Researchers found that women leaders disproportionately manage “caring tasks.” Setting boundaries, along with a culture shift, can help.
Leaders are forever asked to be empathetic. But empathetic leaders, it seems, aren’t created equal.
Harvard Business School researchers Colleen Ammerman and Deepa Purushothaman recently found that the gender gap is just pronounced around empathetic leadership as it is with promotion and compensation. A poll of 350 women managers found that 80 percent found nearly a third of their workweek on “caring tasks”—basically, hearing out staff’s feelings. “That’s more than a business day’s worth of work in a five-day week,” they write in an article about the phenomenon in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
And that’s disproportionate to male leaders—three-fourths of survey respondents found that this sort of caring work is mostly done by women. (“In many cases, men didn’t even observe such work happening around them — whereas women described it as commonplace,” they write.)
This dynamic has all sorts of negative knock-on effects. It forces leaders to take time away from work-related tasks. It creates a culture where supporting the emotional well-being of the team comes at the expense of the leader’s own. Most nefariously, it creates an atmosphere where a woman leader can’t win: If they demonstrate too much empathy, they’ve given up bandwidth dedicated to their leadership role. If they demonstrate too little, they risk being seen as “insufficiently warm” and “graded on how much and how well they show compassion.”
In the association industry, where female two-thirds of CAE holders are women, the empathy gap can be an acute problem.
(See also: the glass cliff.)
None of this is meant to suggest that empathy, in itself, is a bad thing in an organization. But presuming that only one gender has a responsibility for it—and then passively punishing them for demonstrating it—is. And in the association industry, where female leaders abound by some metrics—two-thirds of CAE holders are women—that can add up to an acute problem.
It would be helpful to know if the researchers asked their survey participants about their preferred strategies for addressing the emotional-labor challenge, because their proposed solutions have their own issues. They recommend that women who face this problem do more to set boundaries around what kind of empathy they will and won’t expend energy on. They also recommend being more alert to their own needs when it comes to their time and energy.
That’s reasonable advice, but an organization-wide cultural problem is unlikely to be resolved by individual leaders. Closing the empathy gap—”prioritizing empathy and compassion as core leadership qualities for everyone,” as they write—demands executive-level (perhaps even board-level) discussions about what empathetic leadership looks like across the organization, and providing the necessary training for it. (Or hiring for it.)
Like the “hidden org chart,” what you might call the “hidden empathy gap” is one of those dynamics that can be hard to identify but which can have a profound impact on the success of an organization. In recent years, organizations have made a lot of strides in terms of better understanding their people holistically and standing up more supports for them. But some challenges persist, including the idea that emotional labor is gendered. That’s a problem women leaders face, but one organizations as a whole need to address.
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