anything, layoffs, AI disruption, economic uncertainty, and the erosion of workplace loyalty have left employees looking to their managers for even more emotional support. The effect has been a blurring of lines between managerial responsibilities and the more therapeutic, ill-defined work that people like Young found themselves inundated with.

Researchers have begun calling the latter the “empathy tax” — the largely invisible work of supporting colleagues, absorbing anxiety, and tending to workplace well-being — and it’s work that falls disproportionately on women.

Meanwhile, much of corporate America has shifted in the opposite direction: celebrating a harder-edged, take-no-prisoners vision of leadership, one especially prominent in Silicon Valley that prizes decisiveness, competitiveness, and “masculine energy.”

The divergence is increasingly hard to ignore. Psychologists, managerial researchers, and the managers caught in the middle — between colleagues’ emotional needs and the boss’ mantras to effectively ignore them — say that this gap threatens to exacerbate burnout and existing inequalities in the economy. They also say that the fix starts with companies acknowledging the true cost of this often invisible load and their responsibility to alleviate it.

A growing body of social psychology research helps explain why women pay a steeper empathy tax than men. Many studies show that, thanks to deeply ingrained gender norms, women are expected to demonstrate warmth and caring in the workplace and are judged negatively when they don’t.

Women are becoming the emotional infrastructure of modern work.Deepa Purushothaman, Harvard Business School

Bobbi Thomason, a professor of applied behavioral science at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School who studies gender and leadership, says those expectations reflect what researchers describe as “benevolent sexism.” “Women are wonderful, they’re so nice, they’re so caring,” she says. “These things all sound perfectly good until you realize that using all your time and energy being kind and giving to everyone else is taking away from time and energy you could spend moving your own career forward.”

“Women are conditioned to believe this is simply their role to play — often without ever questioning it,” says Gabriele Geist, a 47-year-old who left investment banking in 2016 and now advises organizations on burnout, nervous system regulation, and the retention of senior women.

Martha Fernandez, a clinical social worker, says that this conditioning can quickly turn into a self-perpetuating cycle. The people doing the most emotional labor “are usually the last to complain, because complaining about caring feels like admitting you’re not actually caring, which is its own trap,” she says.

In November and December last year, researchers at Harvard Business School polled more than 350 professional women in managerial roles, and found that more than 80% said they spend at least 30% of their workweek on caring tasks: listening to colleagues’ anxieties, offering encouragement, or monitoring how people around them are feeling. In other words, they’re spending more than a day of work as quasi-therapists every workweek.

“A line that kept coming up when we were doing this research was that women are becoming the emotional infrastructure of modern work,” says Deepa Purushothaman, an executive fellow at HBS.

And the strain that comes with that is growing. When the researchers asked the women how their time spent on caring tasks had changed compared to a year ago, some 59% reported an increase in emotional labor at work. That’s not surprising, as workers in 2026 bring into the office existential worries about the economy, job security, healthcare, the state of democracy, climate change, and AI disruption, to name a few.

The anxiety stemming from all of this, and the resulting empathy tax felt by many, may also be reshaping the labor market itself. More than 455,000 women left the US workforce between January and August of 2025, and a survey of more than 1,000 women conducted at the end of last year by Catalyst, a workforce consultancy, found that many quit because the combined weight of paid work, still-disproportionate caregiving, and invisible emotional labor had become harder to sustain.

Men pay empathy taxes, too. But Purushothaman says that in the conversations she’s engaged in for her research, men did not describe feeling the same pressure to provide emotional support as women, and in many cases they didn’t observe this work happening around them. “We aren’t saying men don’t do this work at all,” said Colleen Ammerman, director of HBS’s Race, Gender & Equity Initiative, who led the study with Purushothaman. “We’re just saying that women experience substantially greater expectations to do it.”

