Why Women Are Leaving Corporate in Record Numbers

Women are leaving corporate in record numbers.

And they're not leaving to slow down. They're leaving to build something on their own terms.

I spent 18 years in corporate, the last 8 at Adobe, before I walked away from a tech salary to build something of my own. And I see this same story play out with the women I work with every single week.

Women are starting businesses at unprecedented rates, burnout among women leaders continues to rise, and more women than ever are questioning whether the traditional corporate path is still worth the cost.

In this episode I go past the surface-level conversation about burnout and flexibility and into the real root: the system itself. What it was built on. What it's become. And what it's quietly costing everyone, including the companies losing these women every single day.

Here's what we get into:

• The numbers behind the mass exodus of women from corporate
• Why this isn't a women's problem, it's a systems problem
• How the corporate structure was built by men, for men, and what that still costs us
• The way technology and modern pace have amplified all of it to unsustainable levels, for men too
• What it's costing corporate America in real dollars
• The honest tension I hold: wanting more women in leadership and refusing to tell women to stay in a system that's breaking them

This isn't about choosing a side. It's about knowing your worth and refusing to spend it somewhere that doesn't honor it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Let's face it, you can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're carrying way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome to the Live Lighter Podcast. I am your host, Jessica Berg, and today we are going to be talking about a topic that I am extremely passionate about, and it's why women are leaving corporate in record numbers and how the system is what's actually inspiring them to leave. This is a personal topic for me, and it's one that is consistently showing up in my direct messages on LinkedIn or just in discussions with women while I'm networking. And for me personally, it is a topic that needs to be talked more loudly, more often, for us to be able to see the change that we really want to see. Now, I personally spent 18 years in corporate. The last eight years of my time at corporate was at Adobe, and before that was digital agencies. And I built a career I was truly proud of. I climbed, I achieved, I got promoted, I got recognized, I showed up, and I sacrificed. And I burned out multiple times. And I felt the pressure to prove myself at 200% as a woman in a male-dominated world because tech is predominantly male. I remember towards the end of my career at Adobe, I was on the Nike account and it was an executive call. And it was myself, and we had the SVP of product and engineering, her direct reports. There were two women, one on product, one on engineering. We had on the client side on the Nike account, we had the VP of global marketing, the VP of technology, and our SVP, her name was Anjole. I remember she said, This is the first time I have been on an executive call and it is all women. And it was really incredible. Every box on that Zoom screen was women. However, there's a lot of women, a lot of us, myself included, who are choosing to leave. Now, for me, my experience in corporate, it was a roller coaster. There was some good times, right? But I would say for the most part, it was high stress autopilot. And I remember I would wake up in the mornings, and for the first minute that I fluttered my eyes open, maybe even the first 10, 30 seconds, it was just pure bliss and it was peaceful. And then the reality of the day that I was about to step into came flooding into my system. And all of a sudden, the cortisol started ripping through my body. It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. And that's how I went through the day. I missed snuggles with kids. I may have been physically next to them, but mentally I was thinking about emails, presentations I had coming up, or fire drills at work that I was trying to extinguish. And I was constantly chained to my desk for 10 hours a day, sometimes with a towel still on my head, because I didn't have time to actually do my hair or put makeup on. I would just opt out of being on video for Zoom, or I was shoving food down my throat as I was in back-to-back calls. My mental, physical, and emotional well-being was suffering. It was fractured and I was hanging by a thread. And I remember in 2018, right after my daughter was born, my second child, a seed of curiosity was planted deep inside of me where I was feeling that pain. I was feeling that discomfort in how I was moving through my days and that this wasn't how I wanted my life to be lived. This wasn't how I wanted to experience the time I had on this earth. And that seed of curiosity was planted within me of this could look different. What if this looked different? I didn't know what that would look like, but the seed was planted. And then in 2024, I walked away from a base salary of 250K, launched my coaching business, and I've never looked back. Now I am not alone in this. Women are leaving corporate in record numbers. Not to slow down, not to retreat away and just go and sleep away the day, not to just be quiet and relax. They are leaving to go build something on their own terms. I have a number of clients, I would say 90% of my clients ended up leaving the position that they were in. And 75% of my clients ended up leaving corporate as a whole. There's a number of women that are feeling that pain, that are feeling that pull to leave. And that's what I want to talk about today. Why so many women are fed up with the corporate system and are choosing to go off on their own. And I don't want to just discuss the surface level why. We'll talk about the burnout. We'll talk about the pull for flexibility and autonomy and the work-life balance conversation. And I want to go deeper than that. I want to talk about the system itself, what it was built on, what it has become, and what it is costing absolutely everyone, including the companies that are losing these women every single day. Now, I also want to be brutally honest in the fact that I hold this topic with real tension inside of me. It's a bit of a dichotomy that I'm living with. Because on one hand, I truly, truly, deep in my heart, want to see more women in corporate leadership. I genuinely believe that the world needs women's