Emotional Labor

It turns out I didn’t quite know what I was getting into when I picked up this book. I was expecting to learn more about “mental load,” which I’ve since realized overlaps with, but isn’t quite the same as, “emotional labor.” Mental load refers to the ongoing mental work of anticipating needs, planning, organizing, and generally keeping track of life’s details, whereas emotional labor involves managing your own emotional responses and attending to the feelings and emotional needs of others. So while I ended up exploring a slightly different topic than I expected, it may have been an even more enlightening one.

Hackman does an excellent job of examining emotional labor from a wide range of perspectives, revealing how deeply it shapes our relationships, workplaces, and society. The rest of my review will consist mostly of quotes from the book, because there was so much I wanted to document for future reference.

The book begins by defining emotional labor and examining why so much of this work falls disproportionately on women.

“Emotional labor is what is happening when someone first seeks to cater to the emotional experience of someone else and then puts their own emotions to work for that other person.”

“Women across the world are taught from a very young age to regulate, modulate, and manipulate their feelings in order to have a positive effect on the feelings of others.”

One of Hackman’s central arguments is that emotional labor often goes unrecognized precisely because we’ve come to regard it as an inherent part of femininity rather than something that requires actual effort and skill. When women are assumed to be naturally nurturing, empathetic, and emotionally attentive, the work involved in meeting those expectations becomes largely invisible.

“Instead of seeing it as work, we have cast emotional labor as a passive expression of the supposed purest essence of femininity.”

“Emotional labor, for all the effort, time, and skill it takes, is often just taken in as women in their natural state.”

“Women, treated like emotional thermostats whether they like it or not, not only must constantly manage their own feelings but they are also held responsible for the feelings of others.”

“Being good at something didn’t alleviate the toll and magnitude of the work involved.”

Importantly, Hackman emphasizes that men and women are equally capable of performing emotional labor, but the expectations placed on them are very different. Women are often expected to provide this labor as a matter of course, while men may receive disproportionate praise for doing the same work. This creates an imbalance not only in who performs the labor, but also in how that labor is recognized and valued.

“Men and women are perfectly able to perform emotional labor, but the expectations placed on women are far greater than those placed on men, resulting in a notable penalty-versus-credit gulf.”

“Nothing at home and women should provide most puts men into positions of easy praise when they do more than nothing, and almost immediately positions women in a place of deficiency and easy criticism if they do less than everything.”

Hackman’s analysis extends well beyond the home. She examines how emotional labor operates in the workplace, where women are often expected to maintain a narrow range of agreeable, reassuring emotions while simultaneously demonstrating competence and authority. She also explores how occupations that rely heavily on emotional labor tend to be undervalued and undercompensated, and how the unpaid labor women perform at home helps make other people’s paid work possible.

“And as emotional labor continues to tirelessly, invisibly be performed in the background, it is also what enables other, more socially valued—and paid—forms of work to take place. Emotional labor is the ultimate enabler of work.”

“Economists call “feminization of labor” the refusal to recognize and fully compensate feminine fields of work—such as care, service, and attention work—that are becoming the bulk of the economy. Government helps the power holders in private feminized industries, including the service sector, by not requiring employers to provide the same basic labor rights to their workers that have been common in masculine industries, such as manufacturing, since the 1930s.”

She also highlights the double standards women encounter in professional environments, particularly the expectation that they soften their communication and manage other people’s reactions in ways that aren’t necessarily required of their male colleagues.

“It felt like men around her were allowed to be just as direct, if not more, but she was being penalized.”

“In all communications, she was expected to do the emotional labor of making sure she made people feel good.”

“As they assert themselves as competent and confident, they must also dole out doses of reassuring emotional labor.”

“Our economic system is all about making money from feminized forms of work, but it isn’t sharing much, if any, of that money with the workers.”

This particular quote stood out to me because I heard almost the exact same advice at my own job years ago:

“They told me the only way you are going to get ahead in the corporate world is to boost the male egos around you.”

One of the more interesting aspects of Hackman’s analysis was her discussion of the emotional labor associated with larger social institutions, including the U.S. military and the prison system. She considers the often-overlooked burden placed on women who provide emotional support and absorb the consequences of these institutions within their families and communities.

“This means that in a nation that employs over 1.3 million active military personnel, 84 percent of whom are men, more than a million families are coping with, supporting, and absorbing the effects of an armed global superpower in very real emotional ways, at home.”

“A system that throws millions of men behind bars relies, once more, on the free labor of women to act as buffers and absorbers of pain. Not only that; it entrenches gender inequality by forcing them to bear the brunt of an unending list of negative consequences.”

Hackman also examines how these expectations are established early in life, particularly the ways girls are taught to accommodate men’s emotions and desires. She explores how this conditioning can shape women’s relationships with their own sexuality and how the pressure to manage men’s emotional responses can actually become a matter of safety within abusive relationships.

“Carrying the effects of other people’s sexual desires on our bodies is taught to us before we get to define our sexuality for ourselves. Sexual emotional labor performed for others predates much of our own sexuality—to the extent that our sexuality is often shaped by it.”

“People say that a lot of this is anger management. But that doesn’t make sense. A lot of these people do not have anger management issues with anyone other than women.”

Another major theme is the personal toll of an unequal distribution of emotional labor. Hackman draws on research and interviews to explore its potential effects on stress, relationship satisfaction, and physical and emotional well-being. One study that was especially alarming found a substantial gender disparity in separation and divorce rates following a spouse’s diagnosis with a serious illness.

