Just when you think we’re making progress in terms of women in leadership, somebody comes along and does us in.
Yes, he said it. Early this year in a podcast interview, Mark Zuckerberg said companies had become neutered and needed more ‘masculine energy’.
In their Women in the Workplace 2021 report, McKinsey & Company highlighted that women leaders still report higher incidences of burnout and exhaustion.
Mark saying such things doesn’t help our case. If this kind of mentality is widely adopted, and it can if significant business figures push it to the forefront, women will be back to having fewer leadership opportunities, and those who get the chance will yet again need to deny their womanhood and femaleness and continue carrying on in an inharmonious masculine persona to survive.
Meaning more stress for us in the workplace.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout (informed by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)) as a syndrome, but not a medical condition, emanating from chronic stress in the workplace, and evidenced by three elements, namely:
- feeling very exhausted or depleted,
- feeling growingly unattached to one’s job, no longer deriving pleasure from it,
- reduced work productivity and efficacy.
Having experienced several bouts of burnout as a doctor, I can attest to the fact that it isn’t so much physical exhaustion as it is mental and emotional, and that the disconnection that one feels seems to be exclusively from work. Doctors call it ‘fed up’ leave when they take a break from work due to burnout. Removed from work one feels better, but on day 1 back to work you feel the exact same ‘fed up’ feeling.
However, recent research has argued that there are other symptoms to burnout, it is a masking/diverting label from the real issue, and that it could be added to the depressive disorder category in the ICD-11 so that proper treatment can be initiated. To all of which I agree.
What this means is that you need to take burnout seriously, as it’s not just a superficial ‘I’m fed up at work and need a break’ situation. Depression can lead to suicide. We’ve lost doctors and others to suicide because all they ever complained about was burnout.
Burnout can affect anyone in the workplace, but the reasons why women are more affected than men have to be considered so that women are capacitated to take targeted steps to reduce it for themselves, especially where organizational support is lacking/ineffective.
Here are 3 reasons why women burn out more than men:
1. Gender Biases at Work
Some employees work long hours due to the nature of their jobs. Some do so to achieve more work-related rewards and faster promotions. However, women don’t reap the same rewards compared to men. A cited recent study showed that gender biases at work are hard at work against women. It showed that men received larger bonuses compared to women working the same hours with the same performance assessments. The reason for men working long hours was attributable to job commitment but to incompetence in women.🤷🏽♀️
This implies that women could never make a way out of gender-based work disparities through overworking. But try they do and will clock even more hours, meaning more chances of burnout and depression. Interestingly, even when a woman was more efficient than a man, i.e., achieved the same results in less time, the man still got more rewards. Such a catch-22 situation for women this undervaluing of both efficiency and overtime is.
Knowing this, and for our mental and emotional wellness, what if we just decided to operate in excellence and give our best in the normal/reasonable number of working hours? If burnout is knocking, what if we re-evaluated whether we really need those back-breaking rewards in the first place? What if we asked ourselves, what point are we really proving, and to whom? And decide whether that point is a worthy cause or not.
2. Gender Biases at Home
Gender bias in the home sees women burdened with disproportionate caregiving responsibilities compared to men. An analysis of the 2022 American Time Use Survey Study showed that women spent more time than men doing unpaid household work, including child care, and having less free time. Women not only provide the majority of childcare but also take on far more elder care than men.
Even as women take on leadership roles, they continue to shoulder an unfair proportion of domestic responsibilities. A Gallup report highlights that women with children are three times more likely than men to be the parent addressing unexpected child care issues. Managing both professional and household obligations (even unexpected ones) intensifies women’s level of stress and contributes to burnout.
Instead of trying to do it all, I’ve done away with what I call the ‘McGyver complex’ – if you’re my age, you’ll know who I’m talking about.😉. There’s only one of you, and only one lifetime to carry out your responsibilities. The carrying out doesn’t have to be only by you. Delegate, delegate, delegate household responsibilities as far as is possible. Have open conversations with partners and family members about equitable division of labor. Seek external support through house helpers, chefs, etc. I now often say, having a home chef is starting to become a necessity and not a luxury, especially if you desire a healthy dietary lifestyle.
3. Operating from an Inauthentic Place
Authenticity in the workplace means that women 1.) have self-knowledge about what being a woman/female means, their powers, limitations, and values, and 2.) they can embody all that at work. This means one can either have a self-knowledge or an embodiment problem, or both. The first is an individual problem, the second is both an individual and an organizational problem.
Authentic leadership is something that makes for enhanced job performance, work engagement, and overall well-being.
I identify two related areas of inauthenticity where women leaders are involved:
3.1 Operating in High Masculinity
Traditional workplaces and societal gender expectations have conditioned, even pressured, women leaders to predominantly exhibit more masculine traits—such as assertiveness, competitiveness, and busyness—to fit in, be seen, and succeed as leaders. Women are not highly wired to operate this way, and this can lead to internal conflict and emotional exhaustion.
As such, authentic leadership is more challenging for women. They frequently find themselves navigating a delicate balance between authenticity and conformity to male-centric leadership models, which can be mentally taxing.
Women can learn to unearth and start to integrate feminine leadership traits—like empathy, intuition, and collaboration—into their leadership style unapologetically. Reconnecting with their natural design allows women leadership success that doesn’t sacrifice their identity. After all, studies are galore arguing the case for the effectiveness of soft skills, the feminine aspect of humans, in leadership.
3.2 Operating from a Place of Performance and Survival
Again, because of gender biases and societal expectations, women get into performance mode to meet those expectations. They also perform to prove their worth. In addition, because of trauma, especially gender-based in this context, one’s neurology gets wired to operate in fight, flight, or freeze (survival) mode – hence the busyness, competitiveness, low confidence, etc. All this at the expense of aligning with who they were truly created to be and accomplish, and therefore thriving.
The key to shifting from survival to thriving as a leader is realigning with self-identity and purpose as a woman, and deriving internal validation and a sense of agency and power from that, rather than external approval. Doing inner healing work, aligned leadership coaching, as well as practices like mindfulness and values-based goal setting, are all tools worth considering.
Conclusion
To conclude, women leaders face higher burnout rates because they’re navigating gender biases both at work and at home, which contribute to their suppressing their authentic, feminine leadership strengths so that they can be taken seriously. Over time, this constant performance mode—driven by survival rather than alignment—leads to emotional exhaustion and disconnection from self.
Dr. Shibu Selatole
Dr Shibu Selatole is a Femininity Mindset and Lifestyle Coach certified in NLP Life Transformation Coaching. She helps women leaders embrace their womanhood and femininity so they can attain harmonious success at work and at home. She firmly believes that it's unnatural and unhealthy for women to continue succeeding in hyper-masculine patriarchal ways, and that this is why they experience more burnout than men. She has 20 years of forensic pathology practice, holds an MBA(cum laude) and is an award-winning Head of Unit, also overseeing clinical governance in her province and training of residents. In her dreams, her memoir is titled ‘Renewal, Decaff & Dresses’.
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