Allison MaslanCEO & Business Scaling Expert | WSJ Bestselling Author

The hidden tax every female CEO pays

16 Sept 2026 · 2 min

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1:39

In this monologue, Allison Maslan describes the constant, invisible emotional labor that female CEOs endure, which she calls the "empathy tax." She explains the double bind women face: when they lead assertively they are labeled cold or aggressive, yet when they lead warmly their competence is questioned. This forces them to continuously calibrate their tone, strength, and relational approach in meetings, emails, and everyday interactions, expending significant mental energy that isn’t reflected on profit‑and‑loss statements or key performance indicators. Maslan also outlines the additional work of managing others' anxieties, maintaining the emotional temperature of a room, and providing encouragement—all unseen tasks that keep teams together but remain unaccounted for. The result is a daily exhaustion that makes it hard for women leaders to quantify their true accomplishments, as the invisible work is never captured as a line‑item or KPI.

Chapters

And then there's this hidden amount of energy you spend every single day constantly calibrating. If you lead assertively, like a CEO is supposed to lead, you get called cold, you get called bitchy, aggressive, hard to work with. If you lead warmly, relationally, the way many of us actually want to lead, your competence gets questioned. And so, people can actually take advantage of that. So you're constantly calculating, how strong can I be in this meeting? What if I let this person go? How will others respond? How soft or how direct should I be in this email? How do I say this without becoming that woman? This is exhausting in a way that it doesn't show up on any P&L. Then there's All the invisible work you're doing called the empathy tax. And the empathy tax is listening to people's anxieties, encouraging them, managing the emotional temperature in the room. And that is on top of all the other work. And then you go home, let me know if you resonate with this, and you do the same thing there. It's the reason you get to the end of the day and you can't really identify what you actually accomplished because you accomplished the invisible things. You held people together. You just don't get to put held everything together on a line item on your P&L or as a KPI.