The Rising Demand for Soft Skills in the Era of AI
By Marion Davis
In a recent report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, a joint study found that jobs traditionally held by women were significantly more likely to be impacted with the rise of automation via artificial intelligence (AI). The study found that jobs at a higher risk for automation were currently held by women employees at a rate of 9.6% while the same number was only 3.5% among men employees. While the study did determine that 34% of employment in high-income countries was likely to be affected by generative AI (GenAI) use, the findings also noted that full job automation was still not possible in many cases as there continues to be a need for human oversight. The most expected outcome of GenAI introduction in the workforce is transformation rather than eradication of many jobs.
Among this idea of transformation has risen a growing focus in the corporate world on the human factor alongside AI use. For those companies in the US that still championed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workforce, the overarching argument was that their employees provided value in lived experience and soft skills in a way that could connect with the corporations’ customers. Thus, by ensuring the removal of hiring barriers and focusing on retention efforts across diversity, these companies could leverage their employer brand. The human factor involves elements that are uniquely human such as empathy and spontaneity, which AI can only imitate at this point. However, as the focus on soft skills grows in the era of AI and certain commentators point out that women’s emotional intelligence provides a competitive advantage, this article will highlight a necessary foundational step for gender parity which is to take steps to properly identify and quantify the emotional labor present in providing soft skills which has–for so long–been undervalued or devalued.
The Historical Trend of Invisible Emotional Labor by Women in the Workplace
For far too long, women’s emotional labor in the workforce has gone undervalued. Recent reports have noted that men’s social networks have declined while women’s networks have expanded. This has quietly led to a growing emotional dependence on women in both personal and professional settings, particularly from men who resist their own growth in areas like vulnerability, reflection, or interpersonal processing. Rather than developing the tools to self-regulate or seek peer support, there is a trend for men to repeatedly return to women for the outcome of emotional maturity without doing the internal work to earn it.
This is unsustainable not just for the women providing soft skills, but for the teams, companies, and founders who will eventually plateau without broadening their emotional intelligence capabilities. If emotional labor continues to be invisibly outsourced to women—and only women—then the emotional skill-building necessary to lead in an AI-augmented world will be delayed. Corporations today cannot afford these types of gaps in rapidly evolving and competitive industries and should be proactive in addressing structural issues regarding expectations on the development and provision of soft skills in the workforce.
Emotional Labor as Scaffolding and Not a Nice-to-Have
In my work within social impact strategy, I’ve observed a consistent dynamic in founder-led and contractor ecosystems. Female founders often arrive with deep community ties, wide-ranging networks, and a clear understanding of consumer needs shaped by sustained, relational engagement. Male founders, by contrast, more frequently arrive with a concept generated in isolation with the help of AI and limited consumer testing or long-term strategic grounding.
When pressure mounts, it’s not uncommon for male founders to seek out female strategists not only for business acumen but for emotional steadiness. After these interactions, these founders may leave feeling more confident and clear but without recognizing that this clarity was cultivated and not coincidental. This obtained clarity came from practiced emotional labor from the female strategist in the form of active listening, tone calibration, decision modeling, and the kind of grounded presence that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet but is critical to navigating uncertainty. This emotional labor forms the scaffolding of successful strategy in the business world. However, instead of being formally named or compensated, this emotional labor is too often brushed aside as support, niceness, or an unspoken expectation.
Professional women, especially in marketing and client strategy circles, frequently describe this pattern in online communities. These women are hired for one job but wind up acting as both strategist and therapist. Only one of those roles comes with clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs). The emotional cost of providing reassurance, clarifying direction, and absorbing frustration can be unpaid and untracked even as this emotional wherewithal becomes central to project momentum. The personal cost is often the stress of the founders’ chaos permeating these professionals’ thoughts and leaching out into their time not on the job. In fact, it often becomes so significantly impacting that we may find these women at support groups or in therapy, spending time and money on their mental well-being, which is a personal and professional investment.
Women have much higher therapy attendance rates than men in the US and also experience higher levels of emotional burnout in the workplace at 75 percent compared to men at 58 percent. If women are encountering higher emotional labor demands in the workplace, spending more in therapy, and generally scoring higher on emotional intelligence factors than men, then these emotional abilities are clearly skills that took time and money to develop just as for any hard skills. In one research study that used the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) to assess employees, the researchers found that women tended to score higher than men in emotional intelligence but referenced earlier research that emotional intelligence is not something inherent to women but can be learned. What motivation is there to learn though if workplaces are demonstrating that emotional intelligence is something to be consumed without regard for the provider’s energy levels and without valuing the provision of this increasingly more precious commodity?
