The Empathy Tax: Balancing our strengths as female managers

I’m a big fan of The Skimm daily news and in today’s edition, I read a stat from a Business Insider article that started me thinking mid-scroll.

According to a recent study, more than 81% of women in management roles say they spend at least 30% of their work week on what researchers call "caring tasks." These caring tasks often consist of actions like listening to (and processing) a colleague’s anxiety, translating confusing directions from a superior manager or colleague, navigating conflict, and in general, soothing and managing emotions.

In their influential MIT Sloan Management Review research, business thought leaders Colleen Ammerman (Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School) and Deepa Purushothaman (author) popularized the phrase “empathy tax.” Empathy tax is the invisible toll that women leaders pay for being the ones that steady others. It’s unseen, necessary work that is almost never included in the job description. And with growing uncertainty around AI and the shifting nature of white collar work, the need for empathetic leaders to navigate employees through uncertainty has only grown.

A recent Catalyst survey found that two in ten women who left their jobs cited high levels of burnout linked to job market uncertainty and difficulty balancing their roles as worker and caregivers. While surveys like this one cite “burnout”, the truth is that many women are complexly experiencing the unique combined weight of doing paid work, caregiving and chores at home, and a quiet, often underappreciated job of holding everyone' else’s emotions together at the office every day.

At the end of the day, something’s gotta give — and rarely is it going to be their kids. In the process, businesses lose good employees who care deeply.

I think and write a lot about empathy and emotional intelligence in leadership. I’m an empathetic leader by nature, so I’ve lived both sides of this article. I’ve been the manager taking the 8:30pm phone call because my boss is frazzled and needs my support. I’ve been the manager who picks up slack at the office because a direct report calls out for weighty personal reasons. I’ve also been the middle manager who had to learn, the hard way, that empathy without a boundary isn’t effective leadership.

So how do we, as women (or empathetic people), stay true to ourselves while setting boundaries that allow us to remain productive?

Lesson 1: The false choice nobody should have to make

Here's what I don't want women to take from that article: that the fix is to become less warm, less available, less you. That's the wrong lesson, and it's actually the opposite of what the research says. Compassion drives trust, engagement, and resilience on a team. Strong leadership starts with recognizing that you are leading human beings who have motivations and feelings that drive them uniquely.

The problem was never that women lead with empathy. The problem is that empathy has been treated as free, infinite, and unsupported. Empathy is something you're expected to produce on top of your actual job, with no boundary, no recognition, and no appreciation.

So the answer isn't "stop caring." It's "care on purpose, inside a structure that protects you." Those are two very different things, and conflating them is exactly what's driving good leaders out the door. A good business needs both protective factors created by the individual and protective factors created by the organization.

It’s not an either/or.

Lesson 2: boundaries are not just fences

Boundaries, for many years, was a word other people used to chastise me for “caring too much.” They were a buzzword that managers read about in leadership books but that somehow never apply to them, only to other employees. Somehow, the fault lay with the employee, not the manager, for not saying “no” or allowing tasks to creep outside professional limits like 8 to 5 work hours.

I would think to myself, how can you put up boundaries if someone knocks over your fence to get to you?

One of the biggest shifts I mentally made as a growing leader was to recognize that boundaries do not equal fences. Fences can be broken, jumped, dodged, or ignored. And if the wolves get in, it’s often the shepherd that gets blamed when the sheep get taken.

I now like to think about my emotional and physical availability as a pool with lifeguards and posted rules. The water is mine. I choose whether people get to dump buckets into it or jump deeply into it. I have a set of clear rules that are posted so everyone can see what is and isn’t allowed. If one of those rules gets violated, I reserve the right to kick them out of the pool.

Here are some of the posted rules that changed how I operate:

• I stopped treating availability as a virtue. Being reachable at all hours is a habit that trains people to skip the critical thinking part and go straight to you. I started naming, out loud, when I was and wasn't available for the unstructured stuff, and reserving real focus for the moments that actually needed it. I also named aloud why those boundaries were in place. For example, if I said I was going to be with my kids and husband, I would not be dividing my attention because they deserved my full self. You are not less compassionate or kind because you aren’t answering the phone at 8 pm.

• I pushed back on the “everything is urgent and important” mentality by asking the right questions. I encouraged my team (including equals, superiors, and direct reports) to ask questions like, is this truly time-sensitive? What would happen if Laney did not address this right away? Who else might be able to answer or help if not Laney? (Jump down to the next section for a glimpse at how curiosity looks in practice.)

