In 2025, a concerning pattern emerged across global workplaces: women began pulling back, not from purpose, but from promotion. Headlines framed it as an ambition gap. But when you look beneath the surface, it becomes clear this was never about a lack of drive.

It’s about depleted capacity. It’s about exhaustion. It’s about a lack of flexibility.

At the heart of the ambition gap sits a far more uncomfortable truth: a gender wellbeing gap.

The latest McKinsey and Lean.In.Org research, Women in the Workplace report, found that six in ten senior-level women report feeling frequently burned out, compared with around half of men in similar roles. That statistic isn’t just a warning sign. It’s an indictment of work systems that demand sustained output without supporting recovery, biology, or life beyond work.

The McKinsey report found that women are less interested in being promoted than men. Women are just as committed to their careers as men, but fewer are aspiring to senior roles, not because of a lack of ambition, but because the cost of progression has become too high.

Women aren’t disengaging. They’re exhausted. As I’ve said before, women are not okay.

Women Haven’t Just Leaned Out. They’ve Been Micro-shifting

A recent Women’s Agenda article finally put language around what many women have been doing quietly for years: micro-shifting.

Micro-shifting describes the invisible, strategic adjustments women make to keep work and life moving when rigid systems don’t bend, adjusting hours, compressing work into unconventional windows (often around childcare and caregiving obligations) and constantly recalibrating energy rather than time.

I’ve been micro-shifting since I had children. Doing a work shift (& a workout) from 4:30–6am. Picking things back up after school drop-off. Squeezing in focused work before school pick-up. Then returning again after the bed, bath and book routine.

That flexibility has been essential to sustaining both my career and my wellbeing. But there’s an elephant in the room: this has been possible because I’m self-employed.

That level of flexibility, autonomy and control over when and how work gets done is simply not available to most women in the corporate world and that’s exactly the issue.

Why Women Are Leaving the Workforce

Recent data from the United States makes this impossible to ignore and something we must examine in Australia to ensure we don’t replicate this trend.

In 2025, Forbes reported that 450 000 women exited the US workforce. When asked why, the most common reasons cited were caregiving responsibilities and the high cost and limited availability of childcare. Not lack of ambition. Not disengagement. Structural incompatibility.

This data mirrors what women have been signalling for years: when work systems collide with caregiving realities, and refuse to adapt, women don’t opt out of work. They opt out of unsustainable design. They lean out.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere. Australian research reveals that 72% of women experienced burnout in the past year, despite greater access to wellbeing initiatives. For many, those initiatives function like a band-aid, layered on top of long hours, constant digital connectivity and unrealistic expectations of availability.

This Isn’t an Ambition Problem. It’s a System Design Problem.

Women are stressed because they are stretched.

The Deloitte Women @ Work 2025 report found that around half of women described their mental health as good, four in 10 women say they feel able to switch off from work and 36% of women said their stress levels were higher than the year before..

They continue to carry the second shift: the invisible load of domestic labour, caregiving and emotional work (as well as a digital load now- read more here), alongside demanding professional roles. Add to this the biological realities women navigate across their lifespan: hormonal fluctuations that influence cognition, energy and emotional regulation, often colliding with peak career years. In my keynotes for women I often describe this as the “stress superstorm”.

Yet workplaces still expect everyone to perform as if biology, caregiving and recovery are irrelevant within systems and frameworks lacking flexibility.

So when women don’t see a path to progress without sacrificing their health or without alternatives to caregiving, they pull back, not from ambition, but from burnout.

We spent a decade telling women to “lean in.” Many are now asking: Lean in to what, exactly?

Rigid hours. Little support. Exhaustion. Chronic stress. Return-to-office mandates that value presence over performance.

This is the success tax, quietly paid by women who choose their wellbeing over promotions that come at too high a cost.

What the Data Really Tells Us

When women receive the same level of career support as men, sponsorship, flexibility and cultures that respect recovery, the ambition gap disappears.

Ambition isn’t declining. It’s waiting for better conditions.

What Needs to Change

This isn’t a call for unstructured flexibility or anything-goes remote work.

What we need is flexibility within a clear framework:

• clear expectations for hybrid and remote work arrangements (making the implicit, explicit)
• digital guardrails that protect focus, boundaries and recovery
• Clearly delineated ‘tech-spectations’ that articulate our often unspoken digital norms and practices
• leadership cultures that value trust and outcomes over control

For most knowledge workers, performance must be measured by outcomes delivered, not hours logged. Productivity is not a proxy for presence. Desk time is not a measure of impact.

Women have been adapting to make work work for years, quietly, creatively and often at personal cost.

The next phase of work requires organisations to do the adapting.

Because women aren’t broken. The system is.

When we close the wellbeing gap, the ambition gap takes care of itself.

If this conversation resonates, my 2026 International Women’s Day keynote goes deeper:

Powered-Up Women: Rebalancing Invisible Loads

A science-backed, systems-focused keynote exploring:

• why women are burning out, even when they “love” their work (we have a pronounced gender wellbeing gap that must be addressed)
• how invisible loads erode women’s capacity, performance and ambition
• What’s within women’s locus of control in terms of sustaining their performance and wellbeing in a digitally-intense, always-on world
• what leaders and organisations must redesign to keep women in the workforce and thriving

Because women don’t need more resilience.
They need better systems.

Refrences

Deloitte. (2024). Women at work: A global outlook.
https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/work/content/women-at-work-global-outlook.html

McKinsey & Company, & LeanIn.Org. (2025). Women in the workplace 2025.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace

Neely, A. (2025, November 28). A 2025 reality: Majority of women report burnout. Women’s Agenda.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/eds-blog/a-2025-reality-majority-of-women-report-burnout/

Women’s Agenda. (2025). The 2025 women’s ambition report.
https://womensagenda.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/The-2025-Womens-Ambition-Report-1.pdf

Women’s Agenda. (2026). Micro-shifting: The work revolution working women have been doing for years.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/soapbox/microshifting-the-work-revolution-working-women-have-been-doing-for-years/

USA Today. (2026, January 29). More women are leaving the workforce. Caregiving and childcare costs are key reasons.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/01/29/women-leaving-workforce-caregiving-responsibilities/88370584007/