Mental Load Is Not a Buzzword. It's a Business Problem.
I was recently quoted in Forbes as saying that the biggest drain on professional women that is commonly overlooked is mental load. Mental load is not a trending topic and it shouldn’t be just a catchy phrase for therapists to toss around on Instagram. Rather, mental load is the invisible cognitive work that is draining top performers, tanking employee engagement scores, and costing organizations real money. And most employers have no idea it is happening.
What Mental Load Actually Is (And Why It's So Hard to See)
The term "cognitive labor" was brought into the academic mainstream by sociologist Allison Daminger, whose research defines it as the work of anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring outcomes in household and family life (Daminger, 2019, American Sociological Review). Her new book, What's on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life, draws on interviews with over 170 people and confirms what most women already know: “even in couples who believe they split things equally, the cognitive labor falls overwhelmingly on women.”
Here is what makes mental load different from mental busyness. As I stated in Forbes, mental load has three hallmarks: it is invisible, boundaryless, and enduring (Dean et al., 2022). Nobody sees the work, the thoughts travel from the desk to the kitchen to the pillow. And it never ends, because mental load is tied to caring for the people we love and the teams we lead.
Thinking alone doesn’t break us, but when added to constant processing that never stops, seeps into work, sleep, and leisure, and isn’t acknowledged or compensated, we are guaranteed a one way ticket to the “Island of Misfit Toys.”
The Research Is Catching Up to What Women Have Known for Years
The academic literature on household labor focused on physical tasks like driving to practice or doing the dishes. Physical labor can be demanding, but it isn’t even half of the story. A 2025 study published in Archives of Women's Mental Health (Aviv et al.) found that cognitive household labor is even more unequally distributed than physical chores, and is significantly associated with worse mental health outcomes for women, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. Suddenly, all the antidepressant use in “Valley of the Dolls” is making a lot more sense.
Here is the research that should make every employer sit up and pay attention. A recent study found that women who shoulder a disproportionate amount of cognitive labor at home experience higher emotional exhaustion, which in turn increases their turnover intentions and decreases their career resilience (Krstić et al., 2025). These same researchers appropriately dubbed this phenomenon “the invisible third shift.” Said simply, the mental load your employees carry at home is spilling directly into your workplace, and that plus lack of understanding and systemic support, is driving some of your best employees toward the door.
What's Happening Inside Your Organization Right Now
Let me connect the dots between the research and your poor engagement scores. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, matching the lowest levels since the pandemic. But the most alarming finding was the collapse of female manager engagement, which dropped seven percentage points in a single year, which is not a blip on the radar, but rather a signal flare.
McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2024 report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women make that jump. One in three women surveyed said they had considered downshifting or leaving the workforce entirely. The broken rung and the mental load are not separate problems. We are not talking about “women problems;” we are talking about systems issues.
And we have not even talked about what happens when you layer perimenopause and menopause on top of all of this. The midlife collision I often describe in my work is the convergence of peak career responsibility with hormonal fluctuations that affect sleep, cognition, and emotional regulation. Add an invisible cognitive load to that which was already unsustainable, and you have a recipe for attrition that no meditation app is going to fix.
Before Slapping Another Well-Being Initiative on Mental Load…
I have said it before and I will keep saying it: giving someone a meditation app while the structure that is burning them out remains unchanged is like handing someone a bucket of water and expecting it to extinguish a four-alarm fire. Sure, some well-designed individual well-being programs are table stakes in big organizations, but when they become the entire strategy, they actually make the problem worse.
What Actually Works: A Systems-Plus Approach
The path from burnout to breakthrough requires both individual support and structural change. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Make the invisible visible. Audit who is doing the cognitive and emotional labor on your teams. Who plans the offsites? Who remembers the birthdays? Who takes notes in meetings? Who checks in on struggling colleagues? If the answer is consistently the same people, and those people are consistently women, it is time to make some changes, not the least of which involves some serious recognition and some readjusting of work.
Stop siloing solutions and start integrating them. When we build or add separate programs for menopause, burnout, caregiving, and mental health, we increase stigma and add to the very load we are trying to reduce. Human beings do not experience these challenges in silos and support systems should not operate in them either. A systems-plus approach means building an infrastructure of support that recognizes how mental load, midlife health transitions, and workplace demands converge, and addresses them together rather than sending employees on a scavenger hunt for help.
Train your leaders in compassionate dialogue so they have language that stops silent suffering (both theirs and their teams). Stop the 30-minute webinars on "resilience," or the 6-month training on menopause. Train ALL leaders to recognize the signs of cognitive overload in themselves and their teams. Teach them to redistribute invisible labor by encouraging compassionate, honest conversations about what their people need to perform at their best. The 3Cs Method of Compassionate Leadership exists because I watched too many well-meaning managers default to "let me know if you need anything" when what their employees needed was someone to notice without being asked.
Redesign your performance reviews to capture and credit invisible labor. Right now, the woman who plans the offsite, mentors the new hire, and holds the team together emotionally gets the same rating as the person who showed up and participated. If your review process does not account for cognitive and emotional contributions, you are systematically undervaluing the people who keep your culture functional. McKinsey's data shows that women are still less likely to receive high "potential" ratings despite strong performance. That gap does not close until the work women disproportionately do becomes visible, measured, and rewarded. What you measure matters and what you reward gets repeated.
The Business Case Is Already Made
Gallup estimates that a fully engaged global workforce could add $9.6 trillion in productivity, while McKinsey's research has shown that advancing women's equality could add $12 trillion to global GDP. We have the data, but we keep using it to treat organizational dysfunction like the recurrent failings of individual women. Mental load is not a women's issue, but rather a business issue that disproportionately affects women. And until employers start designing systems that account for the full weight of what their people carry, top talent will keep walking out the door wondering. We need to stop asking women to be more resilient, and start building workplaces that do not require superhuman endurance to survive.
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On March 25, I will be at a research symposium bringing together leading researchers who study mental load to align on shared definitions, identify research gaps, and bridge the distance between what the science says and what employers actually do about it. That bridge is exactly where Kacy Fleming Consulting thrives, and I cannot wait to share my learnings with you.
If you are ready to move your organization from burnout to breakthrough, book a consultation to discuss how “Burnout to Breakthrough” can equip your leaders to recognize, redistribute, and reduce the invisible load that helps you keep top talent.