Women, or any other person developing their emotional intelligence, who learn how to better function in a chaotic world can increase their professional capabilities, but yet, as the pattern continues, this higher level of ability seems to simply invite more reliance on emotionally intelligent people from others. Then a shift can occur as trouble may arise when a woman especially begins setting clearer boundaries around her emotional energy in the workplace. Those unfamiliar with managing their own emotional loads may interpret the boundary as abandonment. Instead of seeing the emotional steadiness as a professional service or a job duty, peers, founders, and managers alike may perceive these emotional contributions as loyalty and greater boundaries as betrayal. That misperception can lead to devaluation or pushback, despite clear communication about scope and billing.
Rather than assigning blame to one gender, this article seeks to name a systemic pattern shaped by socialization. Women are commonly conditioned to provide emotional labor freely and without recognition. In contrast, men are less often socialized to build or rely on emotionally reciprocal networks, which can result in a quiet overdependence on the emotional bandwidth of women in professional settings.
As AI continues to streamline the technical and administrative work once used to define roles, especially roles held by women, we likewise need to evolve how we define productivity. Soft skills are not intangible extras. These skills are time-bound, cognitively demanding, and increasingly central to what gives businesses their edge in a world flooded with automated output. If the work of building clarity, calming conflict, and modeling strategic calm is holding up a business or project, then this work should be defined properly as critical infrastructure. This provision of infrastructure deserves to be scoped, named, and paid accordingly.
The Rising Demand for Emotional Intelligence
One Fortune article somewhat optimistically in June of 2024 noted that the gender parity gap in executive leadership could be narrowed by the rise of AI and the simultaneously rising demand for soft skills, in which women still overwhelmingly score higher than men. However, while it is true that women offer great value here with a competitive advantage, another truth remains that this type of labor has been historically devalued.
One article in Psychology Today noted gendered tendencies in business that–at one extreme–men tend to rush too quickly towards a finish line without sufficient planning while–at the other extreme–women tend to spend an extended amount of time in the planning process without forward movement. Either extreme can create a problem, but a happy medium can create success. A problem occurs when male founders lack networks as is growing increasingly more common, focus on rushing from one finish line to another, lean into artificial intelligence use for basic tasks, but feel the lack of emotional support. They may do this subconsciously or fully consciously and specifically seek out female contractors or employees to blur lines and benefit from emotional labor enriching strategic work but then devalue the energy and time put into developing and providing those soft skills alongside a hard deliverable. These soft skills seem to be seen as a nice-to-have alongside a measurable outcome with an obligation that women provide this rather than recognizing soft skills tied in with strategy as a foundational necessity for financial success that enriches the strategic work.
Soft Skills Are the Missing Link in Gender Parity
As the workforce transforms and AI is set to transform significantly more jobs by women than by men, we must not only prepare workers for a new set of tools. We must redefine what counts as a deliverable. Soft skills like emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, tone calibration, client energy management, and decision guidance are real outputs that take time and leave an energy cost behind. These skills and their delivery are the glue of successful collaboration and long-term project health.
If the workplace is to truly evolve alongside AI, and if equity is to be more than a buzzword, then women’s historically invisible contributions, their emotional labor, their calming influence, their clarity in chaos, must be named, scoped, and priced. Not only will this benefit women, this demonstration of the valuation of emotional labor will encourage all members of the team to develop their emotional intelligence levels and to bear emotional responsibilities equally. The era of AI makes one truth undeniable: what is uniquely human is where the value now lies, and that value must no longer be free.
Soft skills are not nice-to-haves. These are real outputs that take time, demand energy, and directly impact long-term outcomes like project stability, client satisfaction, and team cohesion. If we are to prepare workers for a transformed future, we must redefine what counts as a deliverable.
Emotional Labor Is Business-Critical Infrastructure
To evolve with AI, workplaces must stop treating emotional labor as invisible. Women’s historical contributions in the form of calm under pressure, relational clarity, and psychological containment are not incidental to success. These contributions are central to success.
Scoping and compensating emotional labor is both a step toward equity and a competitive advantage. Recognizing these contributions allows everyone on a team to build their own emotional capacity, rather than relying on a small group (usually women) to carry the emotional load for all.
The era of AI makes one truth undeniable: what cannot be automated becomes premium. And emotional labor, taking the form of relational steadiness, adaptability, empathy, cannot be automated. If these types of outputs are indispensable, then they must no longer be free.
Why Valuing Emotional Labor Is a Systemic Imperative
In many founder-led or male-dominated companies, emotional labor is treated as an ambient resource as something that just exists rather than something that's actively performed. This unspoken dynamic can lead to two compounding problems as women’s contributions go unrecognized and uncompensated, and other team members aren’t incentivized to build their own emotional regulation muscles. This creates a self-reinforcing loop of dependency and devaluation. The more emotionally intelligent a woman is, the more she’s leaned on, and the more invisible her work becomes.
