The Competence Tax
Somewhere in my late thirties I noticed that every time I got good at something hard, my reward was more of it.
More of the hard thing, handed over with a compliment attached.
"You're so good at this." "Honestly, nobody else can handle it the way you do."
For years I heard sentences like those as praise. It took me a long time to hear them as an invoice.
There is a cost to being the capable one, and a lot of women are paying it without ever seeing the line item. I have started calling it the competence tax. The better you get at carrying, the more you get handed to carry, and the arrangement almost never comes with more money or more room to breathe. It comes with more trust, which sounds lovely until you notice that trust has quietly become a synonym for "we have stopped asking whether this is fair."
I spent years as an employment attorney before I built what I build now. I sat in rooms where compensation got decided and where a person's contribution either showed up in a promotion case or vanished. And I watched the same thing happen to capable women again and again. The work that keeps a team standing rarely earns the advancement.
Researchers even have a name for it, non-promotable work, the tasks everyone relies on and no one gets promoted for. Someone organizes the offsite, mentors the new hire who is quietly falling apart, catches the mistake before it reaches the client, and manages the manager's moods. That someone is disproportionately a woman, and she is usually excellent, and her excellence is exactly why the tax keeps climbing.
Here is the part that took me longest to understand. The competence tax does not only get charged at work.
I paid it at home, where I had become the family's memory, and in friendships that woke up mostly when someone needed something, and in a body that started sending invoices of its own... the tight jaw, the sleep that would not deepen. Sociologists named a piece of this decades ago and called it emotional labor. What they described is real, and it does not stay politely inside office hours.
Work is simply where the tax is easiest to see, because work gives it a flattering name. Dependability. Leadership. Then you go home and find the same withdrawal happening with no title on it at all.
It's an "and." The competence is real. The tax is also real. Both are true at once, and holding them together is where the honesty starts.
So why do so many of us keep paying?
Because the tax once bought us something we needed. Being indispensable felt like safety. If everyone relied on me, maybe my seat was secure and maybe I had earned my place. That math made sense to the woman who first learned it, often young, often somewhere that being useful was the surest way to be kept.
The math changes, though. Your capacity has an edge to it, and at some point the interest on the tax outruns whatever it was buying you. You become exquisitely good at holding more than any person should, and the reward for that skill is the quiet assumption that you will simply keep holding it. That is the trap folded inside the compliment.
Let me be careful here, because this is not an argument against being good at your work. I love being good at my work. Competence is a real pleasure, and capability is a real form of power. The real question sits one level down. Has your capability quietly become a resource other people spend freely, because you have never once handed them the bill?
You can hand them the bill. That is the unglamorous heart of the work.
Sometimes it looks dramatic, a resignation, or a role you finally decline. Far more often it is small. It can be as quiet as letting a project sit with the person whose name is actually on it, or leaving a gap visible long enough that someone else finally steps into it. Sometimes it is as direct as asking, out loud, for the authority to match the responsibility you already carry.
None of that waits on anyone else to change first. It asks you to stop absorbing the cost so silently that the people around you honestly do not know it exists. That silence is its own kind of self-abandonment. Most of the people benefiting from it are not villains. They are responding to a price of zero, because zero is the number you have been quoting.
This is the conversation I keep wanting to have with capable women, and it runs straight through work, money, worth, and wellbeing, because the competence tax touches all four. It quietly sets what you earn, and what you believe you are worth on the days you are not being useful, and whether your nervous system is ever allowed to rest, and how much life is left over underneath the workload.
So here is what I would gently invite you to notice this week.
Where are you the capable one? And what is that actually costing you that no one has ever named out loud?
You do not have to overturn your life to answer honestly. Start by seeing the line item. A cost you can finally see is a cost you get to decide whether to keep paying.
And once you begin pricing your competence like it is genuinely valuable... which it is... a surprising number of things you assumed were permanent turn out to be negotiable.
This is the written companion to the latest episode of the How Good Can It Get? podcast. If you want the long-form version with the stories, listen here: [Ep 145 How Good Can It Get].
sincerely,
Bree
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