Aimee Young did not realize she had taken on a second job until she was already burning out.
She returned from maternity leave in March 2020, right as the world shut down. She expected to spend her emotional energy on her newborn daughter. Instead, it went to the adults she managed. As the most senior woman on her team, colleagues came to her to process anxieties, navigate conflicts, and debrief difficult conversations. She became the office therapist. Nobody asked her to do it. Nobody noticed she was doing it. And nobody checked on her while she did.
"On the surface, it looked like I was thriving," she told Business Insider. "But behind the scenes, nobody was asking if I was OK."
Researchers have started calling this the empathy tax: the invisible work of supporting colleagues, absorbing stress, and managing other people's emotional states. And it falls disproportionately on women, especially working mothers.
The data behind the empathy tax
The numbers are stark. According to research cited by Business Insider in July 2026, 59% of women reported an increase in emotional labor at work compared to a year prior. These are not soft metrics. These are women spending the equivalent of a full workday each week acting as unofficial therapists for coworkers and direct reports.
Meanwhile, mental health leaves of absence surged 300% between 2019 and 2024, according to ComPsych data. Nearly 70% of those leaves were taken by women. Millennial women accounted for 33%, and Gen X women accounted for 30%. These are women in their prime career and parenting years, and they are hitting breaking points.
The empathy tax is not a metaphor. It is measurable, it is gendered, and it is compounding.
Why the empathy tax falls on mothers
The same skills that make you good at mothering make you a target for workplace emotional labor. You are already the person who notices when something is wrong, who remembers the details, who follows up, who anticipates needs before they become problems. At home, that is the mental load. At work, it becomes the empathy tax.
Society conditions women to be the emotional shock absorbers in every room they enter. When a colleague is struggling, who notices? When a team member needs reassurance, who provides it? When there is tension in a meeting, who smooths it over? The answer, repeatedly, is the most senior woman in the room, or the only woman in the room, or the working mother who already has a full plate but cannot seem to stop adding to it.
A consulting manager in Boston told Business Insider she quit her job partly because the unofficial therapy she provided her team had become "untenable." A healthcare manager in Los Angeles said her actual job does not keep her up at night, but "this work of making sure the people who work for me feel happy and seen in a super stressful world absolutely does."
How emotional labor at work compounds the mental load at home
Here is what makes the empathy tax uniquely destructive for working mothers. It does not replace the mental load at home. It stacks on top of it.
A mother already carries the cognitive operating system for her family: who needs to eat, whose vaccines are due, whether there is enough food, who will stay home when the baby is sick. That system runs constantly, even during work hours. Now add the emotional needs of 8 or 10 or 50 colleagues, and you have two full time jobs running simultaneously, only one of which comes with a paycheck.
The empathy tax also operates differently from other forms of workplace inequality. It is not written into a job description. It is not measured in performance reviews. It is not recognized in compensation discussions. It is invisible, which means it is also invisible when it starts to break you.
Psychology Today reported in 2026 that post pandemic mental health symptoms continue to rise, and working mothers "may represent one of the largest groups silently carrying unmet mental health needs within the workforce." Not the smallest group. The largest.
What companies keep getting wrong
Many organizations responded to the mental health crisis by training managers in empathy, emotional intelligence, and trauma informed leadership. These are good things. But they come with an unspoken assumption: that the managers, often women, will absorb the cost.
CEOs celebrated empathy as a leadership trait during the pandemic. Six years later, that expectation has not gone away. If anything, layoffs, AI disruption, and economic uncertainty have left employees looking to their managers for even more emotional support. Meanwhile, corporate America has shifted back toward a harder edged, results first vision of leadership, leaving working mothers caught between two impossible expectations: be the empathetic glue that holds the team together, and deliver like nothing has changed.
The result is a group of women who are performing two demanding, emotionally intensive roles simultaneously, at work and at home, with no acknowledgment that the second role exists.
What actually helps
The empathy tax will not be solved by individual resilience. It requires structural change.
Make emotional labor visible. Start tracking it in performance conversations. If a manager is spending hours a week supporting team members' mental health, that is work. Name it, count it, and compensate it.
Redistribute the load. Emotional labor, like the mental load at home, tends to pool with whoever is most willing to do it. Rotate who runs difficult conversations. Bring men into the work of supporting team well being, not just delegating it.
Build real support infrastructure. Employee assistance programs exist for a reason. So do mental health benefits. So does paid leave. When companies invest in actual systems rather than expecting individual managers to be the safety net, everyone benefits.
Check on the people checking on everyone else. The woman who seems to be handling it all is often the one closest to breaking. A simple question, asked genuinely, can interrupt that trajectory.
What this means for working mothers
If you are a working mother reading this and feeling recognized for the first time, that recognition matters. The empathy tax is real. The exhaustion you feel is not a personal failing. It is the logical outcome of carrying two invisible workloads and being expected to carry them gracefully.
The mental load at home is already more than any one person should manage alone. The empathy tax at work makes the burden doubly unsustainable. Both are design failures, not personal ones. And design failures can be named, measured, and restructured.
At AlphaMa, we are building tools to reduce the mental load that mothers carry. Because the answer is not to help women absorb more invisible work. The answer is to redistribute the work itself, at home and at work, so that mothers can bring their full intelligence and capability to both roles without paying a tax nobody else even sees.