You’re Running Two Jobs. Only One Pays You.

Issue # 26

By Debbie Lawrence

Read time: 7 minutes

Sarah brought in the cake herself. It was a family recipe for rich chocolate layers and real buttercream topped with fresh raspberries. She’d learned three years ago that Hayley hated fondant and made a mental note in the special events folder that lived in her head.

She picked the balloons and sent the calendar invite with a subject line that said “Don’t tell Hayley!” She made sure the whole team gathered at 3pm even though two people had a deadline breathing down their necks.

They sang. Hayley cried a little, the good kind. Sarah felt it too, that warm thing in her chest. This is what it’s about. We’ve got something special here.

An hour later she opened the client proposal Hayley had submitted that morning.

The first thing she saw was the wrong client name in the header. Then there were the three sections Hayley had copied straight from a different pitch with the original formatting still attached. To make matters worse, this was the third time in two weeks she’d been handed substandard work from Hayley.

Sarah sat there with the cursor blinking. She thought about the singing earlier that afternoon. About Hayley wiping her eyes. About the divorce nobody was supposed to know about but everybody did.

I can’t give her hard feedback today. It’s her birthday, plus she’s got so much else going on in her personal life.

So she let it slide yet again. She closed her office door, opened the proposal, and started rewriting it herself. Two hours later the office was empty and Sarah was still there, fixing someone else’s work while her own inbox filled up behind it.

Then she saw the text Hayley had sent the whole team after the party. “So grateful to be part of this family!”

Sarah read it twice. And underneath the warmth of it, a sharper thought showed up.

If we’re family, why again am I the only one sitting in the office at 8:00 when everyone else has gone home?

The pattern revealed

No one hired Sarah to remember Hayley hated fondant. It wasn’t in her job description to protect the team’s feelings on their birthday. The title on her business card did not include “relationship counselor.” She just started doing it, somewhere along the way, because that’s what she believed a good leader does. She told herself that’s what a good woman does.

It has a name. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined “emotional labour” in 1983, in her book The Managed Heart. It means managing your own feelings, and everyone else’s, to meet the demands of a role. I’ve watched that idea play out in leadership for years, and it’s where I draw a line I call the emotional labour boundary: the point between the emotional infrastructure you choose to provide your team and the parts that were never yours to carry in the first place.

As a woman, I suspect you’re running that same second job. Office mom. Therapist. Confidante. Noticing who’s off before anyone else does. Smoothing the tension in a room before a meeting starts. Protecting a birthday from bad news. Somewhere along the way, most women who lead learn it’s expected of them, without it ever being spoken, written into a job description, or factored into their pay.

It feels like care. Some days it is care. It’s also a second job, unpaid and unassigned, stacked directly on top of the actual one you’re responsible for.

The pattern I see everywhere

I’ve seen this play out forever with women who lead, and I’ve lived it myself. The rule that says “you carry the feelings, he carries the decisions” is so old, none of us remember agreeing to it, and it’s got nothing to do with how well she delegates.

Gallup’s newest workplace data (March 2026) lays this out with more precision than I expected. Women report higher engagement than men by six points, 34% versus 28%. They’re more motivated to pursue career growth, 20% say “extremely motivated” against 16% of men. And nearly a third of women, 31%, say they “very often” or “always” feel burned out, compared to under a quarter of men at 23%.

At the leadership level, that gap doesn’t shrink. It widens. Averaged across four years, 29% of women in leadership roles report burnout compared to 19% of men. In the most recent quarter alone, it’s 34% versus 23%. That’s one in every three women who lead, against a little more than one in every five men who lead.

The detail that really matters most is how among women with children, burnout hits 33%. Among fathers, it’s 25%. Now look at women without children. The gap barely moves. What this tells us that whatever’s driving this has nothing to do with daycare pickups or school runs. It’s older than that.

Ask ten people why this gap exists and nine of them give you the same answer. Workplace conditions. Women getting mentorship instead of sponsorship at work. Unpaid emotional labour. Non-promotable tasks that never make it onto a performance review. There’s a lot of research to support this. All of them are real. All are worth naming.

