I don’t think women are leaving the workforce because we’ve suddenly become less ambitious.
I think we’re finally becoming less willing to disappear.
Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped having careers and started becoming them. We introduced ourselves by our titles before our names. We measured our worth by promotions, performance reviews, bonus checks, and the size of the teams we led. We wore exhaustion like a badge of honor because somewhere, someone convinced us that if we weren’t running on fumes, we simply weren’t trying hard enough.
I know because I lived it.
For twenty-five years my career wasn’t something I did. It was who I was. Nurse. Executive. CEO. Regional Vice President. Healthcare leader. Problem solver. Crisis manager. I was the one everyone called when something was on fire, and there was almost always something on fire. I loved the work. I loved building teams. I loved helping people. I loved proving that a young woman with grit and an MBA earned at twenty-four years old belonged at the executive table.
But somewhere between opening hospitals, leading through a global pandemic, raising my son, surviving a divorce, caring for aging parents, trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good boss, and somehow remembering to schedule my own mammogram, I slowly disappeared into the role. Like completely!
I actually shared a story in my book about being mid mammogram, as in boob pancake in process, and answering a work call on my Apple watch! Boundaries much? I wasn’t Allie anymore, I was was CEO.
The scary part is I didn’t even notice it happening and in that, I don’t think I’m alone.
For years we’ve heard conversations about “The Great Resignation,” but I wonder if we’re missing an entirely different story unfolding underneath it. Women aren’t simply resigning from jobs. Many are quietly resigning from lives that required them to be everything for everyone while leaving almost nothing for themselves.
The numbers should make all of us stop and pay attention.
According to Deloitte’s 2025 Women @ Work report, only about half of working women describe their mental health as good, more than one in three say their stress levels are higher than they were just a year ago, and only five percent expect to remain with their current employer for more than five years. Nearly one in four women reported dealing with health challenges related to menstruation, fertility, or menopause, often while continuing to work through significant pain because they feared being judged or overlooked if they spoke up. (Deloitte)
Think about that for a minute.
We have spent decades encouraging women to climb the corporate ladder, and just as many of us finally reach the upper rungs, our bodies decide to rewrite the rules.
It’s almost laughably unfair.
The years when women are most likely to step into executive leadership—our forties and fifties—often coincide with perimenopause and menopause. The season of life when our resumes are finally overflowing with wisdom and experience is also the season when sleep becomes optional, anxiety shows up uninvited, brain fog convinces us we’ve forgotten our own phone number, hormones seem to stage a daily mutiny, and our emotional bandwidth feels stretched thinner than it ever has before.
Meanwhile, life doesn’t politely pause while we figure it out.
Our children still need us. Our parents begin needing us in entirely new ways. Some of us are navigating divorce. Others are supporting aging spouses or grieving losses nobody at work even knows about. We’re still expected to mentor younger employees, manage impossible budgets, answer emails at ten o’clock at night, remember everyone’s birthdays, volunteer for the school fundraiser, check on our girlfriends after their surgery, and somehow arrive Monday morning looking polished and grateful for the opportunity. No wonder we’re tired.
What’s remarkable isn’t that women are walking away. It’s that so many stayed as long as they did.
The irony is that many of the very qualities that made us successful professionally are the same qualities that slowly consumed us personally. We over-function. We anticipate needs before anyone asks. We solve problems before they’re noticed. We smooth over conflict. We carry emotional loads nobody sees. We become indispensable everywhere we go. Until one day we wake up and realize we’ve become indispensable to everyone except ourselves.
As a healthcare executive, I spent years talking about burnout. I looked at engagement surveys. Retention dashboards. Vacancy reports. Turnover percentages. We discussed resilience as though it were an unlimited natural resource. Looking back now, I realize we rarely asked the more uncomfortable question.
Resilient for what? Resilient enough to continue sacrificing ourselves? Resilient enough to ignore our own health? Resilient enough to keep producing while slowly disappearing?
Somewhere we confused resilience with self-abandonment. And women are beginning to reject that bargain.
McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research shows that although women have made gains in leadership over the past decade, the climb remains uneven. Women now occupy 29 percent of C-suite roles—up from 17 percent ten years ago—but the pipeline remains broken much earlier in careers, and women continue facing disproportionate barriers while carrying far greater responsibilities outside of work. (McKinsey & Company)
We’ve celebrated getting women to the table. We haven’t spent nearly enough time asking whether the table itself is worth sitting at.
I don’t believe this is a story about women losing ambition. If anything, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think we’re becoming ambitious about different things.
Peace. Health. Presence. Freedom. Our children remembering that we looked up from our phones. Our relationships surviving our careers. Sleeping through the night. Laughing again. Knowing who we are outside of our email signature.
I can vividly remember leaving one of my hospitals after a particularly grueling, 14-hour day, driving home in silence, realizing I hadn’t eaten, hadn’t called a friend back in weeks, and couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something simply because Allie wanted to. Then snapping out of it when I pulled into the garage because I was home and now I was fully needed here.
For me, getting fired was devastating. It was humiliating. It shattered an identity I’d spent decades building. But as painful as it was, it forced me to ask a question I probably never would have asked otherwise. If they can take away my title, who am I? .
That question changed my life. Because the answer wasn’t CEO. It wasn’t executive. It wasn’t healthcare leader. Those were roles I played. Important ones. Meaningful ones. Ones I am incredibly proud of and grateful to have had. But they were never supposed to become me.
Maybe that’s what this season represents for so many women. Not an exodus from work, but an awakening. A quiet refusal to continue measuring our value exclusively by productivity. A recognition that careers should support our lives—not consume them. That our worth doesn’t rise and fall with a promotion, a performance review, or the words printed on a business card.
Maybe women aren’t walking away because they’ve given up. Maybe they’re finally choosing themselves. And perhaps that’s not the beginning of the end.
Maybe it’s the beginning of finally coming home to who we were before the world convinced us that being everything to everyone else was the same thing as success.