• I started asking for the invisible work to be visible. If mentoring, calming, translating, and steadying a team is part of my job (which it often is because I am good at that work and I enjoy doing it) then it belongs in how I talk about my own contributions, not just in the quiet things I do behind a closed door. Naming it isn't bragging. It's accuracy. It should show up on every performance review. It should have it’s own goals related to my development as a leader. It should not be sidelined as “oh yes, she’s good at all that ‘people stuff’”. Name it, claim it, honor its importance. And when it isn’t valued or allowed to be named, you are also allowed to say, “this isn’t the space for me.”

• I got honest about the difference between holding space and absorbing everything. I can sit with someone's hard moment without taking their stress into my body and carrying it around for the rest of the week. That distinction took me a long time and a few genuinely rough stretches to actually feel in practice, not just understand in theory. I love yoga and it’s a daily practice in my life, so I picture people’s problems like water. It flows, it stretches, sometimes it grows. Sometimes it’s okay to pool together our water and mourn or laugh or problem solve together. Other times it’s okay to recognize that someone’s water needs to live in another pool. It’s also vital that you redirect problems where they need to go. Confiding in a colleague is fine, but problem solving can only happen directly between the people it actually concerns.

Lesson 3: wisdom is best shared by asking instead of solving

Here's the one that changed how I lead more than anything else, and it took me years to actually live it.

My instinct, for most of my early career, was to fix things. Someone came to me stuck, upset, or stalled, and I wanted to hand them the answer. Let’s be honest, partly because I often could see an answer, and partly, if I'm honest, because solving it for them felt faster than sitting in their discomfort with them. I didn’t have to hold or absorb their water if I made it evaporate.

Whew.

What I didn't understand yet was that jumping in to solve it teaches people one thing: bring me your problems, and I'll carry them. That's not empathy, alas. That's a shortcut that quietly makes you the bottleneck for every hard moment on your team, forever. And it can be a hard process to walk back once its begun.

In no place is this lesson of asking not solving more evident than as a parent of small children. Small children can’t do anything by themselves at first. They must be taught.

My two kids are a study in contrasting personalities. My son is independent, fierce, and immovable. His favorite phrase is “I do it my own self”. Of course, he gets quite frustrated when he fails or can’t do something as well as his older sister. But nevertheless, he holds an innate desire to be self-sufficient that far outweighs his frustration. For him, it’s about proving that he can do the thing. For him, the lesson is teaching him to ask for help when he’s out of his league.

My daughter on the other hand, is quick-witted and easy-going, and therefore more likely to turn for help when a challenge hits. Like water, she flows toward the easiest path to get what she wants/needs. (Sometimes, too quickly.)

As a parent, you sometimes want to just jump in and fix whatever isn’t working. After all, we want our kids to be happy and to succeed, just as we do our direct reports at work. But I’ve learned that the most important thing you can do to help teach someone to work through their own problems is to ask the right questions that hand the problem back to her. To help someone to see the problem in a different light.

I start with reflective empathy that recognizes that she’s feeling frustrated and that it’s hard. Then, I use some version of two questions: "what have you already tried?" and "what else might you do if Mom/Dad wasn’t here?" Pause. Reflect. Think outside the box. Maybe I give her a suggestion that she hasn’t tried. But mostly, I let her do the work.

Sometimes, she’s truly exhausted every option or lacks something (like strength or knowledge) to be able to solve it. But usually, she takes a breath and tackles the challenge another way. (Equally true that she also sometimes flops to the floor and has a little fit. She’s six after all.)

It is so much slower in the moment to take this angle. It sometimes feels like I’m wasting precious time that I could be focused on something else. But like practicing yoga, I accept and breath into the long game because I want my kids and my team members to one day be able to do the thing themselves when I’m not around.

Emotional intelligence is a valuable skill, so practice it

All of this is to say that you can be emotionally saavy, caring, and compassionate and not pay the empathy tax. None of these skills I’ve described above requires becoming a colder version of yourself. Asking good questions instead of rescuing someone is emotional intelligence. It requires reading the room well enough to know that someone doesn't need an answer and that they can be trusted to find one. It requires patience to breath and watch someone struggle for a bit without taking that struggle into yourself. And mostly, it requires caring enough about someone's actual growth to resist the short-term relief of just handing them a solution.

The women (and men!) I admire most as leaders haven't gotten there by dialing down their empathy but by utilizing it deliberately, consistently, and protectively. It is a strength being wielded with purpose and precision to benefit those around them and ignore the voices telling them to “just not care.”

We don't need to become someone else to survive the empathy tax. We just need to stop paying it in silence.

With great empathy,

Laney