The ‘care tax’ costs professional women 12 hours per week

Women leaders often pay an “empathy tax,” according to MIT Sloan Management Review, with more than four in five spending at least 30% of their workweek on caring tasks. MIT surveyed 350 professional women in managerial roles and found that listening to colleagues’ anxieties, offering encouragement or monitoring the emotions of colleagues or subordinates eats up the equivalent of more than a day every workweek. “Increasingly, such work is no longer incidental. It’s becoming part of how organizations function,” the survey notes. “This level of emotional labor is equivalent to a part-time job layered on top of a person’s existing formal responsibilities.”