You’ve wrapped up a tense meeting, but your coworker lingers to vent. You listen. You soothe. You nod, validate, and offer perspective. Later, your boss calls on you — again — to “smooth things over” between teammates or “check in” on the guy who’s been acting off lately.
It’s not in your job description, but somehow, it’s your responsibility.
If you’re a woman, especially in a workplace dominated by men, this might sound familiar. And it might be part of a broader pattern that researchers are now calling “mankeeping.”
Coined by Stanford postdoctoral fellow Angelica Puzio Ferrara, mankeeping refers to the emotional and social labor women often perform to support men — not just in romantic relationships, but increasingly in professional spaces too.
It’s the invisible effort of managing others’ emotions, anticipating their needs, and being the uncredited glue holding team dynamics together.
When Women Become the Default Emotional Managers at Work
While the term originated in the context of heterosexual relationships, its implications are spilling into boardrooms and break rooms.
Women are more likely to be the ones expected to remember birthdays, organize team outings, or check in when a colleague is going through a tough time. They’re also more likely to be the ones absorbing emotional outbursts, mediating conflicts, or buffering difficult feedback.
This emotional caretaking can look like leadership…but often without the title, pay, or authority to match.
This kind of emotional labor often goes unnoticed, yet it can be deeply draining. Many men haven’t developed emotional outlets beyond their romantic partners or, in workplace settings, beyond female colleagues.
As a result, women end up carrying this emotional load across both their personal and professional lives, but often without acknowledgment or support.
“Work Wife” or Unpaid Therapist?
The idea of the “work wife” has long been portrayed as a quirky dynamic: two coworkers who are particularly close, often with the woman in the emotionally supportive role. But beneath that label lies something more complex: emotional labor that can feel one-sided.
What’s being described as mankeeping at home — the mental tracking of emotional states, the check-ins, the comforting, the managing of social calendars — also exists at work in subtler, yet no less draining, ways.
Women frequently report being turned to for support by male colleagues, even when it’s not reciprocal.
They’re expected to mediate conflict with tact, absorb stress without reacting, and be perpetually available for emotional caretaking — especially for male managers or teammates who don’t look for other outlets.
A Symptom of a Larger Disconnection
Mankeeping is rooted in a much larger issue: the decline of male emotional support systems. In romantic relationships, women often become a man’s sole confidante. In workplaces, women can become emotional catch-alls, compensating for the fact that many men don’t feel equipped (or expected) to connect emotionally with other men.
Thirty years ago, over half of men said they had six or more close friends. Today, that number has dropped to just 27%. What’s even more striking is that 15% of men now say they have no close friends at all, up from just 3% in 1990.
This emotional disconnection is now being widely referred to as the male loneliness epidemic — a growing crisis that affects not just men, but the people around them. Studies have linked loneliness to worsening mental health, reduced life satisfaction, and lower workplace engagement.
For men, loneliness is increasing due to a steep decline in communal spaces, social rituals, and male friendships, leaving many men without emotional safety nets. As a result, women — at home and at work — are filling that void, often without support or acknowledgment themselves.
The same dynamics women typically face in their personal lives — being the initiator, the planner, the emotional barometer — show up in office culture. From organizing birthday cards and farewell parties to coaching male colleagues through stress or interpersonal struggles, the woman in the office often becomes the unofficial HR rep, mentor, and morale booster.
The Emotional Labor Gender Gap
Studies show women are more likely to be expected to smile, to soften criticism, to mentor junior colleagues (especially men), and to be “team players” even when it means taking on unrecognized responsibilities. This work is rarely acknowledged, let alone compensated.
Mankeeping helps put a name to this specific form of labor that centers around managing male emotional well-being — something that becomes even more stark in industries where men dominate leadership roles.
Men have emotional needs like everyone else, but society often discourages them from meeting those needs through a range of relationships or from doing emotional work on their own. As a result, women frequently end up carrying the emotional burden on their behalf, and it’s increasingly impacting team dynamics in offices.
What Needs to Change
Workplaces need to recognize and redistribute emotional labor. That might mean:
- Encouraging male vulnerability and peer support, instead of defaulting to female coworkers as emotional processors.
- Creating systems for interpersonal accountability so that emotional maintenance isn’t offloaded to individual women.
- Recognizing emotional labor as real work, and factoring it into performance reviews, leadership tracks, and team dynamics.
- Training male leaders to self-regulate and create psychologically safe environments without leaning on women to do the emotional heavy lifting.
From Mankeeping to Mutual Support
When men develop richer emotional lives, deepen their friendships, and invest in mutual support (both at home and at work) they become better partners, better colleagues, and better leaders.
The health of the team, the relationship, or the organization doesn’t have to rest on women’s shoulders.
It’s time we moved beyond expecting women to carry the emotional heartbeat of every room they enter, whether it’s a kitchen, a conference room, or a Zoom call.