“Married women were, in turn, far more likely to report high levels of stress than single women—with 54 percent of married women reporting they had felt compelled to cry due to stress in the past month before being surveyed, compared to 33 percent of single women.”

“When the patient was male, and the supporting spouse female, divorce happened in 2.9 percent of cases. When the patient was female and the supporting spouse was male, divorce happened in 20.8 percent of cases—it was seven times more likely to happen.”

One of the most direct applications of emotional labor that Hackman explores is its role in sexual relationships. She discusses how women may feel responsible not only for their partners’ sexual satisfaction, but also for protecting their partners’ feelings and self-esteem, sometimes at the expense of their own pleasure. She includes a lot of fascinating research about sexual satisfaction, orgasm disparities, and the reasons women report faking orgasms.

“Lesbian women experienced an orgasm far more routinely than their straight sisters, with 86 percent of them sharing that orgasm was the norm during sex… McClelland’s study’s findings suggest that the only group to fully measure sexual satisfaction through the lens of their own pleasure and not their partners’ was straight cis men.”

“Not only are women more often centering partners’ pleasure over their own, they are prepared to perform extra emotional labor under the form of faking it to protect men’s egos and not ruffle their psychological feathers.”

“79 percent of them faked orgasm during penetrative sex over 50 percent of the time, and 25 percent of surveyed women faked 90 percent of the time.”

“Speeding up the male partner’s orgasm was reported as a reason [for faking orgasm] in 66 percent of cases, which was done ‘to relieve discomfort, pain, boredom and fatigue in equal proportion as well as because of time limitations.’ But most poignantly, 92 percent of the surveyed women reported they very strongly felt the vocalizing-in-spite-of-no-orgasm technique boosted their partner’s self-esteem, which 87 percent of them listed as the main reason for doing so.”

Although much of the book focuses on the disproportionate burden placed on women, Hackman also dedicates an entire chapter to how these same gender expectations harm men. By treating emotional attentiveness, vulnerability, and caregiving as inherently feminine qualities, society discourages men from developing or expressing these capacities themselves. This can leave men with fewer opportunities for emotional connection and support, while reinforcing their dependence on women to provide it.

“Complaining about greater suicide rates and trauma related to war or incarceration doesn’t put men and women on opposite sides; it very simply points out that men stand to lose from this patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist system too.”

“But by isolating emotional labor to women, we invalidate men as caring, compassionate, gentle, nurturing, or any other attribute stereotyped as feminine.”

“‘Man box,’ a term increasingly used by psychologists and advocates, refers to a very rigid set of behavior and personality rules men are expected to adhere to if they are to be safe from being challenged on their status as ‘real men.’ While women have spent the last few decades challenging traditional notions of femininity and breaking down barriers for increased rights, the same change has not happened for men.”

“By refusing to acknowledge the existence of his own emotions, [Hackman’s interviewee] was relinquishing the need for any emotional effort or the belonging to any emotional network, further rendering the work of others around him, absorbing and caring for his emotions, invisible.”

Hackman also explores how these patterns can extend beyond emotional support to women’s responsibility for managing their male partners’ physical health and well-being.

“As things stand, women are responsible for keeping men alive… Many of the women I interviewed talked of worrying about their male partners’ physical health on top of their mental health, with partners who had family medical issues, especially heart disease, but refused to adapt their lifestyle toward preventative care. The preventative care was then left to women to try to implement in subtle and explicit ways.”

“These kinds of findings reveal that in a society where men still tend to support their partners more financially and women tend to support their partners more emotionally, the more important of the exchanges for survival is emotional labor, not money.”

One distinction I especially appreciated is Hackman’s insistence that emotional labor is not inherently a problem, nor is it something we should aim to eliminate. Caring for others and attending to their emotional needs are essential parts of human relationships. The problem arises when this work is taken for granted, disproportionately expected of certain people, or not adequately reciprocated or compensated.

“Doing emotional labor for people who are doing it for you is the goal, not the problem.”

Hackman concludes by discussing ways to create a more equitable distribution of emotional labor, beginning with making the work itself visible. She discusses the importance of recognizing and valuing these contributions, whether through better compensation in professional settings or greater appreciation and reciprocity in personal relationships.

“When we deny that emotional labor is a performance that requires time, effort, skill, or even training, we deny emotional laborers their due profit.”

“Making a performance as valuable can involve monetary rewards, like affording the doer of the task paid leave, expressing gratitude, and marking the performance as deserving of reciprocity or even an IOU for another type of performance.”

I especially appreciated her acknowledgment that addressing this imbalance also requires women to examine their own habits and expectations. Part of the challenge is learning when to step back from responsibilities we’ve been conditioned to assume, while also rejecting the idea that men are somehow naturally incapable of performing the same work.

“But Johnson warned that better dynamics when it came to emotional labor also involved women letting go of what she called ‘compulsive caretaking at one’s own expense.’”

“So part of this is that whole balance of how much of this is because we choose to do it, because this is what we think we are expected to do.”

“Infantilizing men as being blissfully ignorant of what they are gaining under the current emotional labor distribution is not only disingenuous but harmful to progress.”

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and I thought Hackman managed to make a complex, far-reaching subject feel both accessible and practical. The passages I’ve included here reflect the aspects of the book that resonated most with me personally, but they don’t fully capture the breadth of Hackman’s analysis. She is extremely attentive to the intersectional dimensions of emotional labor, including how expectations and experiences differ depending on factors such as race, sexual orientation, and broader social circumstances. She does not assume any single experience to be universal. Definitely worth a read.

Book author: Rose Hackman