'The extra shift': The unpaid emotional labour expected of women at work

Women largely bear the brunt of invisible workplace responsibilities. The work is taxing – and uncompensated.

In workplaces across the world, there's labour happening that's not listed in any job description – and women are performing most of it.

Emotional labour is the unsung, often unseen, job of managing other people's feelings. "It's not just the work that runs economies," explain Rose Hackman, the author of a 2023 book on the subject. "It's the work that runs families and communities. Emotional labour is manipulating the heart in order to have an effect on clients, customers, passengers, patients. It's what creates a feeling of safety and connection, meaning and belonging within a company."

It's crucial – but also taxing, and often required. Women bear the brunt. To begin, they dominate careers that demand a huge amount of emotional labour. But all workplaces require some, and especially in male-dominated offices, women are the ones doing that heavy lifting, largely without acknowledgement or recompense.

Emotional labour-intensive careers tend to be female dominated – think areas like nursing, teaching, childcare, social work and hospitality. While there's an assumption that women are "well-suited" to these jobs, Hackman says that's actually just the effect of socialisation. 

"All of the traits and skills and roles associated with emotional labour have always been put onto girls and women, starting from a really young age," she says. "Girls are not just taught to be painfully other-oriented; they are policed if they are not."

It's a pervasive kind of training, agrees E Michele Ramsey, an associate professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State Berks, US. "It rolls into the types of games we tend to be socialised into playing: little girls play dolls, teacher, nurse. Boys play much more active and less nurturing games." 

The impact is compounded by other early childhood influences, she adds. "This has gotten somewhat better, but on television or in a book you're being read as a child, who is the nurse? Who is the teacher? Who's the scientist and the firefighter? They're often very gendered, and from the very beginning that limits what kids think their options are." 

But traits like empathy and compassion certainly aren't innately gendered, and research has shown there is no categorical difference between the male and female brain. "There are studies across academic disciplines showing that empathy is a skill that all humans, regardless of gender, are able to perform," says Hackman. "But it's become so equated with being a girl or woman that we don't see the training; we see it as how girls and women inherently are."

It's often the internalised basic training, says Ramsey, that leads women to choose careers that require a great deal of emotional heavy lifting.

"It shouldn't be surprising that more women go into these nurturing roles," she says. "People who are marginalised have to be better at non-verbal communication; they have to be able to read signals better, because by virtue of being oppressed they are constantly on the lookout for not stepping on anyone's toes, making sure they don't say the wrong thing. All of that folds into practicing nurturing in all of our play, and all of our interactions. So, we shouldn't be surprised when people who identify as female go into that kind of work."

It's not just jobs like caregiving and service positions that demand emotional labour – every workplace requires it in some capacity. By and large, tasks like planning parties, service days and team-building exercises, maintaining relationships, and building community all fall to women within mixed-gender workplaces. Studies show women provide much more of the "office housework" – tasks that are associated with "low promotability".

Concurrently, this heavy lifting is not typically celebrated or even seen as extraordinary work – and it doesn't help women get ahead. Yet if they don't do it, they can be left behind.

"A lot of women entering workplaces that were previously male dominated are finding that they are expected, by virtue of being women, to provide an added shift of emotional labour," says Hackman. Research has shown that, especially in white collar workplaces, that "extra shift" is a requirement for women to get ahead. A paper in the journal Human Resource Management showed men could advance by being – and appearing to be – good at their jobs, but women also needed "prosocial orientation".

"In an engineering firm, say, to get ahead, a male engineer has to be two things: confident and competent," says Hackman. "For a female engineer to get ahead, she has to display the same attributes, and then she also has to be kind and reassuring and a team player."

In other words, women also must be confident and competent, plus considerate and compassionate. But ironically, while women will be left behind if they don't do the extra work, it doesn't do much to help them rise to the top. "All the extra services women perform at work – raising money for things, planning events, remembering occasions – that sort of stuff doesn't count," says Ramsey. "It takes a lot of organisation and multitasking; there's some solid skill sets in that kind of labour. But then when it comes time to be promoted, none of that work is part of the equation."

