The Empathy Tax: A Day a Week as Unofficial Therapist
More than 80% of women managers now spend at least a day of every working week as their team's unofficial therapist. That is not a wellbeing perk. It is an unpaid, invisible job most organisations never planned for.
Jenni and I spent a good chunk of Episode 65 on a Business Insider piece about the hidden cost of empathy at work, and it is one of those stories that names something a lot of managers have felt for years without a label for it.
The article opens with Aimee Young, a London-based HR executive who came back from maternity leave in March 2020, right as the pandemic hit. Instead of pointing her emotional energy at her newborn, she spent it absorbing her colleagues' anxieties, debriefing their conflicts and acting as the in-house therapist nobody appointed her to be. As she puts it, no one was checking whether she was okay.
Then the number that stops you. Harvard Business School researchers surveyed more than 350 women managers and found over 80% spend at least 30% of their working week on caring tasks. That is a full day, every week, doing work that appears on no job description and in no compensation review. 59% said that load had grown in the past year, against a 2026 backdrop of job insecurity, economic anxiety and AI disruption. The researchers' framing is blunt: women have become the "emotional infrastructure" of modern work.
Why women specifically? The piece points to benevolent sexism, the expectation that women will be warm and caring and the penalty they pay when they are not. And it lands at an awkward moment, with figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon and Marc Andreessen loudly championing "masculine energy" and hustle over introspection. So women are doing more emotional labour in a culture that has decided to respect it less.
Here is where Jenni and I stopped agreeing with the easy version of this story. The problem is not empathy. Approachable managers are a good thing, and people will seek them out for years (I still have former team members who do). The problem is when the caring becomes the job, unbounded and unshared, and when a manager with lived experience but no training starts offering advice a trained professional would not. Jenni made the sharpest point of the segment: the real long-term risk is not just burnout, it is a well-meaning manager doing actual harm because nobody taught them where the line sits.
So the fix is not "care less." It is boundaries, and it is training. Jenni did a three-day mental health first aid course in 2021 and argues it should be closer to standard for anyone managing people. My honest take is that there is no clean fix here, and leaders should at least be aware of what is quietly being dumped on their managers, most of it on women, before they add "make everyone feel seen" to the silent list of things a manager gets measured on. least.
Also in this episode:
Generations at work don't matter. Jenni has disputed this one for years, and she finally has the receipts. Drawing on a LinkedIn post from Rob Briner, we got into why there is little credible evidence that Gen Z, millennials, Gen X and boomers genuinely differ in their attitudes, needs or communication styles, and why the idea refuses to die anyway. Briner calls these "zombie ideas," beliefs that survive because they are simple, comfortable and instantly plausible. Our take: what looks generational is really environment and life stage. A toddler swiping an iPad is not a different species, just a person raised around the tech.
Britain's always-on culture is a leadership problem. New HiBob research found 42% of UK workers are considering quitting over stress, half check messages on holiday, and 29% do it on a date. It starts at the top: 72% of managers say they are expected to perform at a constant high level, and they pass that pressure straight down. I told the story of my dad's first pager at General Motors, the moment "reachable" quietly became "expected to respond." But Jenni pushed back with a fair question: is this the technology, or is it just work, and would someone 30 years ago have said they were exhausted too? Both employer and employee own a piece of this.
Gen Z and the end of business casual. Prompted by a Wall Street Journal piece (and Jenni's real-world sighting of some genuinely questionable office attire), we split cleanly. My position: I do not care how people dress, but plenty of people will, so learn to use an iron and dress for the room you want to be in. Jenni's: she does care, and there is a line. Comfort and individuality are fine. Visible bum cheeks in a corporate office are not.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
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