One of the things that has made the emotional labor many managers describe particularly frustrating is that it has unfolded alongside the growing popularity of a leadership culture that espouses very different traits.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who attended last month’s UFC cage match on the White House South Lawn, has lamented what he described as a lack of “masculine energy” in corporate culture, arguing that businesses benefit from more aggression and competitiveness. AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to managers last year noting that the company has “consciously shifted away” from “an ’employment deal’ rooted in loyalty.” A JPMorgan Chase executive told employees he wanted “more hustle” in the wake of Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, criticizing staff for pushing back against a five-day return-to-office policy. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, meanwhile, has become a leading voice for a strain of founder culture that prizes intensity, resilience, and execution. He recently dismissed introspection and self-reflection as a distraction, and argued that workers should instead “retardmaxx.”

Boundaries matter, of course, but organizations have to reward this kind of work.Lauren Smith Brody, founder of a women’s workforce consultancy

The message is often implicit rather than explicit, but it is nevertheless powerful: Some of the richest, most visible, and most powerful executives are glorifying a type of leadership that values toughness and not empathy, and this creates environments in which employees feel more limited in terms of whom they can confide in when things get tough.

Aimee Young says that her inbox is full of messages from midlevel and senior women who are experiencing exactly this right now. “They’re doing more emotional labor in a culture that respects it less,” she says. “And they’re burning out faster as a result.”

So what’s to be done?

Caroline Stokes, a leadership strategist and executive coach, says that the first thing we need to do is acknowledge that framing the issue as an “empathy tax” might actually be harmful. “It hands men an opt-out and lets organizations commodify the issue without fixing the culture that created it,” she adds. “It pathologizes women absorbing anxiety instead of addressing the systemic problem.”

The onus, says Stokes, has to be on CEOs in setting clear boundaries on what employees should and shouldn’t bring to their managers. Executives should tell their employees directly that “vulnerability at work isn’t dumping on your bosses and line managers or colleagues and expecting them to hold space for you.” It’s “about being able to say ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I need help,'” she adds, “and not ‘let me process my bad weekend trauma with you.'”

Brenda Fahn, a marriage and family therapist, says she has seen the emotional stress that’s heaped on women in the workplace lead to depression, anxiety, sleep issues, resentment, and a loss of interest in intimacy. It’s important, she says, to understand that empathy can be “learned.” “It is a skill, and the more companies recognize its value and the tangible benefits it brings to outcomes and productivity, the better,” she adds.

Lauren Smith Brody, founder and CEO of women’s workforce consultancy The Fifth Trimester, urges her coaching clients to keep a written record of all of the emotional work they do. “When you meticulously keep track, suddenly you can see a pattern,” she says. “It becomes tangible, something you can describe as a real professional skill during your performance review. And once you can quantify it, it becomes easier for organizations to value it.”

While it’s impossible to put a precise figure on the value of empathy, studies have unequivocally linked empathetic leadership to higher employee engagement, stronger organizational commitment, greater innovation, and better job performance. One EY study from 2021 found that 87% of workers said they felt that mutual empathy between them and their leaders increased their efficiency, while 86% said they believed it enhances innovation, and 81% said they thought it increased company revenue.

Thomason cautions against assuming the answer is simply for women to establish firmer boundaries in order for this important empathy work to be shared. Research consistently shows that women are judged differently than men when they prioritize their own needs, she says. What can look like an inability to say no is often a rational calculation about how that refusal will be received. “It’s not that you don’t know how to have a boundary,” she says. Women are often weighing the professional cost of setting one.

Empathy and emotional work often happen spontaneously and in an unstructured way — even behind closed doors — but that doesn’t make it any less important than the structured, predictable, and easily measurable work that managers do. It has to be recognized, acknowledged, measured, and rewarded, says Ammerman. “The solution isn’t to tell people to stop doing this work,” says Smith Brody. “Boundaries matter, of course, but organizations have to reward this kind of work,” she adds. “Because, as we know, there is a real business return on it.”

Josie Cox is a journalist who has worked for publications like Reuters, The Independent, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the book, “Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality.”