Does the stress response of “tend and befriend” cause women to stay in jobs that don’t suit them?
We often ask why women leave difficult workplaces. Perhaps we should also ask why they stay. The “tend-and-befriend” stress response offers a different way of understanding resilience, loyalty, and the hidden emotional labour women can carry at work. I’ve studied stress for years, and I had never read a piece of research that is now more than 25 years old. It raises a question I think I’ve (we’ve?) overlooked: what if freeze, fight, or flight was never the whole picture?
Male models
If you’ve read Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, you’ll know the pattern. Research has often treated the male body, physiology and behaviour as the standard, and female data as an afterthought. It shows up in car safety design, in the PPE offered to women and in clinical drug trials.
It seems to show up in stress research too.
Tend and befriend
In 2000, Shelley Taylor and colleagues at UCLA noted that much of the classic stress research had been carried out on males. They proposed an additional pattern of response, particularly in females: tend-and-befriend. Rather than fighting or fleeing, the response involves protecting others, seeking social connection, and strengthening relationships.
They were not claiming that every woman responds this way, or that biology determines behaviour. Their argument was that the dominant model had overlooked other ways of responding to threat.
The proposed mechanism involves oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter linked to bonding and to calming the brain’s threat response, possibly working alongside oestrogen. It’s worth saying that this is a hypothesis. The evidence for the hormonal detail in humans is mixed, and oxytocin’s effects depend heavily on context. The behavioural idea is the useful part: people under pressure don’t only fight or run. Some try to hold the group together.
And it isn’t only women. Research on men under acute social stress has found increased prosocial behaviour too (Bernadette von Dawans et al., 2012), so this is a pattern of response, not a gender rule, although the nurturing element has become something of a gender stereotype.
Where this might show up at work
What follows is my own thinking, not established research. But I think it’s worth asking…. so bear with me.
Many of us know someone who responds to a difficult workplace by trying to fix it. They support the struggling colleague, mentor the newcomer, defuse the conflict and manage around the difficult manager. They become the person everyone turns to when something goes wrong.
We have research on the visible side of this. Studies of “non-promotable tasks” find that women are asked to take on such work more often, and agree more often. Sociologists have long described the hidden cost of emotional labour. Practical constraints matter enormously too, including caring responsibilities and financial pressure, so it’s not always about physiology.
But what if, for some people, part of this is also a stress response? Not resigning, not confronting the boss, but staying and trying to make things better from within.
From the outside, that gets labelled as loyalty, commitment or resilience. Sometimes it is, but staying is not the same as thriving. The person carrying the emotional load is often valued but rarely rewarded, and their ability to cope can conceal the very conditions they are coping with.
Eventually most people reach their limit, and when they leave, organisations sometimes ask, “Why didn’t she say something?” It’s rarely asked whether the “resilience” was really sustained exposure to stress, or what the organisation did to create it.
What organisations can do
- Make invisible work visible. Track who takes on mentoring, coordination, conflict resolution and support roles, and include them in workload and promotion decisions.
- Rotate the non-promotable tasks rather than relying on volunteers.
- Check on the people who never complain. Coping quietly is not the same as being fine.
- Ask about conditions in exit interviews, not just reasons for leaving, and act on patterns.
- Reward relationship work as real contribution, not as personality.
- Stay interviews – find out why people stay in jobs.
A different lens
Tend-and-befriend doesn’t explain everyone’s behaviour, and it isn’t another gender stereotype because many saymen feel trapped in roles as providers which ùakes them more risk adverse to leave a job and they may enter a phase known as “quiet cracking”.
But it offers a useful challenge to how we think about stress because not everyone fights, flees or freezes. There are some people who simply try to hold it all together, and they are the ones who most need the organisation to change and the group that gets most overlooked.
Who is holding your workplace together, and at what cost?
Loyalty, resilience and a willingness to support others are valuable. But when employees are continually compensating for poor management, conflict or unsafe cultures, resilience can hide an organisational problem.
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