Emotional Labor Has Been Gendered and Unequally Distributed
When organizations normalize the idea that women should absorb uncertainty, mediate tension, and maintain morale for free, they disincentivize everyone else from learning how to do the same. If these soft skills are now among the most valuable traits in an AI-driven economy, why should their development and expression fall to just one group?
Breaking this cycle means naming emotional labor for what it is as a strategic skillset, not a personality trait. Only when it’s named can it be taught, distributed, tracked, and paid.
Five Ways to Make Soft Skills Tangible and Billable
1. Name the Function
Too often, emotional labor is bundled under vague categories like “communication support” or “client engagement,” leaving its true value invisible. Instead, use more specific language that reflects the strategic nature of the work being done. For example, the type of work being done can be described using phrases such as “executive decision coaching,” “client tone management,” “conflict de-escalation planning,” and “emotional alignment strategy.”
Naming these contributions accurately not only legitimizes the work but sets expectations for deliverables beyond tangible assets. It also helps clients and employers understand the difference between output and outcome where emotional clarity often drives both.
2. Track the Energy Cost
Emotional labor may not show up in spreadsheets as an isolated deliverable, but it still takes time, energy, and cognitive load. Whether an employee or contractor is calming a panicked founder mid-launch, mediating a tense team meeting, or reframing negative feedback for a client, these efforts add up.
Questions to ask to better track the energy cost can include:
How many hours a week are spent helping someone emotionally pivot?
How often are check-ins used to provide reassurance rather than technical updates?
Keep a separate internal log of these interactions, especially if these are repeat incidents or are initiated outside project scope. This provides data for employees and contractors alike to use in future contracts, scope-of-work language, or compensation negotiations, especially as the demand for soft skills rises with more emphasis placed on this in the AI era.
3. Normalize Coaching Language
Emotional labor becomes easier to scope and defend when it’s paired with professionalized, intentional language. Borrow from coaching, counseling, and leadership development fields to describe what’s actually being delivered.
Useful terms can include:
“Emotional containment” – the ability to stay calm while others are in distress
“Narrative reframing” – shifting perspective to reduce panic or overwhelm
“Executive emotional regulation” – modeling calm that regulates others’ emotional states
By using terms that reflect emotional intelligence as a strategic function, the framing shifts from a vague “being supportive” to a more concrete “providing emotional infrastructure.”
4. Scope Emotional Labor
Make emotional labor explicit in contracts and job duties so this labor is recognized as a service with defined limits. This protects workers’ time, sets boundaries, and reinforces its value to the client, team, or members of management.
Example language could include “provides up to 2 hours/month of emotional recalibration or founder mindset alignment support” or “retainer includes tone coaching and narrative alignment during key decision periods.”
Even brief clauses like these help differentiate duties from unpaid emotional availability. This specificity also helps prevent confusion around boundaries regarding emotional labor.
5. Create Feedback Loops That Reward Relational Leadership
In most performance systems, emotional labor is invisible unless someone disrupts it, or burns out from doing too much of it. Considering that women have much higher emotional burnout rates than men, recognition of emotional labor must change for the sake of gender equity. By demonstrating that women’s emotional labor is not something others are entitled to but rather a high-value offering, especially in the era of AI, this encourages better boundaries around emotional labor as well as can encourage those of all genders to improve their emotional intelligence to develop their professional value, thus reducing the tendency for this burden to rest on the shoulders of only a few team members.
To make these changes, companies and clients need to intentionally reward relational leadership in their feedback, reviews, and KPIs. For example, if an employee or contractor consistently calms difficult clients, reduces interpersonal friction, or helps leadership avoid costly missteps through emotional clarity, that is not ancillary labor. Name it for what it is as brand protection, client retention, and strategic risk mitigation.
Instead of only tracking hard metrics (e.g., number of accounts opened, deliverables completed), include relational outcomes such as “customer responded to empathetic tone and announced a desire to help with word-of-mouth advertising due to excellent experience,” “stakeholder engagement improved after guided messaging,” and “team morale stabilized during high-pressure launch.” A calm, emotionally attuned team member is often a hidden driver of repeat business and brand trust, and yet this remains uncaptured in most review systems.
Moving Forward into the Future
The age of AI has made it clearer than ever that what cannot be automated becomes premium. However, women’s contributions in these premium areas are still routinely unpaid, unnamed, and continually demanded with entitlement.
Founders and companies that actively revalue emotional labor as strategic labor will not only improve retention, but outperform competitors in markets where trust, narrative, and alignment matter more than raw speed. If women’s labor holds up the emotional scaffolding of a company, acknowledge the scaffolding and pay for the scaffolding.