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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.