Aimee Young, a London-based human resources executive, didn’t just return to work after maternity leave in March 2020. She watched her job mutate. As COVID-19 upended workplaces, colleagues kept coming to her to debrief hard conversations, process anxieties, and work through squabbles. “On the surface, it looked like I was thriving,” she says. “But behind the scenes, nobody was asking if I was OK.” With hindsight, Young describes the emotional load as “the perfect recipe for burnout,” after realizing she had been doing a job nobody asked her to do.

The pattern she ran into is now getting a name in the management world: the “empathy tax.” It is the largely invisible work of supporting colleagues, absorbing anxiety, and tending to workplace well-being. Researchers referenced in the piece point out that this load does not spread evenly. In a Harvard Business School poll of more than 350 professional women in managerial roles in November and December (last year), more than 80% said they spend at least 30% of their workweek on caring tasks like listening to colleagues’ anxieties, offering encouragement, or monitoring how people around them are feeling. When you translate “caring tasks” into time, that is more than a full day of work every week spent acting like an informal therapist.

This matters because the empathy tax is colliding with a leadership style that has been getting louder for years. During the pandemic, empathy moved from theory to practice. CEOs such as Marriott’s Arne Sorenson and Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd publicly emphasized staff well-being and recognizing employees’ whole selves, signaling a break from the hard-charging, shareholder-maximizing managerial style that dominated much of the previous half-century. But six years later, the expectation hasn’t vanished. If anything, it has intensified as layoffs, AI disruption, economic uncertainty, and declining workplace loyalty push employees to seek emotional support from their managers even more.

Meanwhile, the broader corporate mood has shifted in the opposite direction too. Much of corporate America has leaned into a take-no-prisoners vision of leadership, with one strain especially prominent in Silicon Valley that prizes decisiveness, competitiveness, and what the report describes as “masculine energy.” The friction shows up in executives’ own messaging. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the article notes, has lamented what he described as a lack of “masculine energy” in corporate culture, arguing companies benefit from more aggression and competitiveness. AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to managers last year saying the company has “consciously shifted away” from an “employment deal” rooted in loyalty. A JPMorgan Chase executive told employees he wanted “more hustle” after Jamie Dimon criticized staff for pushing back against a five-day return-to-office policy. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has similarly become a leading voice for founder culture focused on intensity, resilience, and execution, dismissing introspection and self-reflection as the article truncates mid-sentence.

So managers are being asked to do two things at once. On paper, leadership culture rewards speed, toughness, and ignoring distractions. In reality, people are bringing their fears to work, including worries about the economy, job security, healthcare, the state of democracy, climate change, and AI disruption. The empathy tax becomes a pressure valve for those anxieties. Psychologists, managerial researchers, and managers caught between colleagues’ emotional needs and leadership mantras say this gap threatens to worsen burnout and reinforce existing inequalities.

The “women pay more” part of the story is grounded in gender norms, not just workplace vibes. The report points to research explaining how deeply ingrained gender expectations lead women to be judged negatively when they do not demonstrate warmth and caring at work, a dynamic some researchers describe as “benevolent sexism.” Deepa Purushothaman of Harvard Business School is cited arguing that these expectations sound positive until you realize they consume the time and energy that could be used for moving your own career forward. Gabriele Geist, who left investment banking in 2016 and now advises organizations on burnout and nervous system regulation, is quoted describing how women are conditioned to believe caring is their role “often without ever questioning it.”

That creates a self-perpetuating trap. Martha Fernandez, a clinical social worker quoted in the piece, says people doing the most emotional labor are often the last to complain because complaining about caring can feel like admitting you are not actually caring. In other words, the empathy tax can be enforced not by explicit policy, but by social expectations about who should be the emotional infrastructure. The article summarizes the Harvard findings as women becoming that infrastructure of modern work, then adds another data point: when the researchers asked how caring-task time changed compared to a year earlier, some 59% reported an increase in emotional labor at work. It also notes that men pay empathy taxes too, but Purushothaman says men do not describe the same pressure to provide emotional support, and in many cases they do not observe this work happening around them.

And the labor market consequence is showing up beyond individual burnout stories. The report notes that more than 455,000 women left the US workforce between January and August 2025, and it cites a Catalyst survey of more than 1,000 women conducted at the end of last year that found many quit because the combined weight of paid work, still-disproportionate caregiving, and invisible emotional labor had become harder to sustain. That’s the second-order impact executives should actually care about: when empathy becomes unpaid and expected, retention becomes the business metric that breaks.

For boards and operators, the question is not whether empathy is “nice” or “needed.” It is whether leadership systems are distributing emotional labor sustainably. If a manager’s formal job becomes indistinguishable from therapeutic support, you get burnout, inequality amplification, and churn. The strategic stakes are simple: companies that celebrate well-being in public while rewarding “hustle” in private risk turning caring into a hidden cost center that burns out the people least likely to be able to set boundaries.