Why 50% of Women Face Burnout and How to Overcome It

Everyone has the potential to become burned out, but data shows women have reported higher levels of burnout than men for years, a gap that has more than doubled since 2019.

In 2023, Gallup surveyed over 18,000 workers and found that 33% of women are almost always burned out right now. 25% of men feel the same (Gallup, What Women Really Want at Work, 2023).

What's more, the burnout gap between men and women has widened from 3 percentage points in 2019 to 8 percentage points in 2023. The numbers go even higher for women who are senior leaders, with 50% saying they experienced burnout (McKinsey, Women in the Workplace 2021).

40% of women who are looking at new job opportunities cite burnout as the key driver (Deloitte, Women @ Work 2022).

This stark contrast prompts an urgent inquiry: what factors contribute to higher burnout rates for women and what can we do about it?

High-Achieving Women's Burnout Symptoms

Stress is unavoidable; in healthy doses, it’s even a positive experience. It boosts your productivity, increases your alertness, and pushes you to take initiative. Your body can persevere with chronic stress for a while, but not forever.?

Burnout is the moment the body steps in and pulls the emergency brake. At that moment your internal battery is empty, or almost empty. As much as you would like to keep going, you simply don’t have the energy left to do everything you want to do. Your body says “no”.?

Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that can manifest differently for everyone, but there are some common signs and symptoms that high-achieving women may experience.

Here are some indicators to watch for:

• Unexplained Chronic Conditions: Chronic fatigue, headaches, stomachaches, muscle tension, eczema, hormonal imbalances, weakened immune system, or other physical symptoms without a clear medical cause
• Increased Irritability and Mood Swings: Becoming more easily frustrated, short-tempered, or snappy with colleagues, friends, or family members
• Emotional Exhaustion: Feeling easily overwhelmed, pulling away from social events, avoiding friends or colleagues, or isolating oneself
• Insomnia and Sleep Disturbance: Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up quickly in the morning (cortisol spike!) but feeling exhausted
• Neglecting Self-Care: Ignoring physical needs (rest, movement, nutrition), emotional needs (belonging, support) and mental needs (challenges and growth opportunities)
• Cynicism or Detachment: Feeling emotionally detached from work or personal relationships, losing interest in activities once found enjoyable

Why Is the Burnout Rate for Women Staying Higher?

The rising rate of burnout among women, especially among top-talent women, and its persistent higher prevalence compared to men can be attributed to several interconnected factors.

Impostor Syndrome: 70% of top female talent suffer from impostor syndrome (The 2020 KPMG Women’s Leadership Summit Report), leading to excessive self-criticism, fear of failure, and perfectionism. This generates stress, anxiety, and an inability to set limits and say no.

Perfectionism Tendencies: Top-talent women often seek flawlessness in their work. This can lead to excessive self-criticism, fear of failure, and a reluctance to accept anything less than perfection. The constant drive to excel can contribute to chronic stress and anxiety.

Workload and Responsibilities: Women in top positions may face additional pressures and responsibilities such as navigating gender biases, overcoming imposter syndrome, and managing family and household duties.

Emotional Investment: Women, on average, may prioritize a sense of purpose and meaning in their work more than men do. When women find a purposeful job or career, this positively impacts their performance and well-being. However, when this criterion is not met, this creates an additional source of stress, frustration, higher turnover and difficulty in achieving professional fulfillment.?

Shift from Achievement to Self-Actualization: Most women have made a shift from achievement to self-actualization, changing their values, needs, priorities, and the support they need to succeed at this new stage. Women do not only want to “manage a challenging project”, “get a promotion” or “earn more money”. Most of them want, consciously or unconsciously, to fulfill their talents and potentialities. When this is not achieved, women can experience intense stress and frustration when navigating their careers and personal lives.

Imbalanced Feminine Energy: Regardless of their gender, everyone has feminine and masculine energies. Masculine energy is about “doing”: living from the head, action orientation, logic, strength, responsibility, etc. Feminine energy is about “being”: living from the heart, intuition, nurturing, softness, creativity, empathy, etc. When these energies are balanced, we experience a greater sense of harmony and fulfillment, better health, less stress, and deeper relationships. When they're askew, we feel more friction, internal and external conflicts, strain from unhealthy relationships, and stress in everyday life. Most high-achieving women are unaware of this concept and tend to rely too much on masculine energy due to societal norms and workplace cultures that prioritize masculine traits and behaviors, such as competitiveness, goal orientation, control and rationality. Both men and women need a healthy dose of feminine energy, but this is even more critical for top-talent women working in male-dominated environments.?--> Check out my article on how reconnecting with your feminine energy can boost your career for more information!

Difficulty Asking for Help: Top-talent women may be less likely to seek help for mental health issues due to stigma or fear of judgment. This can prevent them from receiving the support they need to prevent or address burnout. The number of women who feel comfortable talking about mental health in the workplace has dropped significantly from 43% in 2022 to 25% in 2023, and fewer feel comfortable disclosing mental health challenges as the reason they take time off work: 39% in 2022 compared to just 25% in 2023 (Deloitte, Women @ Work 2023).?

