Why High-Achieving Women Are Exhausted

Hello and welcome to all new subscribers from last week! You inspire me to write this newsletter. I try to reach back to as many people as possible. One of the people I spoke with is a high-achieving, successful, ambitious, smart woman. As an immigrant, she knows what it takes to get to where she is right now. And trust me, she has achieved A LOT. I’m seriously impressed. But she’s also taking care of her children, her elderly parents, the whole family, and quite honestly, it’s exhausting. She wanted a different point of view. I told her I wrote about this in my book—Chapter 2. I also told her that early beta readers- men, wise, smart people told me I should cut it.

I’m not going to. Because I’m tired of seeing women like her wondering what to do. Because telling you to meditate and breathe more doesn’t solve this problem, so here it is. I’ve written about this before. This is an updated version.

​

The 2025 Women in the Workplace report has an erasure problem. In 60 pages of body text analyzing women’s career trajectories across 124 companies and 9,500 employees, the word “childcare” appears zero times. “Eldercare” — zero times. “Parenting” — zero times. “Caregiving” appears once as a brief aside in a recruitment tactics section, noting that phrases like “work hard, play hard” may deter caregivers from applying. That’s it. When the report acknowledges that 25 percent of women who don’t want to be promoted cite “personal obligations” as the reason—versus 15 percent of comparable men—it uses that phrase exactly: “personal obligations.” No analysis. No context. No naming of what those obligations actually are.1

The report claims to diagnose women’s careers and argues that women “lack ambition.” Doing that without looking at the whole picture is a con. Their own data shows that women and men are equally ambitious. Young women under 30 are more ambitious than their male peers. Latinas are the most ambitious group in the entire dataset. And when women receive the same career support as men, the “ambition gap” completely disappears. As care economist Blessing Adesiyan puts it in her Substack, “The problem is not ambition. The problem is the absence of support.” The ambition gap is corporate speak for, We made no effort to accommodate half of the population, and then when we broke the system, we blamed women for it.2

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the invisible, unpaid work that women do after their “first shift” at the office ends the “second shift”. The report itself acknowledges that “women with partners were more than three times as likely as men with partners to be responsible for all or most housework.” For those partners of working women, unhustling means stepping up at home as an equal, conscious co-owner. The revolution starts in your kitchen before it reaches your office.

Teodora is a teacher. Past midnight on the last day of each school year, she’s already planning for next fall. She does this because she cares. But she’s also a mother, and she worries that caring this much will eventually make her bad at everything: a bad mom, a bad teacher, a bad friend to herself. “I’m a complete workaholic,” she told me. “I know I have good intentions. But I’m worried that I will burn out.”

Lonica, a lawyer, took the train to work every morning, passing Sing Sing prison in New York. One day, she caught herself thinking, “At least prisoners get three meals and a full night’s sleep.” She filed it away as a dark joke and then ignored that red flag for two more years before she finally left. When a maximum security prison starts to look like an upgrade, something has gone terribly wrong.

These are some of the women I’ve spoken with. We raised a generation of women to believe that if they checked every box and over-delivered, the system would rise to meet them. It never did. The fairytale had no architecture.

Women are leaving in massive numbers because the workplace doesn’t allow for people to have lives outside work. More than 455,000 women left the US workforce in the first eight months of 2025.3 Forty-two percent cited caregiving as the reason. They are taking their income and security into their hands. Women can’t function in a structure designed for someone with no caregiving responsibilities, a spouse handling the domestic load, and a body that will never be pregnant. Of course, it looks like women are leaning out instead of leaning in. But they are only opting out of a system that doesn’t work.

Women see burnt-out leaders with no support, who are penalized whenever they need flexibility. Senior-level women are experiencing the highest burnout in the study’s history. Women are being locked out of the tool that will define who thrives in the next wave. Only 21 percent of entry-level women are encouraged by their managers to use AI, versus 33 percent of men. So they’re not waiting. They’re opting out of a rigged game and opting in to take control of their income, life, and future. Female entrepreneurs are starting 49 percent of all new businesses — a 69 percent increase from 2019 to 2024.4 Women are not retreating from ambition. They’re relocating it.

In dual-income households, women perform 40 percent more housework than men and manage 71 percent of the mental load.5 If you’re a man reading this section, I’m not blaming you. I’m describing a system. I’m not a mother, but I’m still dealing with the household’s cognitive load. Phil is one of the most present, equal partners I know. He still operates inside the same system. We all do. If your partner is burnt out, consider helping more with the cognitive load.

