Across The Pond Talk

You’re mentoring junior staff. Educating colleagues on bias. Sitting on the diversity panel. All while delivering KPIs. Sound familiar? For women of colour, this unpaid emotional and cultural labour is a daily reality and it’s rarely acknowledged as leadership.

The modern workplace often frames this contribution as “extra” or “nice to have,” yet research shows it is essential to the social cohesion and ethical integrity of organisations. But at what cost?

Emotional tax is a term coined by researchers at Catalyst to describe the heightened levels of emotional monitoring and cultural management required of marginalised employees especially Black, Asian and other racialised women. This invisible work includes managing others’ discomfort, absorbing racial bias in silence and acting as the unofficial DEI compass of the company.

A 2022 Harvard Business Review study confirmed that women of colour are significantly more likely to experience high levels of emotional tax especially when they feel their identities are not respected or represented at work. Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of ‘Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome’, argues that these compounded expectations impact not only productivity but long-term mental health and generational self-worth.

There needs to be a stronger call for inclusive innovation and equity-driven leadership or else leaders of colour will suffer:

• Chronic burnout and decision fatigue

• Strategic distraction from leadership and innovation goals

• Emotional erosion of self-worth, particularly when contributions are unacknowledged

• Heightened isolation and performance anxiety in white-majority leadership structures

The future of leadership is moving toward inclusive agility where stakeholders demand transparency, ethical governance and wellness-centric performance cultures. Yet traditional corporate cultures continue to value emotional stoicism and invisibilised “teamwork.” For women of colour to thrive not just survive they must be allowed to lead from a space that respects cultural socialisation, generational insight and emotional intelligence.

Dr. Ella Bell Smith, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, highlights that “women of colour are constantly navigating racial and gendered boundaries that shape how they can speak, lead and exist at work.” Her research insists that unless organisations create structures that validate identity and emotional labour, inclusion will remain performative.

Leadership Exercise:

• List all the emotional or cultural labour tasks you take on weekly. Now ask: which ones build your brand and which ones only benefit the organisation?

• Identify one of these that you will either delegate, decline or negotiate recognition for this month.

• What would a workplace look like where your cultural knowledge is seen as strategic not supplemental?

You don’t owe your wellness to the workplace. Leadership isn’t about absorbing harm to keep peace it’s about designing systems that allow all of us to lead with clarity and dignity.

For organisations serious about building inclusive leadership models, the answer isn’t a wellness initiative it’s a cultural transformation. They must move beyond metrics and embrace models rooted in empathy, equity and cultural fluency. That means:

• Recognising and compensating emotional and cultural labour

• Embedding inclusive leadership behaviours in performance metrics

• Providing safe spaces for healing, dialogue and feedback

• Creating mentorship and sponsorship pathways rooted in equity, not optics

Because the future belongs to leaders who build cultures of care—not just systems of productivity.

Like, comment, and tag a woman of colour who is redefining value on her terms and if you know an ally, mentor or sponsor committed to building inclusive teams, tag them too. Because when we evolve leadership together, we don’t just grow careers we grow cultures where everyone thrives.