energy, women's wisdom, women's values in those corporate rooms, at those corporate tables, making those corporate decisions, shaping those corporate cultures, not just for the women, but for the men and for corporate as a whole. And on the other hand, I want women to take aligned action, to lean into the pull that they have deep inside, just like I did, where they're making an impact and feeling fulfilled at the level that they dreamed it could be, because it is possible I am proof, and so many other women that I know and support are proof as well. So both of these things are true. So I want to start with the numbers because the numbers tell a story that is impossible to ignore. And when I say these out loud, you will probably start to feel these in your system. And I love data, data doesn't lie, data is very inspiring. And granted, you can slice and dice data to tell any story you want. But for the sake of this episode, I'm going to share these data points and you interpret it as you may. So according to a 2024 survey by Gusto, a small business platform that tracks new business information, what they found is that 49% of new businesses registered in 2023 were started by women, up from 29% in 2019. In just four years, female entrepreneurship has increased by 69%. So just let those numbers land in your system for a little bit. It's just further proof that women are leaving these corporate systems, myself included, and they're going off and they're building something new. That is not a blip, that is not a trend, that is truly a movement that is happening within our culture. And here's another stat I want to share with you because these are not small projects. These are women who now own 13.8 million businesses in the United States. And those businesses employ 10 million workers and they generate $3.9 trillion in revenue. Over 1,800 new women-owned businesses are created every single day. Every freaking day, 1,800 businesses owned by women are created. What? That's amazing. And shocking and telling about a system that needs to change. And the women that are walking out, they are the top performers in the workforce. They're the ones who are driven, who are ambitious, who have been building their career for decades and just got tired of it. They're the ones who sat in the rooms, made the decisions, carried the weight, and they walked out. Now, why are these highly capable, highly successful, highly talented women walking out of this corporate system? Mackenzie did a very famous report. It was called Lean In and McKenzie's Women in the Workplace report. And it was the largest study that was ever conducted on the state of women in corporate America. And what they found was that 43% of women leaders are burned out from management responsibilities and unsustainable workloads. And at the very top, the very top of organizations, there is one in four women CEOs who leave their post within a matter of years, which is twice the rate of men because women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rate ever recorded. They're either fed up with a system that's not giving them the life that they know that they want to be living, or they're fed up with the system not respecting them and giving them the equality that they know they are deserving of. So something is very, very wrong with how things are going today, not in the women and the choices they're making, but in the system as a whole. So this is not a gender war. This is not women versus men. This is not about women ruling the world and men taking a backseat because men are suffering inside the system too. And we are going to talk about that. This is truly a system problem. First and foremost, it was built by men for men. Full stop. The corporate structure as we know it today was designed for a very specific era. All of it was designed around a person who had no caregiving responsibilities, no domestic load, no competing demands outside of the office, someone who could actually give everything to the job because someone else was giving everything at the home. Now, this is impacting men and women because not only are women no longer only the caregivers at home, they're also in the workforce building the career. And it's impacting men because men are being held more accountable at home and they want to have more of a role at home as well. So this is something that our culture has shifted, how we function as a family and the requirements and where we are putting our priority and where we want to spend our time as human beings has shifted. But the way in which the system was built was rooted in this past era and how things were done before. And what we have seen is as the pace of the world has ramped up significantly with technology and God, with AI, it's at an alarming rate. We have taken that masculine energy that the system is built around, that the system was born into, and it has been amplified so much that we are now operating. The system is now running in this wounded masculine energy. So you have this productivity, proving, performing, protecting, pushing more, faster, bigger. Win at all costs. Never show weakness, never slow down, never admit you're struggling. Scarcity is everywhere. Protect what you have. Power is the currency. Accumulate it or lose it. This is all wounded masculine energy, and it is the heartbeat of our corporate society as a whole. And it has been running like this for decades. Now I want to be clear that I am not saying masculine energy is bad. We need masculine energy. We need the structure. We need the action. We need the outcomes. We need the forward movement and we need the feminine energy where we need the connection. We need the flow. We need the ease. We need the presence. So when we are wounded, when we're operating in this wounded space, that's when we're operating from fear and scarcity rather than abundance. When we're operating from control rather than trust. And this is what got baked into the system as a whole is this wounded masculine energy. Pace is no longer just fast. It's absolutely relentless. There is literally no switching off. There is no boundary between work and life because work lives in your pocket. The demands do not stop when you leave the office because the office comes with you. Maybe your office is at your home. Mine is. There is always another email, another Slack message, another notification, another thing asking for our attention right now. And like I said earlier, this is not just a women's problem because men are suffering too. What we're seeing in