Why Many Women Feel Exhausted at Work Even When They’re Just Doing Their Jobs

Leaning on the same two or three women to plan office birthdays, organize card signings, and smooth over conflict might look like it’s just “who they are.” Research suggests otherwise. This kind of invisible or emotional labor is quietly costing mid-sized Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies almost $1 billion a year combined in lost production, discrimination lawsuits, and employee turnover, according to workplace equity firm Syndio.

The list of what counts as invisible labor is longer than most people realize. Organizing team events, collecting money for coworkers facing illness, remembering birthdays, tidying conference rooms, leading employee resource groups, mentoring new hires. None of it appears on a job description, and almost none of it gets tied to a raise, a bonus, or a promotion, according to Syndio’s research on unpaid, non-promotable work.

The financial damage isn’t abstract. Employee attrition and disengagement, including absenteeism and slow backfill, costs a median-sized S&P 500 company roughly $282 million every year, according to 2023 research from McKinsey & Company. Layered across a Fortune 500 company, the toll breaks down into stress-related health costs, disengagement losses, legal exposure, and turnover expenses that all trace back to work nobody is tracking.

The Data Shows Women Get Asked More and Say Yes More Often

A Harvard Business Review study found that in mixed-sex groups, women receive 44% more requests to volunteer for non-promotable tasks than men do. When those requests come in, women say yes 76% of the time, compared to 51% for men, a gap researchers found held true regardless of whether the person asking was male or female.

Author Eve Rodsky, who wrote the book “Fair Play,” described the double standard driving this pattern in an interview. “Our society views women’s time as infinite like sand whereas we guard men’s time as if it’s finite like diamonds,” she said. “Nowhere is this more obvious than the workplace.”

Refusing the work carries a real cost. Syndio’s “Invisible Labor in the Workplace” report found that women who decline to do office housework face worse performance evaluations, fewer promotion recommendations, and being seen as less likable by coworkers. Men who take on the exact same tasks are viewed as going “above and beyond,” a distinction the report says results in more raises and promotions for them, not fewer.

This Pattern Doesn’t Stay at the Office

The dynamic mirrors what happens at home, and researchers say that’s not a coincidence. Domestic labor inequality is one of the most commonly cited reasons behind the roughly 70% of heterosexual divorces initiated by women, a pattern researchers and family law experts have documented for years. The same expectation that women will absorb unrewarded work follows them from the household into the office.

Rodsky, who now leads interviews through the Fair Play Policy Institute, says the pattern has intensified rather than faded. “Post Covid, women continuously are asked and are tasked with non-promotable tasks and have to work harder for their employees to respond and take them seriously,” she said, describing one woman whose direct reports simply don’t respond to her the way they do to her male counterparts.

Executives claim to know better. In a global survey of CEOs and CFOs by Columbia Business School, more than 90% said culture is important at their organization, and 92% said improving it would raise the company’s overall value. But claiming to value culture and actually rewarding the people who build it turned out to be two very different things.

Almost No Company Actually Tracks This Work

Despite the near-universal executive praise for culture, only 25% of employers formally recognize invisible labor in performance evaluations, according to the 2021 Women in the Workplace Report. That gap between what leaders say they value and what they actually measure is where the financial losses and the burnout both take root.

A small number of companies have started closing that gap. Some are embedding emotional labor into job descriptions and performance metrics, rolling out parental leave policies that normalize men taking time off, adding menopause support, and using internal surveys to track who is actually doing the invisible work so it can be assigned and recognized more evenly across a team.

Author Regina Lark, who wrote “Emotional Labor: Why a Woman’s Work is Never Done and What to Do About It,” argues the fix starts with naming the problem out loud. “What does it mean when we say that we care about equity at work, but then we hand the party planning to the only woman or person of color on the team?” she asked. “If we don’t name it, we can’t fix it.”