Chelese Perry, PCC, is Founder & CEO of The Chelese Perry Group and a longtime Chief Guide.
Six in ten senior-level women now report frequently feeling burned out, the highest level ever recorded by the McKinsey and LeanIn.Org Women in the Workplace study. That is 10 points higher than men at the same level. For the first time since the report began, women are less interested in promotion than men, and the gap is widest at the senior level. The cost of being at the top has become unsustainable for the people who have finally arrived there.
The usual burnout conversation focuses on workload, hours, and calendars. Rest more, delegate more, set better boundaries. Those things matter, but they do not explain why the gap widens precisely as women gain authority.
Somewhere in the last decade of her career, the senior woman leader became the regulator. Not officially. There was no announcement, no line item in the job description. But over time, they became the one their team looked to when the quarter went sideways, their board called when a director went rogue, their family checked in with when something felt off at home. They became the steadiness in the system. The person who absorbs volatility so that other people can keep performing.
In my coaching practice, this is the single most underestimated driver of burnout at the senior level.
The exhaustion these women are carrying is not just their own. It is the exhaustion their organizations would otherwise experience, absorbed quietly at their expense.
Researchers call the invisible part emotional labor. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology titled “Heavier Lies Her Crown” found that women leaders perform more of it than men in equivalent positions, and that this disparity is associated with greater exhaustion, chronic stress, and impaired well-being. They run two processes at once in every room: tracking the agenda and managing the relational weather of the people in it.
Consider what that regulation prevents: The meeting before the meeting, where they sense which executive is about to derail and reshape the conversation, so the derailment never happens. Steadying their voice on a hard call so the team stays calm. Keeping their expression neutral during a board update because the room is reading them for cues. The volatility their organization does not experience is the volatility they absorbed before it reached anyone else.
And these leaders go home, where the regulating continues. They are moving across three generations in a single evening. Their nervous system does not differentiate between steadying a direct report, a struggling teenager, and a parent who has just received a hard diagnosis. It registers another hour of carrying someone else.
One more layer deserves naming. Many women reaching senior leadership are also navigating perimenopause or menopause, a significant physiological shift occurring while they are still expected to be the steadiest person in every room. The capacity being asked of them is not what it was 10 years ago, and the expectations have not adjusted to meet that truth.
Senior women are not burning out because they are fragile. They are burning out because they are functioning as shock absorbers for institutions that have not built any other ones.
The teams are calmer, the boards are smoother, and the families hold together. None of that happens by accident, and none of it shows up on a performance review.
When their capacity finally erodes, the language used to describe it is almost always personal. They are tired. They need to rest. The framing returns the problem to their body, as if regulation were a private vulnerability rather than a function the institution had come to depend on.
The action that moves the needle starts with refusing that framing. Find one room in your life where you are not the steady one. Not all of them. One.
The room most senior women are missing is a peer one. Rooms full of equals thin out at this level. What is often missing is a circle of peers who do not need women leaders to be okay to be okay themselves. People who can hear that the quarter is hard, or the marriage is hard, or the elder care decision is hard, without requiring them to manage the impact of the disclosure on them.
In my coaching practice, this peer space is one of the clearest differentiators between women who sustain their leadership over decades and women who quietly burn out. The leaders who hold steady the longest tend to have at least one peer room where the regulating is shared rather than carried alone. The leaders who burn out, even the ones with excellent calendars and personal trainers, almost always lack this. They have mentors, direct reports, and boards. What they do not have is a room of equals who can hold steady for them when they cannot.
Sustainable performance for women at the top is not about doing less. The women I coach are looking to do their work for another seven, 10, or 15 years without losing themselves in the process. That requires telling the truth about what their work consists of. The strategy and the decisions, yes. And the steadying that the institution is not paying for and is not prepared to do without.
That is the burnout conversation I wish more senior women leaders were having. Not simply how to rest more, but how to stop being the only shock absorber in every system they enter and where to find the rooms that can hold steady for them.
