30 JANUARY 2026

The Empathy Trap: Theatre, not Transformation 

For a long time, empathy was treated as a “nice-to-have” in organizations—well-intentioned, but ultimately secondary to strategy, metrics, and results. That mindset has shifted. Today, many leaders openly acknowledge empathy as essential infrastructure: foundational to trust, retention, and sustained performance.

And yet, a quiet gap has emerged between recognizing empathy and truly practicing it. Many organizations have become skilled at naming their people’s challenges without meaningfully addressing the conditions that create them. The result is what we might call empathy theatre: listening sessions that surface the same concerns year after year, awareness campaigns that never quite translate into policy or structural change, and leaders who express genuine care while leaving the workloads and systems causing harm firmly in place.
Empathy, in these moments, is visible, but not transformative.

This gap is felt especially by women, who shoulder disproportionate burdens within workplace culture, often invisible ones. From emotional labor and behind-the-scenes coordination to impossible double binds around how leadership “should” look, these demands quietly accumulate. Today, organizations are increasingly fluent in naming these dynamics. The research is presented at leadership meetings. Everyone agrees that the problem is real.

And yet, for the women living these realities, little actually changes. Performance systems remain the same. Workloads stay unevenly distributed. Advancement criteria continue to reward presence and output without accounting for the invisible labor that makes both possible.


When awareness becomes its own endpoint

Empathy-driven cultures are shaped by leaders who regularly pause to ask, How will this land? and What pressure does this create downstream? This kind of deliberate, systems-level perspective-taking influences everything from workload expectations to communication norms, and even how success itself is defined.
Research confirms what women already know: that they perform significantly more organizational citizenship behavior than their male colleagues. This includes the invisible and uncompensated work such as mentoring others, mediating conflict, and sustaining team culture. A 2021 study found that women spend substantially more time on non-promotable tasks: work that is essential to organizational functioning yet rarely rewarded or recognized in career advancement decisions (Babcock et al.).


In response, organizations often show genuine concern. The data is shared. Leaders acknowledge the issue. Development programs are thoughtfully designed around it.
And yet, the core systems, the ones that govern compensation, performance evaluation, and advancement frequently remain untouched and unchanged. 


The particular cost for women

Women tend to experience this gap most acutely, in part because so much of what shapes their day-to-day experience at work remains structurally invisible. Emotional labor, care work, and the cognitive load of navigating gendered expectations don’t show up in productivity metrics or workload dashboards. Organizations may acknowledge these realities in listening sessions, even as performance systems continue to reward only what is easiest to quantify.
The consequences show up in burnout data. Women consistently report higher levels of burnout than men, with the disparity especially pronounced among those in leadership roles. This is not primarily a question of individual resilience or coping strategies. It is a reflection of organizational design.

Many women describe working in environments that express genuine care while maintaining structures that make those conditions unsustainable. Feedback about workload imbalances or advancement barriers is received with empathy, then absorbed into “ongoing dialogue.” Some leave. Others remain, but quietly recalibrate, doing what is required while withholding the discretionary effort that once defined their engagement.
When empathy is treated as the endpoint rather than the beginning, understanding becomes a form of management instead of a mechanism for change.


What implementation looks like

Organizations that move beyond empathy theatre approach women’s wellbeing and inclusion as outcomes to be intentionally designed, not values to be simply affirmed. Empathy becomes practical when it is embedded in how work actually functions.
In practice, this means conducting workload audits that surface gender imbalances and prompt meaningful redistribution. 
It means building performance systems that explicitly recognize and reward care work, not just individual output. It also requires a close examination of how work is structured (meeting design, advancement criteria, communication norms, and time expectations), and an honest assessment of whether these systems enable women to thrive or merely survive.

Implementation also asks leaders to confront an uncomfortable truth: many “neutral” policies operate very differently depending on who is navigating them. Flexibility programs that exist on paper but quietly penalize advancement are not truly flexible. Messages encouraging people to “bring your whole self to work” ring hollow when boundary-setting carries professional consequences.
The shift from theatre to transformation begins when progress is measured not by how deeply leaders understand the challenges, but by how materially they have changed the conditions that create them.

Beyond performance

Cultures that genuinely care understand that empathy is not a sentiment. It is infrastructure. It shows up in the systems themselves: in how policies are written, how work is distributed, and how advancement is defined, evaluated, and rewarded. These structures must account for the fact that people experience work differently.

This matters for everyone, but it matters especially for women. Many organizational systems were designed around lives with minimal caregiving responsibilities, uninterrupted career paths, and freedom from the contradictions that arise when gendered expectations are violated. When those assumptions go unexamined, inequity becomes embedded in the design.

Research on gender and leadership makes this tension visible. Women who demonstrate assertiveness often face social penalties that men do not, while those who emphasize collaboration and care are more likely to be perceived as less competent (Rudman and Glick). When organizations understand these dynamics but fail to redesign evaluation and advancement systems accordingly, empathy becomes performative rather than equitable.

Organizations that stop at awareness ask women to adapt to structures that were never built with them in mind. Organizations that move to implementation do the harder, and more necessary work of redesigning those structures.
A question worth asking is this: if your organization has been “working on” women’s wellbeing and inclusion for years, what has actually changed? Not what has been acknowledged or discussed, but what has been redesigned? What workloads have been rebalanced? What barriers have been removed?

If the answer isn’t immediately clear, it may be pointing to the work still ahead.
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References
  • Babcock, Linda, et al. "Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability." American Economic Review, vol. 107, no. 3, 2017, pp. 714-47.
  • Rudman, Laurie A., and Peter Glick. "Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes and Backlash Toward Agentic Women." Journal of Social Issues, vol. 57, no. 4, 2001, pp. 743-62.
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