I know a lot of smart women. Ambitious women. Successful women. Hard-working women. Women who can do it all.

But what I don’t see is more relaxed women. Women who have time. Women who can play. Women who can have leisure time without thinking of the next to-do. Women who prioritize themselves. More Unhustled women.

We need more of that.

​

I chose not to have children, in part because without family nearby to help and without adequate parental leave, I couldn’t see how to be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be. The math never worked for me personally. In Bulgaria, during communism, my mom had three years of paid maternity leave for my brother and three more for me, with her job guaranteed when she returned. The U.S. is the only rich nation without federally mandated paid maternity leave. When I spoke about this to a room packed with female leaders, the silence in the room was deafening. Every woman in that room had done her own version of that math.

We’re running a 21st-century economy on a 1950s operating system designed for households with stay-at-home wives. The operating system is obsolete. But we keep running it anyway. It’s not that we don’t know that the way we’re working isn’t working. It’s that we refuse to do something about it. The business case for change is documented, repeated, and ignored. Companies with gender-balanced leadership are 20 percent more likely to report improved business outcomes, yet only 7 percent have a female CEO.6

Organizations grind employees into impossible schedules, then offer yoga classes and meditation apps rather than reducing work hours or giving people more flexibility. The message at the top is clear:

We know this system destroys people. We regret what it does. But we’re not going to change it.

When leadership acknowledges the damage but refuses to redesign the work itself, they’re telling you that your burnout is a feature, not a bug. Wellbeing isn’t a personal problem with personal solutions. It’s a systemic problem that will require systemic redesign.

For some men, the grind culture message is to work hard and succeed. For white women: work hard, do the second shift at home, and maybe succeed. For Black women, immigrants, and people of color: work harder than everyone else and prove yourself repeatedly, manage both gender and racial stereotypes, make everyone comfortable with your presence, and even then, negotiate for what others are given.

One of the people I interviewed on the Unhustle podcast is Deborah Smith Pegues — an author of 18 books, an MBA, and a former Fortune 500 VP who paid her way through college by cleaning houses. Early in her publishing career, she told her publisher not to put her photo on her books. “We don’t want anybody to know I’m Black,” she told them. “I have a French last name.” She sold over 2 million copies that way. Her newest book has her face on the cover — a decision she describes as a mindset breakthrough. But the fact that it took a breakthrough at all is the point. When excellence requires camouflage, the system isn’t rewarding merit. It’s rewarding conformity. This is the compound tax—the invisible markup to play a game that others enter for free.

As a first-generation immigrant, I’ve experienced the compound tax more than once during my career. The pressure is double. I had to prove my value over and over. I’ve been asked if I speak English at a public meeting after I earned my MBA and spoke on stages. I had to prove my value to earn the same salary as the person who held the position before me. What carried me was tenacity. Immigrant grit.

This isn’t just a woman’s issue. A system that spends one sentence on caregiving will eventually minimize everyone’s humanity. We need to design work that is humane, fair, and works for modern lives.

I hope we find solutions fast.

​

1. Derek Thompson left me wondering this morning over coffee. He had a conversation with Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago professor, about her new theory, “the uni-context.” The Uni-Context Explains … Why Everyone Talks About How Everything Sucks All the Time. It also explains why identity has become more important than character, status anxiety, comparison, moneyball, and the marketization of everything. If that interests you, check it out here.

​

2. Cross-pollination as a psychological strategy to get unstuck - to think and feel better, we need people outside our usual circle. Written by my friend and respected person in the field Jeffrey Davis.

• Certain biases can keep us from solving problems in fresh ways.

• Certain conditions with diverse groups can strengthen collaboration and creative insight.

• Deliberately seeking ideas outside your field can refresh creative thinking and broaden perspective.

This is partly why I started the Unhustle Collective, a local business community where I live. I see a real need for in-person gatherings, old school, you may call it, where we can exchange ideas, learn, connect, and walk away inspired. If you’d be interested in reviving the Unhustle Collective online let me know. Community and collaboration are the last principle in my book. Speaking of, I have to go back and finish the I-lost-count-which-edit-version-I-on-now. Even my computer has had enough and crashed this week. But I opened my old Mac and kept going.

Talk next week.

Milena

P.S. If you are a single man raising a family while working full-time, this applies to you too.

Sources: