Women and Burnout: Why It Happens, What to Do

This Women’s History Month, I can’t help but think about all the women leaders who are exhausted but still showing up. Who are carrying more than their share and wondering if anyone notices. Who love their work but aren’t sure how much longer they can sustain this pace.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

To those leaders: I see you. 

Your fatigue is real, and it’s not a personal failing—it’s a systemic issue that organizations need to address. In one recent survey, 75% of women reported experiencing burnout at work, compared with 58% percent of men. Sixty percent of senior-level women report frequent burnout, compared with 50% of senior-level men. For Black women in senior leadership, that number climbs to 77%.

To the executives and HR leaders reading this, the burnout gap won’t close on its own. And it’s costing your organization dearly. You’re losing talent, engagement, and the leadership pipeline you’ve worked so hard to build.

So, as we celebrate women in March, we also must take a hard look at the barriers to women’s progress. The burnout crisis is one of the most serious obstacles women face, but also one where we can take decisive action.

Why Burnout Hits Women Harder

What’s behind these numbers? First, there are key factors driving burnout for men and women: stressful work environments, pressure from growing workloads, expectations to be constantly productive, stagnating wage growth and not enough mental health support.  Second, women face unique challenges that increase the risk of them feeling unprepared or overwhelmed in their roles:

1. Women receive less actionable feedback than men—and less feedback overall. One analysis found that women get twice as many vague, unactionable critiques in performance reviews as their male colleagues, and are more than 20% less likely to receive the kind of difficult, specific feedback that actually helps people grow, learn and advance. 

2. Women are less likely to be offered the stretch assignments and training opportunities that signal the organization’s investment in them and reinvigorate their career energy. Four in 10 entry-level women haven’t received a promotion, stretch assignment or leadership training opportunity in the past two years, and women are 12% less likely than men to receive leadership skills training.   

3. Women experience the draining toll of microaggressions—being talked over in meetings, having their competence questioned, navigating double standards about leadership style. Women who experience microaggressions at work are four times more likely to report being almost always burned out. And women of color face these experiences at dramatically higher rates: Black women are nearly four times as likely as white women to encounter microaggressions, and Latinas and Asian women are two to three times as likely.

4. Women often carry invisible labor that doesn’t show up on any performance review. Research shows that women in senior leadership do 60% more work than their male counterparts to support employees’ emotional well-being: mentoring junior colleagues, mediating team conflicts, noticing when someone is struggling. The culture-building work that organizations depend on falls disproportionately on women.

5. Women still perform a disproportionate share of unpaid labor at home: Those who work full time still log 9.7 hours per week on household tasks, compared with 5.4 hours for men. Working mothers put in 63% more time than working fathers on childcare and housework each week. And beyond the physical work, mothers take on roughly 73% of all cognitive household labor—the never-ending work of planning meals, scheduling appointments and tracking what the family needs. When this “second shift” follows women into the office each morning, is it any wonder we are exhausted?

The #1 Misconception About Women and Burnout

We have to realize that burnout is not simply a result of individual choices. It is a systemic issue.

Far too often, we talk about women and burnout only in terms of what individual women can do on their own to recover. Addressing burnout at your organization involves more than, say, offering a weekly yoga class or a workshop on resilience.

That means that if your people seem burned out, examine workloads before you look for ways to build their stress management skills. Trust me, even the best training programs won’t be effective when your learners are just trying to keep their heads above water.

Workplace relationships are another systemic factor in burnout. Amid the rise of hybrid work and wave after wave of layoffs, it can feel harder than ever to form close connections to colleagues. More women than men feel isolated and lonely at work, and that fuels burnout.

Organizations also inadvertently fuel burnout by skimping on recognition. It’s easy to understand why: When we’re busy, praise and recognition can be among the first things to fall by the wayside. And—you guessed it—women get less recognition than men do.

How Development Can Address Women’s Burnout

As your organization examines structural issues that fuel burnout, you can start looking at how development opportunities fit into the equation. At Newberry Solutions, we’ve been working with high-performing women leaders since 2008, and we shape all of our products and services based on what really works.

