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Key points
- High achievement culture, paired with having to constantly prove oneself, can lead to burnout and mental health problems for women.
- Women often have to choose between career advancement and their mental health, creating a new set of decisions.
- Organizations can better retain high-potential women by increasing awareness and understanding of mental health conditions and stigma.
This post is part of my subseries on how organizations can transform leadership development for women, as described through the eyes of women’s lived experiences and where gaps remain.
In this post, I explore the intersectionality of gender and mental health for women in leadership, through the eyes of Ashley Rector, founder of Harness, a magazine that shared stories of women from around the world and of Quimby Digital (Quimby means the estate of women), a digital marketing agency.
Four years ago, Ashley was a corporate attorney on the fast track, aiming to be promoted to senior counsel. However, she was also launching her passion-project/side hustle magazine, Harness.
She recalls:
“I'm a high achiever. I was a very young attorney who was trying to get promoted, and so I was constantly trying to prove my value: showing that my work is good, I can provide quality insights, helping to run the east region of a portfolio, and whenever I heard other departments having problems, I was trying to help them in ways that probably weren't my responsibility. And then launching the magazine on nights and weekends. I didn't prioritize my own mental health. There was virtually no self-care and I didn't see a problem with that at the time.”
This experience is typical of many young high-achievers. However, one thing that we see high-achieving women do more than men is to spend more of their time supporting employee wellbeing, such as tending to the DEI and communication work needed to create positive workplaces. These activities are rarely recognized or rewarded and lead to higher rates of burnout among women in those situations.
Over time, Ashley started noticing concerning signs about the impact on her mental health:
“I would wake up in the morning and I had been clenching my fists as tight as they could be all night long. I was having chest pains and not even knowing that it was a panic attack. I didn't want to give up the side hustle because it was giving me life and making me feel more connected. But my body was giving me all these signs to slow down. My brain snapped one day, and that's how I woke up: I felt hopeless, I couldn't eat, I had really bad intrusive thoughts. It went on for days. I was scared of myself. I was scared of my own thoughts. I was crying all the time. And finally, I went to the hospital and they admitted me. I was there for three to four days. When I got out, it was like starting over again. And it totally changed the trajectory of everything I wanted to do.”
Women learn early on that it's important to be visible and to be recognized and valued for our work. Young women, in particular, have higher aspirations than ever before. They want to be considered for opportunities and will work hard to demonstrate their worth. In fact, women often have to work harder to prove their promotion potential than men do despite outperforming men, on average, on current performance ratings.
This level of effort is not sustainable. Women are more likely to burn out, and, in Ashley’s case, the combination of working harder to prove herself at work while also pursuing a passion project was not sustainable for her mental health.
Women in this situation then experience a new set of decisions:
Do they share their experience and risk the negative judgment associated with mental health and promotability?
Do they choose to access their employee benefits to help themselves recover?
Do they choose to forego getting employee benefits, such as time off, for fear of losing career options?
For Ashley, she chose to access her benefits. She wonders whether it ultimately had negative consequences for her career outcomes.
“I remember being scared to tell my boss that I need to take FMLA. I really needed to ease back into work. And I remember wondering, ‘Can I take FMLA for clinical depression? Is that even covered? Who do I ask? Do I ask Human Resources here? If I go to Human Resources, everybody's going to know. How are people going to look at me?’ Because the Human Resources department at this company had this reputation for things getting out in the company, nothing was truly private. I decided I that I needed to prioritize myself. Luckily, I had a boss who was very understanding because his daughter struggled with mental health issues. I was able to get approval to integrate slowly back into the workforce. But I never was promoted to senior counsel. I don't know if that had an impact and never will.
Later that year, I became pregnant and had a son who was born early with a congenital heart defect that required heart surgery. While he is fine now, he gets sick a lot which requires me to take time off. All this led me to starting my own business. The flexibility that I needed just didn't exist in the corporate world.”
What can we learn from this experience?
How can organizations do better to retain high-achieving, high-potential women?
- Provide better mentorship. If Ashley had mentors who could identify when she was pushing herself too hard without sufficient positive reward, while helping her create a manageable promotion plan, it’s possible she may have found a good way to balance her energies (both at work and outside of work).
- Increase HR and leadership awareness of mental health conditions and stigma. Ashley’s worries were not unfounded. When people see their HR professionals sharing private health information, or a company's leaders negatively judge someone’s potential based on disability (including mental health), employees are understandably worried about seeking help, which could make their condition worse. (Note that discriminating based on disability status and sharing private health information also put a company at risk of being sued for violation of employee rights.)
- Offer routine well-being check-ins. Managers can check in with employees and see how they are doing. Companies can offer broad programs. Ashley shared that she does “monthly mental health checks” with her employees simply asking how they are doing and what they need.
- Offer flexibility. For example, Ashley shared that she doesn’t require her employees to clock in. “Just get the job done. If they are having a bad day on Monday they can say I’m feeling unwell, I will complete this tomorrow. I’m trying to make sure that everyone's feeling heard and valued.” While not all companies can work in this way, McKinsey’s 2022 survey of Women in the Workplace revealed that "Women leaders are significantly more likely than men leaders to leave their jobs because they want more flexibility or because they want to work for a company that is more committed to employee well-being and diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and, “A vast majority of women prefer remote or hybrid work to being fully on-site.”
- Review benefits available to employees related to childcare, pregnancy, and mental health. Ashley described her ideal set of benefits: “In an ideal world, employee benefits would include salary covering six months to a year in maternity leave to help parents ease back in, a monthly mental health benefit or access to counselors when they need it, and fertility treatment coverage.” This could look different by company, but most importantly, it would be helpful to hear directly from women in leadership what they would need to stay with the company.