5 Steps to Start Recovering From Burnout

Starting the recovery process from burnout can be challenging, but taking proactive steps is essential for restoring physical, mental, and emotional health. Here are five steps to begin the journey towards recovery:

1. Recognize and Acknowledge Burnout: The first step is to recognize and acknowledge that you are experiencing burnout. Reflect on your symptoms and how they are impacting your life, work, and well-being. Admitting to yourself that you are burnt out is essential to start taking proactive steps toward recovery!
2. Identify Your Energy Drainers and Givers: Physical, mental, and emotional energy are interconnected aspects of your overall health, vitality, performance, productivity, resilience, growth, and quality of life. When you are suffering from burnout, all three types of energy are depleted. To target your recovery interventions, you need to identify your daily stressors, energy drainers, and energy givers across all three energies.
3. Set Boundaries and Prioritize Self-Care: Get rid of all the energy drainers that are not urgent or important, and develop coping strategies for the ones you can’t remove. This includes setting boundaries, saying “no”, delegating, asking for help, prioritizing your own needs, and limiting the time and energy given to others. In parallel, increase time spent on activities that give you physical, mental, or emotional energy.
4. Regulate Your Nervous System to Support the Stress Response: The key to getting out of burnout is to “heal” the nervous system and recreate physical, mental, and emotional safety. To do so, I advise clients to choose two nervous system tools: one is an emergency tool for acute stressors to avoid adding new stress points to their system, and one is a foundational tool to practice daily to eliminate the negative points accumulated over the years. Check my free “Superwomen Survival Guide to Survival mode” for more details.?
5. Get the Right Support: Reach out to friends, family members, colleagues, or mental health professionals for support. Consider joining support groups or seeking coaching to develop a customized recovery plan and get support along the way. Asking for help is one of the bravest things you can do, and it can save your life.

How Can Companies Reduce Women's Burnout Rates?

Reducing the burnout gender gap requires a multifaceted approach that addresses systemic barriers and promotes gender equity in the workplace. Here are several strategies that companies can implement to mitigate burnout, with a focus on closing the gender gap:

Invest in Women's Empowerment: While companies should work on external factors that contribute to burnout, they should also equip women with the right tools, knowledge, and support to prevent burnout and speed up recovery. Those interventions should help top-talent women:

• Understand their unique physical, mental, emotional needs to fulfill them sustainably?
• Get clear on their personal and professional priorities to choose conscious trade-offs
• Develop authentic confidence to communicate about their needs, set limits, and ask for help?
• Reconnect them to their feminine energy to enhance physical, mental, and emotional balance
• Overcome limiting beliefs and tap into their heart and intuition to make decisions that are aligned with who they are and what they want
• Master emotional regulation to take advantage of their emotions, rather than feeling like they’re at their emotions’ mercy
• Increase nervous system resilience to better handle external stressors

This can be done by educating women and supporting them through their entire careers from entry-level positions to senior leaders. Effective interventions include women-centric training, one-on-one coaching and mentoring, and women's support groups.

Equip Managers and Senior Leaders With the Training and Resources to Support Women: Managers and senior leaders need to better understand women’s physical, mental, and emotional needs in the workplace. They should receive frequent, high-quality training and coaching opportunities which will help them bring the best out of their top-talent women while keeping them healthy and fulfilled.?

Create an Organizational Culture That Balances Feminine and Masculine energies: Companies should increase the focus on feminine energy and qualities (care, compassion, vulnerability, balance, presence, empathy, freedom and trust, etc.) and reduce excess masculine energy (competition, power, arguing/fighting, strength, intensity, control, etc.). Companies should create environments where women (and men!) can express feminine qualities, and where those traits and behaviors are included in managers' and leaders’ priorities and reward results.

Directly Support and Reward Women With Women-Centered Incentives: When women express clear preferences, give them what they ask for and go beyond men-centric processes and reward structures. Successful examples include hybrid and remote working models, flexible hours (e.g., part-time, compressed working hours), mental health benefits, and childcare and caregiver benefits.

What to Do Next

To prevent burnout and reduce the burnout gender gap, we need both bottom-up approaches (supporting and empowering women) and top-down approaches (innovative and women-centric corporate interventions). These combined approaches will increase top-talent women's attraction, retention, and development, and create working environments where both men and women will be more healthy, efficient, and fulfilled.?

If this blog post brought up some insights that felt big or uncomfortable, or if you struggle to understand your situation, you can download the free “Superwomen Survival Guide to Survival mode” or get in touch HERE

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Célia Zermatten is an Empowerment and Career Coach for High-Potential Women, as well as an experienced Consultant working with companies on innovative approaches for female top-talent attraction, retention, and development | Ex-Manager at McKinsey & Company | ICF ACC

Visit www.celiazermatten.com for more resources