Development must sustain, not drain. That’s why we emphasize teaching practical, immediately actionable strategies that focus on what matters most. We also created the New Lens® platform that empowers leaders to learn wherever they are, even when they have only a few minutes between meetings or in the school pick-up line. As one participant told us, “I feel like I’ve got four full-time jobs. What I love about New Lens is that I can work on it in between things in little spurts. It’s great how digestible this is—videos are two to seven minutes and the articles are short.”

To cultivate the relationships that benefit women so much, we offer development programs that integrate cohort learning, coaching and feedback, and build sponsorship—without taking too much time. All of this has the potential to fix the “broken rung” in women’s career advancement.

Empower Your Women Leaders

Since the turn of the decade, we’ve all been through enormous change, and disruption is only increasing. The period between now and 2030 will be unlike anything we have ever seen. Amid this dramatic transformation, there’s widespread anxiety about leadership pipelines. More than three-quarters of CHROs worry about their organization’s bench strength for key roles. 

In this environment, we just can’t afford to keep losing high-performing women to burnout. If this issue has been on the back burner at your organization, there’s no better time than Women’s History Month to move it forward. We love supporting organizations in advancing women in leadership—and we have an array of proven solutions to customize to your organization’s unique needs. Just drop us a note to open the conversation.

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Don’t wait for performance to drop before taking action. Discover how the New Lens® platform helps organizations support managers with bite-sized, actionable learning—built for today’s fast-paced, high-stress environments.

Give to Gain: 5 Ways to Advance Your Career While Lifting Other Women

International Women’s Day is March 8, and this year’s theme is “Give to Gain”—a reminder that when we invest in other women, we all rise. It’s a message that resonates deeply with me. The most successful women don’t just focus on their own advancement. They lift as they climb. And in doing so, they gain more than they give.

Before we can give to others, though, we have to invest in ourselves. You can’t pour from an empty cup. So as you read through these six practices, I want you to think about them from two angles. First, how can you apply this to your own career? And second, who’s one person—a team member, mentee, or colleague—who could benefit from your support in this area?

1. Own Your Seat at the Table

For you: Recognize that you’ve already earned your current role. Pay attention to your executive presence: the messages you send about your confidence and authority. Stop waiting to feel ready. You’re here because you belong here.

If you’re still feeling some doubt, you’re not alone. About three-quarters of executive women have experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. And the more you achieve, the worse it can get: Research shows that feelings of self-doubt often intensify rather than diminish with success. But here’s what I want you to remember: Those feelings of uncertainty aren’t facts. They’re a predictable response to stretching outside your comfort zone. Don’t let them keep you from taking up the space you’ve earned.

What you can give: Help another woman see that she’s already earned her seat, too. Women often discount their accomplishments or attribute success to luck. Be the voice that reflects her capabilities back to her—especially when she can’t see them herself. This is especially important if you’re the other woman’s manager: Employees are hungry for more coaching, and they often look to managers for a sense of purpose. (This is one reason we made sure that our New Lens® platform involves managers in employees’ development plans.)

Normalize talking about imposter syndrome; some women feel too embarrassed or isolated in their experiences to bring them up. You can also advocate for systemic change or address everyday behaviors that affect women’s sense of belonging or confidence (e.g., like the habit of interrupting women at meetings).

2. Invest in Sponsors, Not Just Mentors

For you: When you’re a busy manager, it’s easy to let relationship building take a back seat or assume that you’re past the stage of needing a mentor or a sponsor. But not having one can still hurt your career. You need people who will advocate for you when you’re not in the room. Mentors give advice. Sponsors open doors. Both are important, but sponsorship is what moves careers.

According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without. If you don’t have a mentor or sponsor, it’s never too late to cultivate those relationships.

What you can give: Be a sponsor for another woman. Bring her up for opportunities and educate others on her strengths. If she’s involved with a leadership development program, talk to her about how to apply what she’s learning within the specific context of your organization. If you’re not yet in a position to sponsor directly, make introductions to people who could sponsor her or give her opportunities to be in front of senior leaders. Access is one of the most valuable things you can give. You could even suggest starting a mentorship or sponsorship program at your organization.

