Emotional Labor, Gendered Care, and Educational Leadership Educators During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified faculty emotional labor as instructors were expected to sustain learning while responding to students’ grief, isolation, and uncertainty. Educational leadership educators occupy a distinctive role as mentors and models for current and aspiring PK–12 and higher education leaders. Using a secondary phenomenological analysis, we reanalyzed de-identified Zoom interview transcripts (2022) from nine U.S. educational leadership educators (seven women; four educators of color) originally collected to examine caring pedagogies. Guided by Hochschild’s emotional labor theory and feminist care ethics, with particular attention to Tronto’s political theory of care, we conducted a theoretically informed thematic analysis focused on caring expectations, role boundaries, and well-being. Findings highlight five interrelated themes: serving as an “anchor” during crisis; blurred instructional–counseling roles and invisible care work; gendered and racialized expectations of availability; competing care obligations across work and home; and boundary-setting as resistance and sustainability. Participants described deep relational commitments to students alongside exhaustion, role strain, and frustration with institutional cultures that assumed limitless capacity to care without reciprocal support. Emotional labor in leadership education should be recognized as central leadership work, and sustainable cultures of care require systemic policies that redistribute and resource care labor.