Indeed, a 2022 study from the department of psychology at New York University Abu Dhabi showed that, while prosocial behaviour can increase employee wellbeing, it can also keep women out of leadership roles by "draining powerful women's time and resources without equitable rewards, and making it difficult for women to legitimise their power".

On top of potentially making it tougher to advance, there's a personal cost to doing all this extra labour. "The toll is huge," says Hackman. "First, it's just time consuming: checking in with co-workers, being a team player, coming across as agreeable, sending emails, having watercooler conversations. It all takes up your time."  

Not only are women not being compensated for additional emotional labour – and penalised if they eschew it – but analyses of the gender wage gap also often point to the fact that female-dominated professions pay lower wages overall.

More like this:

"This is especially true of jobs in care work, such as childcare workers, domestic workers and home health aides, all of which pay below average wages," researchers wrote in a 2022 US Department of Labor report. "And while it does not contribute directly to the wage gap, women-dominated jobs also are less likely to include benefits like employer-provided health insurance and retirement plans compared to occupations dominated by men."

This persists, despite the reality these emotional-labour-heavy jobs women dominate are also some of the most important.

"Why is it that we undervalue these kinds of jobs, that are arguably the most essential in our society, and that can't be replaced? You can't automate good bedside manner or a humanising touch. Part of the problem is we don't see emotional labour as a form of work," says Hackman. But in many roles, especially customer-facing service positions and care work, the emotional labour is central to the job being performed.

"Think of what would happen in its absence," she continues. "If a customer care representative doesn't care about your problem, that's rude. If the home healthcare aide taking care of your elderly parent can't be bothered to remember anything or check in, if the nursing assistant is abrasive and short, if the server at the restaurant is hurrying you, surely you would think that all of these people are doing horrendous jobs." 

Meanwhile, many women remain underpaid for doing the hard work of caring, nurturing and problem-solving – a slight that's justified by the idea that the work itself is the real reward. 

"We're rewarded socially for these traits, but the system takes advantage of the fact that we're attracted to these roles," says Hackman. "We're meant to see these jobs as fulfilling in and of themselves, beyond the salary. We'd never expect that in a traditionally male-dominated field. We'd never say, 'oh, men are better at math, so if you're a banker that work should be rewarding enough, and you don't need a decent wage'. But that's the way we encourage women to enter these industries. It's extraordinary that we are comfortable being underpaid for jobs that society relies on to meet essential needs."

The first step to creating more value around women's emotional labour may be the simple recognition that it is, in fact, labour. "We need normative change," says Hackman. "We need to actually value other-oriented traits and empathy at work. Stop treating this kind of work as a bunch of set traits, as opposed to something that requires time, effort and skill."

Things are moving, however slowly, in that direction. Social and interpersonal skills are gaining importance for all genders as the number of jobs requiring high social interaction increases (in the US alone, the labour force share of such roles grew by 12% in the past 30 years).

Giving value to the skills of emotional labour – by including it in job descriptions and as a more formal aspect of employee evaluation, and by finding more concrete ways to reward it – could help to spread its burden out more evenly among employees, rather than letting it fall to women. 

Ramsey cautions that while acknowledgement and valuation of women's extra labour is a good thing, it could also have potential ramifications in terms of rising expectations: though it might seem counterintuitive, she says, placing more value on the work could increase pressure on women to do even more of it. "It's often like two steps forward, one step back," she says. "When things happen that sort of take some of the heat off of women, then the standards all of a sudden get higher and that heat comes back up."

Ultimately, Hackman says women should be compensated for this extra shift. "We live in a world that says if you're creating value in the marketplace, you get rewarded for it. The fact of the matter is, there's a lot of people creating a lot of value that are not."