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. Educa-tional 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 col-lected 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 con-ducted 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 de-scribed deep relational commitments to students alongside exhaustion, role strain, and frustration with institutional cultures that assumed limitless capacity to care without re-ciprocal support. Emotional labor in leadership education should be recognized as central leadership work, and sustainable cultures of care require systemic policies that redistrib-ute and resource care labor.