What gets left off that list are the kinds of things Sarah took on without question. Sarah’s agency never wrote a policy that said plan the birthdays, absorb the tension, or protect people’s feelings before the client relationship. She built that standard herself, out of the same broken playbook Lisa was following back in Issue #01, the one that taught her a good leader carries this without being asked.

That’s the part I want you to sit with: the standard Sarah was conditioned to hold herself to led her to believe that holding it was the only way to do her job right.

Look at what Gallup’s own engagement survey shows women scoring higher on than men.

• Someone at work encourages my development: 33% women, 26% men
• I know what’s expected of me at work: 51% women, 45% men
• I have a best friend at work: 21% women, 16% men
• My supervisor seems to care about me as a person: 40% women, 36% men

Gallup calls this an engagement advantage. Set it next to Sarah’s cake and Lisa’s apologies and it reads less like an advantage and more like a tax on the labour women build around everyone else at work.

The real story is that for the most invested people in the building, women, that investment, the refusal to let anyone’s feelings go unmanaged, is exactly what’s costing them their sense of work-life balance.

The day the men left the room

I saw this up close years ago, in a management meeting. There were six women at the table, and four men.

Near the end, we got to an agenda item about staff morale. One of our team members was getting married and another was about to be promoted, so we started talking about how to mark it as we wanted both occasions to be special. Whether to cater it. Who’d collect for the gift.

The most senior man in the room pushed his chair back. “Gentlemen, this is our cue to leave,” he said. “We’ll leave the ladies to talk about this women’s stuff.”

“What do you mean, women’s stuff?” I asked feeling taken aback by his proclamation.

“The party. The gift collection. The catering,” he said. Then he and the other three men stood up and walked out.

I looked around the table at the women who were left. “Why is this only OUR responsibility?”

“Because it’s women’s work,” one of them said.

We sat there debating whether that was true, or whether we’d just made it easy for the men to leave. No one had assigned it to us. No one had asked who wanted to be involved in the planning. We’d just always done it, so it had quietly become ours, and all the men had to do was show up and eat cake. The morning of the event, the most senior man stood in front of the whole staff and thanked everyone for pulling it together, as if that covered it.

That wasn’t the only tab I was running that year. I spent hours in my office counseling team members through things I had no training to counsel anyone through, carrying details about people’s lives I hadn’t asked to know and couldn’t put down afterward. That table was the first time I sat back and asked myself: what am I saying yes to here, by default?

I didn’t have language for it yet, but the rebel in me knew something was off about a system where showing up was the whole job for half the room, and all the extra things got piled on top of the whole job for the other half simply because of our gender.

Where the line sits

If you’re wondering how you know if you’ve crossed the line, here’s one approach. Ask yourself: if I stopped doing this tomorrow, would my team say I set a boundary? Or would they say something else entirely? Something like “she stopped caring” or “she’s not herself lately.”

If it’s the second one, you’ve been running a job you never signed up for, one that’s likely been sitting on your calendar for years.

What I do differently now

I used to think noticing everyone’s feelings before they noticed them myself was just who I was. I told myself I was good with people, which I am. I’m empathetic. That’s true. It’s also true that for twenty years I never once asked whether it was mine to do, or just the thing I’d absorbed because no one else in the room was going to.

Now I ask one question before I pick something like this up. Is this mine, or did I just get here first?

Most of the time the answer surprises me.

You are allowed to care about your team without being their emotional processor.

You are allowed to notice someone’s struggling without owning the job of fixing how they feel.

You are allowed to put the cake down.

Naming the job is the starting point. What changes it is learning exactly where the line sits, and what to do the third time someone tests it, because it will get tested. That’s what I’m teaching inside The First Boundary: The One That Changes Everything, a micro-training launching this fall for $67. It walks through the real protocol, not just the diagnosis, and for both visible and invisible workplace boundaries.

The waitlist is open now. Click here if you’d like to be notified as soon as the course launches.

Your turn

Just take a moment and think about where you might be carrying emotional labour because you’ve told yourself it’s part of your role or it’s who you are, and what that really costs you.

Comment below and tell me: what’s the job no one assigned you that you’ve been doing anyway?

I read and reply to every response. And I love hearing about what you’re discovering.

P.S. You can also listen to this issue on The Compassionate Leader School podcast episode, which drops the same day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Click here to explore all the episodes.