3. Learn the Unwritten Rules

For you: Don’t shy away from office politics. Every organization has unwritten rules about how decisions get made, who has influence and what it takes to advance. Successful women learn to navigate these dynamics ethically—because ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.

“Playing the game” might feel harder these days if you’re working a hybrid schedule or you’re dealing with increased responsibilities. But that doesn’t make it less essential. So take a few minutes to think about a couple of important questions: Who has the resources, information and influence you need to get business results. And how can you get those people in your corner?

What you can give: Share the playbook with a woman who’s a rising leader or who is new at your organization. The unwritten rules are often invisible to people earlier in their careers—or to anyone who hasn’t had access to insider knowledge. Tell her what you wish someone had told you. Who really makes decisions? What does it actually take to get promoted here? This kind of knowledge can change a career trajectory.

You could make an even bigger impact for women at your organization by pushing for improvements in your onboarding process. Gallup has found that “only 12% of U.S. employees say their company does a good job of onboarding.” When companies miss the opportunity to facilitate relationships, learn new employees’ goals and get an early start on development, they hurt their pipeline of future leaders.

4. Ask for What You Want

For you: Negotiate. For the salary, the resources, the assignment, the flexibility. Here’s something that might surprise you: Recent research from UC Berkeley and Vanderbilt found that women with MBAs actually negotiate salary more often than men do. Yet women still earn less.

If you don’t like negotiating, or don’t think you’re not good at it, there’s probably more than one factor behind that feeling. Perhaps you feel constrained by cultural stereotypes that women are always accommodating. Or maybe you’re comfortable advocating for your team members, but not yourself.

I always share one simple tip that my clients say helps them get past their anxiety about negotiation: Beforehand, think about and prepare for how you might get in your own way. How have you reacted during negotiations in the past? What do you need to change this time to get the results that you want.

What you can give: Encourage another woman to negotiate for something she cares about—and coach her on how to do so. Share your own experiences, including the times it didn’t go perfectly and how you adjusted your approach. I’ve found that negotiation can be a powerful topic to explore in peer or cohort learning. Discovering that this is a shared challenge helps ease anxiety, and the chance to share wisdom helps everyone get better results in negotiations.

5. Make Your Impact Visible

For you: Have you always been a heads-down worker with the mindset that “I just need to do a good job and people will notice”? On today’s overloaded and distributed teams, just doing great work isn't enough anymore. Your contributions must be seen by the people who make decisions about your career.

Think of it this way: You're not bragging. You're helping others learn from your experience and successes. Someone else in your organization may be facing the same challenge you just solved, and sharing your results could help them tremendously. The mindset shift “promoting myself” to “sharing something useful” has been a light-bulb moment for so many of my executive coaching clients and users of New Lens.

What you can give: Create visibility for a woman you believe in. Mention her contributions in meetings. Forward her emails to senior leaders with a note about why her work matters. Recommend her for presentations or high-profile projects. At the same time, help her learn that self-promotion isn’t selfish. Let her see you tastefully highlighting your own wins, and share resources like the ones I’ve linked to throughout this article.

Give to Gain

In my work with clients and nonprofit board service, I’ve seen one thing hold true again and again: When women support women, everyone benefits. What you do has a ripple effect: The high-potential woman you guide today becomes the future leader who now has the chance to lift other women herself. It can all start with you, and we can help. Newberry Solutions has a special commitment to developing women leaders, and we have an array of products and services that fit the needs of women at every career stage. To learn more, just drop me a note.

P.S. Stay tuned here and on my LinkedIn page: We have more special content planned throughout Women’s History Month!

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Don’t wait for performance to drop before taking action. Discover how the New Lens® platform helps organizations support managers with bite-sized, actionable learning—built for today’s fast-paced, high-stress environments.

Are You Underutilizing These Powerful Ways to Close the Leadership Gap?

