A consulting manager took a call at 7:30pm from an employee who felt "on the verge of quitting" — while she was volunteering at her son's soccer practice. That same week, she responded to texts at 2am from team members who couldn't sleep amid corporate restructuring and AI uncertainty. On Sunday, she sent notes of encouragement before the workweek resumed. None of this appeared in her job description. None of it was compensated.
This kind of work now has a name: the empathy tax. And researchers are finding that it falls disproportionately on women, it is growing in scale, and most organizations treat it as someone else's problem.
What the Empathy Tax Actually Is
The term, developed by researchers at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan Management Review, refers to the invisible emotional toll that women leaders pay when they shoulder the bulk of an organization's caring labor. Researchers Colleen Ammerman and Deepa Purushothaman define it precisely: the slow accumulation of small stabilizing acts — calming a worried employee, translating a confusing strategy shift, reassuring a team after another round of change, welcoming new starters, organizing farewell events, monitoring how people are feeling, responding to the colleague who seems quieter than usual.
These acts keep organizations functioning. They build the trust, engagement, and psychological safety that make teams work. And almost none of them appear on any official job description or performance metric.
When the researchers surveyed more than 350 professional women in managerial roles, 81.6% said they spend at least 30% of their workweek on these caring tasks. Only 1.7% of respondents said that caring work falls primarily on men. When asked whether this load had changed compared to a year ago, 59% reported an increase.
Why Women Pay More Than Men
The distribution isn't random. A large body of social psychology research has established why women consistently carry more of this load: gender norms that associate women with warmth, caring, and emotional availability mean women are expected to demonstrate these qualities at work and are evaluated negatively when they don't.
Bobbi Thomason, a professor of applied behavioral science at Pepperdine who studies gender and leadership, described the mechanism clearly: "Women are wonderful, they're so nice, they're so caring — 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."
Men often don't see the labor happening. "In some cases, they didn't even seem to notice this labor happening around them, even as women were describing it as a regular and significant part of their jobs," said Ammerman. Researcher Brené Brown described being stopped by strangers wanting to share their most traumatic experiences — a dynamic her colleague Adam Grant, who has a comparable public profile, said he hasn't experienced. Similar expectations play out in organizations at every level.
Why 2026 Made It Worse
The caring load has always existed. What's changed is the weight of anxiety workers are bringing to the office, and consequently the emotional demand on those expected to absorb it.
Across industries, employees in 2026 are dealing with existential stress about the economy, job security, AI disruption, and broader societal uncertainty. "As workers bring their fears into the office, someone has to steady them," the MIT Sloan research notes. "And that someone is disproportionately a woman."
The irony of the current moment is stark: precisely as Silicon Valley and corporate America have celebrated a harder-edged, "masculine energy" leadership model — decisiveness, competitiveness, moving fast — the actual emotional scaffolding of organizations is being maintained by women doing work that receives no formal recognition. The gap between what gets valorized and what keeps teams functional is widening.
The Cost When Nobody Acknowledges It
The accumulated weight has a measurable consequence. Researchers call it "care fatigue" — exhaustion that stems from constantly absorbing others' stress, frustration, and anxiety. Nearly 36% of women in managerial roles say this burden is so heavy they are considering leaving their jobs.
More than 455,000 women left the US workforce between January and August of 2025. Researchers studying the exodus found that many quit because the combined weight of paid work, still-disproportionate caregiving responsibilities, and invisible emotional labor had become impossible to sustain.
"The solution isn't to tell people to stop doing this work," said Smith Brody, one of the researchers. "Boundaries matter, of course, but organizations have to reward this kind of work. Because, as we know, there is a real business return on it." What that looks like in practice: formally auditing who is doing caring work, making it visible in performance reviews, and distributing it more equitably across teams — including to the men who currently often don't even know they're not carrying it.
