The resilience tax
The Price Women Pay at Work
For most of my career, I thought resilience was a leadership skill.
I believed being tough, adaptable, and able to weather anything was part of what made me good at my job—what made me promotable, valuable, worthy of a seat at the table.
It took me years to realize: Resilience wasn’t leadership work—it was gender work.
Because what I was calling resilience was really survival—the exhausting, invisible labor that comes with being a woman at work.
What Is the Resilience Tax?
The resilience tax is the extra emotional, cognitive, and relational labor women are expected to perform—just to access, navigate, and succeed in workplaces not built for them.
It’s the unpaid work of proving competence before you’re believed.
It’s the constant self-editing—watching your tone, softening your language, calculating how much ambition is too much.
It’s the invisible glue work—mentoring younger women, leading DEI efforts, smoothing conflict, doing the cultural caretaking that keeps teams functional but rarely gets rewarded.
It’s all the extra weight women carry at work—that men, especially white men, rarely even notice, let alone shoulder.
The Two Jobs Every Woman Works
Every woman I know works two jobs. The one in her job description. And the invisible one that comes with being a woman at work.
This isn’t just individual—it’s structural.
Women are interrupted more—so they work harder to hold the floor.
Women’s ideas are adopted more when men repeat them—so they work harder to document and protect their contributions.
Women are given projects, not promotions.
Women are praised for being supportive but rarely promoted for being visionary.
And for women of color, LGBTQ+ women, women with disabilities, and women from marginalized backgrounds, this tax is exponentially higher.
They’re asked to do the work and explain why their perspective matters at all.
They’re asked to represent their whole community while also assimilating into dominant culture to be seen as “leadership material.”
They carry bias on every axis—gender, race, sexuality, ability, class.
Why We Have to Name It
For years, we’ve called this resilience—as if it’s a personal virtue. But this is not about individual strength. This is about systemic inequity.
Women aren’t resilient because they want to be. They’re resilient because they’ve had no choice.
This is why I say: Resilience is not the goal—equity is. The work isn’t to make women stronger. It’s to build workplaces that don’t require women to be this strong just to survive.
If You Lead Women, You Have Work to Do
If you lead women, your job is not to celebrate their resilience. Your job is to lower the resilience tax.
That means:
Pay them fairly—and publicly. No quiet pay gaps.
Promote them for their vision—not just their execution.
Interrupt bias in real time—not in post-mortems.
Take on the cultural work yourself—don’t outsource inclusion to the people excluded.
Create a culture where ambition is expected—not punished.
Women: What’s the Most Resilient Thing You’ve Ever Had to Do at Work?
On this International Women’s Day, I’m not interested in performative praise. I want the truth.
What’s the most resilient thing you’ve ever had to do at work? And what could your career—and your life—look like if you didn’t have to be resilient just to belong?
Let’s talk about the real cost of resilience—and what we could build if we finally refused to pay it.