On the other hand, women also are more satisfied in their marriages when their husbands take on as much responsibility for emotional tasks as they do. And this type of task requires effort, time and energy, although most people don t think of it as such. An imbalance in emotional tasks in a marriage or on the job tends to negatively affect women more than men, Cook adds. That could be because, in general, women tend to do more emotional tasks than men. In fact, when Cook and Berger looked at work and family role spillover of people in careers primarily occupied by the opposite gender for example, female engineers or male nurses or in occupations that required extensive emotional support for either gender, such as therapists they found that women, regardless of occupation, still tend to provide more emotional support at home than do males.
Females also provide more emotional support on the job.
Female leaders and managers who were investigated by Cook and Berger tend to be more in tune with and supportive of their co-workers and employees emotional needs. For example, female bosses tend to praise, support and encourage their employees more. They re also more attuned to building teams, reconciling internal disputes and solving work satisfaction and personality problems at work. We started to wonder if there s only a certain amount of emotional energy people can give, said Cook. What we found is that it s reciprocal.