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The Unpaid Therapist: The Hidden Toll of Emotional Labor on Working Women
It took years for Aimee Young to realize she was working a second, unofficial job.
When the London-based HR executive returned from maternity leave in March 2020, the world was shutting down. She expected to devote her emotional energy to her infant daughter. Instead, her colleagues absorbed it. As the pandemic upended the workplace, her team turned to Young—the most senior woman on staff—to process their anxieties, debrief difficult conversations, and navigate interpersonal squabbles.
"On the surface, it looked like I was thriving because I was connected, respected, and trusted," Young, now 39, recalls. "But behind the scenes, nobody was asking if I was OK."
Young had stumbled into the "empathy tax"—the largely invisible, uncompensated work of supporting colleagues, absorbing anxiety, and tending to workplace well-being. And according to a growing body of research, it is a burden that falls disproportionately on women, with devastating professional and personal consequences.
The Paradox of the Modern Workplace
During the pandemic, empathy moved from the margins of management theory to the center of leadership practice. But six years later, the corporate landscape has fractured into a confusing paradox.
On one hand, layoff anxieties, AI disruption, and a shaky economy have left employees more stressed than ever, driving them to seek out emotional support from their managers. On the other hand, much of corporate America—particularly in Silicon Valley—has swung sharply in the opposite direction, celebrating a hard-edged, take-no-prisoners vision of leadership.
Executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have publicly lamented a lack of "masculine energy" in corporate culture, advocating for more aggression. JPMorgan Chase executives are demanding "more hustle," and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen have dismissed introspection as a distraction.
The result is an environment where employees are more emotionally needy than ever, while the dominant leadership culture increasingly views that neediness with contempt.
Becoming the "Emotional Infrastructure"
For the women caught in the middle, the strain is immense. Social psychology research traces this dynamic back to "benevolent sexism"—the deeply ingrained expectation that women will demonstrate warmth and caregiving in the workplace, and the professional penalties they face if they don't.
"Women are conditioned to believe this is simply their role to play—often without ever questioning it," says Gabriele Geist, a former investment banker who now advises organizations on retaining senior women.
A recent poll of more than 350 professional women by Harvard Business School found that over 80% spend at least 30% of their workweek—equivalent to a full day—on caring tasks like listening to anxieties and monitoring team morale. Nearly 60% reported that this emotional labor had increased over the past year.
"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.
This invisible load is reshaping the labor market. Between January and August 2025, more than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce, with many citing the combined, unsustainable weight of paid work, disproportionate caregiving at home, and unacknowledged emotional labor at the office.
The Boundary Trap
When leaders are asked how to solve this problem, the most common refrain is for women to "set better boundaries." But experts warn that this places the blame on the victim rather than the system.
Research consistently shows that women are judged far more harshly than men when they prioritize their own needs or refuse to help. What looks like an inability to say "no" is often a rational calculation about the professional cost of setting a boundary.
Furthermore, 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," says Martha Fernandez, a clinical social worker. "It’s its own trap."
From Invisible Labor to Measurable Value
So, what is the solution?
First, experts say, CEOs must take responsibility for defining what vulnerability at work actually means. "It’s about being able to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I need help,’" says leadership strategist Caroline Stokes. "It's not about dumping your bad weekend trauma on your boss and expecting them to hold space for you."
Second, organizations need to stop treating empathy as a finite, feminine resource and start treating it as a measurable professional skill.
Lauren Smith Brody, CEO of a women's workforce consultancy, advises her clients to meticulously track their emotional labor in a written log. "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."
The business case for doing so is undeniable. Studies consistently link empathetic leadership to higher employee engagement, stronger retention, and greater innovation. A 2021 EY study found that 87% of workers said mutual empathy with their leaders increased their efficiency, and 81% believed it directly increased company revenue.
"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. Because, as we know, there is a real business return on it."