The extra duties assumed during the pandemic by many women in the US are taking a belated toll on women in leadership positions. Exodus of Gen X women leaders is a setback for the decades-long effort to diversify corporate America’s top ranks.
The data alarmed employers and economists as the shock waves of the pandemic hit the US. Women were leaving their jobs in droves. By the end of 2020, their share of the labor force had fallen to its lowest level since 1987.
Two years later, the female participation rate is steadily returning to pre-pandemic levels, however, many senior-level women, exhausted and torn between their career ambitions and personal lives, are now bowing out. Some are switching to less demanding positions or changing industries, while others are giving up lucrative paychecks and simply walking away, raising troubling issues for the decades-long national effort to diversify the top ranks of corporations. Several recent studies have documented the same trend—which government data isn’t fully capturing.
Reshma Saujani, founder of groups that support female advancement including Girls Who Code, says working women are no longer willing to tolerate companies that don’t support them in their roles as mothers. The exodus of women in leadership roles “should really be a wake-up call for corporate America.”
A 2022 survey that McKinsey & Co. conducted for women’s advocacy group LeanIn.Org—started by Sheryl Sandberg, who in 2022 departed as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc.—found that women leaders were leaving companies at the highest rate since the groups began collecting data in 2017. “This is wildly problematic for organizations because women are still underrepresented,” says Rachel Thomas, LeanIn.Org’s chief executive officer. “So now companies are losing their few precious leaders on top of that.”
Besides Sandberg, the list of high-level resignations includes YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female leaders who also helped create Google’s advertising business. In the political arena, two of the world’s most formidable female leaders, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, surprisingly announced their resignations in recent weeks, both citing burnout.
Extra duties are taking a belated roll
Labor market experts say the extra duties assumed during the pandemic by many Gen X women—those born from 1965 to 1980—are taking a belated toll. The surprise is that data from the US Department of Labor showed women in that demographic were less likely to leave the workplace during the pandemic.
After decades of private and public efforts to move more women into top corporate roles, the departures threaten to shrink the pipeline that feeds the next generation of women into C-suite jobs.
Stress and exhaustion were the biggest problems women cited. More than half of female employees at the senior manager level and above said they were responsible for most or all of their family’s housework and child care, compared with 13% of men at the same level. Respondents said they also did more than male colleagues at work to support employee well-being and to foster diversity and inclusion, resulting in better retention and employee satisfaction. But such efforts often aren’t acknowledged in performance reviews.
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Source: Bloomberg / Jonnelle Marte