I have some bad news and some good news about mentorship and sponsorship at work. First, the bad news: These two strategies are extremely underused. According to Gallup, only 40% of employees have workplace mentors, and 23% have sponsors. The good news? Improving these numbers is low-hanging fruit and holds huge potential for increasing the number of women in senior leadership, enhancing engagement and retention and even bolstering the bottom line at your organization.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic after serving as one of the mentors at the Dallas Business Journal’s recent Mentoring Monday, a nationwide event sponsored by The Business Journals that brings together successful female business leaders and women who want to tap into their advice and insights.

Image by Sue Styles from Pixabay

As a longtime advocate for advancing women, I’m excited that we’re learning more about how to create meaningful results for individuals and their employers through relationships with mentors and sponsors. In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s take a deeper dive into this topic and make the case for your organization to invest in programs that integrate the power of both mentorship and sponsorship.

What Is the Difference Between Mentors and Sponsors?

Mentors and sponsors serve valuable, but not identical, roles in your network. Mentors typically serve as role models, providing advice and perspective to help you develop your skills and navigate challenging situations. Mentors can be at any level in the organization, with peer and reverse mentoring becoming more frequently used approaches. 

Sponsors, on the other hand, have clout and yield considerable influence on key decision-makers. Sponsors also give you critical exposure to opportunities and visibility to other influential leaders, and advocate on your behalf. 

As a longtime executive coach and the creator of a leadership development platform, I’m not surprised by how underutilized mentorship and sponsorship are. I’ve had many clients fall into the trap of thinking their good work is enough. It often takes people a while to realize that who they know is just as important as the quality of their work. They overlook how much their relationships give them access to resources, information and influence that they need to get work done and to advance their careers.

The Power of Support at Work

While mentorship and sponsorship are good for everyone, I’m especially intrigued by their potential to address an issue that many organizations struggle with: the leadership gap between men and women.

According to the Women in the Workplace 2023 report  from McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.org, women are underrepresented at all stages of the leadership pipeline. While 48% of all entry-level employees are women, only 40% of managers are. The gap keeps getting broader all the way to the C-Suite, where men outnumber women by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

That’s a problem on many levels. Researchers have found that companies with more female leaders make more money, are more socially responsible and have better customer service. Female CEOs can even drive stock prices. Companies recognize these benefits, and many are increasing their efforts around leadership development for women.

These programs must include opportunities to develop relationships with mentors and sponsors. When you look at data from Gallup, the Women in the Workplace report and other recent research, it becomes clear why these relationships can be so beneficial for women’s careers:

• Women are more ambitious now than they were before the pandemic. In 2019, about 70% of women wanted to get promoted to the next level. Today, that figure is 81%. (For women under 30 — your organization’s rising generation of leaders —93% want promotions.) In other words, high-potential women want to know that they have a future at your organization. Gallup found that when an employee has a mentor or sponsor, they’re much more likely to feel that they have a clear path forward.

• Learning and growth are deeply important to your workforce. More than 9 out of 10 employees said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in helping them learn. Mentorship and sponsorship help address that demand. According to Gallup, employees with mentors are twice as likely to say they’ve had recent opportunities to learn and grow.

• Perhaps the greatest potential for mentorship and sponsorship programs lies in helping more women find sponsors. Currently, 25% of men have a sponsor at work, while only 22% of women do. According to Herminia Ibarra of London Business School:

Too few women are reaching the top of their organizations, and a big reason is that they are not getting the high-stakes assignments that are prerequisite for a shot at the C-suite. Often, this is due to a lack of powerful sponsors demanding and ensuring that they get these stepping-stone jobs.

Ibarra has also found that men and women describe their relationships with supporters differently: Women talk about how these relationships increase their self-understanding, while men talk about others endorsing them and helping them plan their career advancement.

How to Improve Mentorship and Sponsorship

So how can your organization maximize the power of mentorship and sponsorship to advance women leaders?

• Examine how the rise of hybrid work has affected who receives mentorship or sponsorship in your organization. For example, men are more likely than women to receive mentorship and sponsorship when they work onsite, according to the Women in the Workplace report.

• Start thinking about how to weave elements of mentorship or sponsorship into existing programs without overburdening participants or executives. While support relationships that develop on their own are great, formal programs can create even more impressive results, Gallup found.

• Whether or not you have a formal program, make sure your organization is teaching coaching skills. Potential mentors and sponsors are more likely to help when they have the right tools to do so.

• Consider a tool like the New Lens® platform that facilitates mentoring conversations. Our app leverages the power of both peer learning and manager feedback.

Finally, remember that we understand the power of mentorship and sponsorship at Newberry Solutions and we welcome the chance to answer your questions and share how New Lens and our other tools can empower you to support women leaders. Schedule a New Lens demo now, or get in touch with us for more information.

Are You Living Out Your 2023 Theme Word?

Can you believe we’re at the end of Q1 for 2023? This year is flying by, so it’s a good time to check in on your theme word for 2023.

You might remember that I chose “fun” for my theme word. That theme has played out in some interesting ways so far this year. I have made new friends, listened to live music, danced, and gone parasailing, snorkeling and jet skiing with my son during a spring break in Turks and Caicos!

With my breast cancer diagnosis three years behind me, I am finally physically getting back to being me. It’s been fun indeed to feel really fit again. And it’s brought up another important word for me: gratitude. I’ve really noticed who brings out my joy when we spend time together. I’m so grateful to these women who have been in my corner during my post-cancer journey. The richness of the support they’ve given me inspires me to support others as well.

That also seems like a fitting note to conclude Women’s History Month 2023. I’m always in awe of what happens when women unite in their passion to lift others. This year, I’ve seen that passion in (to name just a few examples) United Way of Metropolitan Dallas’ Women of Tocqueville, at the Dallas Business Journal’s Bizwomen Mentoring Monday and in Orchid Giving Circle as we prepare for the next POWER Leadership Forum in May. I’m looking forward to telling you about more meaningful — and fun! — events coming up soon, too.

This week, think about one or two tweaks you can make to bring you more into alignment with your 2023 theme word. What can you add to your calendar to support your intentions for this year? And what can you remove? Remember, we’re always here with tools and resources to support your goals, and in your corner cheering you on.

10 Things Successful Women Consistently Do

March is Women’s History Month, and an important time for us here at Newberry Solutions. One of our passions is developing high-performing women leaders. We’re proud to have been recognized for this work. And we’re excited that the tools we’ve created to make leadership development more accessible (like the New Lens app) are helping women thrive and make a bigger impact.

In honor of Women’s History Month, I wanted to reshare a list of the 10 things that successful women consistently do. Everything on this list is based on what I’ve observed over thousands of hours of coaching leaders. As much as we’d like to think the playing field is similar for men and women, women typically face different types of challenges at work and they play different roles at home. So, naturally, we would expect to see some differences in what successful women do. 

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

So many of you have told me that this list has been helpful to you or that it’s helped you to mentor or support other women. I hope to keep that momentum going today with this updated version of that list.

Successful women …

1. Realize that they’ve already earned their current role and fully assume the position. They pay attention to their executive presence and the messages they are sending about their confidence and authority.

2. Recognize that their own behavior plays a huge role in “teaching” others how to treat them.

3. Own their value by accepting and appreciating positive feedback. They know their strengths and look for ways to maximize them.

4. Authentically invest in cultivating sponsors — leaders with power and influence. They understand that mentorship is not the same thing as sponsorship.

5. Don’t shy away from office politics. Instead, they ethically engage in it to give them access to resources, information and influence they need to get things done.  

6. Negotiate for what they want.

7. Proactively share their positive business results in a way that others can learn and benefit from. (If you have trouble with this, check out our guide to tasteful self-promotion.)

8. Design a “sustainable model” that honors their personal and professional priorities. This is especially important now that hybrid work can make it harder to unplug while you’re at home.

9. Drive for results in a way that maintains or strengthens relationships. Results and relationships are inextricably linked and an investment in both is necessary.

10. Pave the way for other women. They look for the potential in others and find ways to support their growth.

As you read through this list, what resonated for you? What one step can you take this week to bring it to life for yourself or for another woman you work with? As always, we’re here to help, with several resources including our newest tool to make leadership development affordable and scalable, the award-winning New Lens® app.