the data is that the burnout rates across both men and women are rising. Mental health challenges are increasing across both genders. The great resignation was not a woman's movement. It was a human movement. And the reality is that people across the board are hitting up against walls that they didn't know exist and they asking for the very first time, is this really what life is supposed to feel like? Because I'm not feeling it. I am so stressed. Cortisol is ripping through my body so fast, so often, that I am numb to my feelings. I am numb to my life. And I'm on autopilot. I'm just waking up, going through the movements of the day and going to bed. And is this the life I wanted to be living? Is this what it's supposed to look like? A lot of us are starting to have the courage to ask that question. And it's the women, from what I have seen, who are answering that question with a resounding no. This isn't what it's supposed to look like. And I'm going to do something about it because I believe in myself and I know there's got to be a better way. So the other component of this is there's not just a cost to the human element of how the system has been operating. These people who are choosing to leave the system, many of them women, is also becoming a cost to the organization as a whole. It's becoming a bit of a business crisis and the numbers are really staggering. In 2023, US companies spent nearly $900 billion replacing employees who quit. 900 billion. That is insane. And the reason for that is because every time someone leaves, it costs the company about 33% of that employee's base salary to replace them. So if you have a woman who's earning, let's say, $150,000 a year, right? The cost of that company to replace her is going to be roughly around $50,000. And that's before you take into account the institutional knowledge that she's taking with her, her history on the work that she's been a part of and having to ramp that new person up to the levels of the person that just left. That in and of itself can take years. And here is one of the most eye-opening parts of all of this is that 70% of the women who started businesses cited flexibility as their top motivator. It was not money, it was not ambition, it was flexibility. They wanted more autonomy. This is my personal opinion. The silver lining of COVID is that it got all of us off the hamster wheel of corporate. All of us got shaken up, we were thrown off the treadmill, and we were forced to put our work on hold and put our life first. And a lot of us are coming out of that saying, I actually want to build a life that holds both my professional greatness and my human reality at the same time. I don't want it to be at this or. I want it to be at this and. And a lot of us are realizing that that is possible. It is. Sometimes not within the system itself, though. So in order for people to stop leaving the system, the system is going to have to change. It's going to have to require more flexibility, more autonomy, and more of that balance of letting people actually be human beings and live their life versus being these machines always on producing and burning out. And this is where my point of contention is because I want women in corporate leadership. I want to see more women at the tables. I want to see more Zoom calls where the majority of boxes are women, where that's not such a crazy anomaly that happens once in 18 years. I want that to happen a little bit more frequently. And I want that because I truly believe that when women lead, they lead from their full selves, they lead from their heart, they lead from a full range of intelligence and empathy and vision and courage. And as a result, organizations benefit tenfold from that. They become more humane, more creative, more sustainable, more effective, and the world gets better. And I believe that. So what can we do about this, right? I do believe that the more we have these conversations, the more we are talking out loud about this, the more that the data is supporting the storyline, that we will start to see the shifts. I'm very hopeful of that. And I do believe that the more women that step into leadership boldly as themselves will start to see a new way to lead, a new way to be successful within these corporate systems. Things will naturally shift and it will be decades before things get to where we want it to be. But bit by bit we will see change. So if you are a woman who is within the system and it's not working for you, first and foremost, ask yourself, what can I do to make it work for me? Where am I trying to force myself to fit in? Where am I trying to feel like I need to be accepted in order to advance in my career? That I need to fit into this mold, wear this outfit, sound like this, be forceful, not listen to my heart, not listen to my intuition in order for me to advance my career. So where am I allowing myself to shrink? Where am I allowing myself to be dictated on how I'm supposed to be showing up when it's really me? I get to be the one to choose that. And if you are a leader within the corporate systems that wants to stay within the corporate systems, my invitation to you is to create that impact and change and to see that there is top talent that is walking out of your walls and they are going off to build something new because it supports the life that they want to be living, that we are human beings, we are not machines. So as we close out today, I do want to say something directly to the woman that is listening to this. Because wherever you are, whether you are still inside the system, grinding and wondering how much longer you can sustain it, or whether you are in the middle of making the decision I made, which is to leave, or whether you have already left and are building something new and beautiful and some days is absolutely exhilarating and it lights you up, and then other days it's terrifying and it's pushing you past your edge of comfort. Wherever you are, this is not about choosing a side. It is not about corporate being bad and entrepreneurship being good. It is about knowing your worth, knowing what you are made of, and refusing with everything that you have to spend it in a place that does not honor it. You are not the problem. You never were. The world needs women leadership. The question is whether corporate will create the conditions to keep them. Thank you so much for being here today. If this episode resonated, please share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it. You can like, subscribe, and until next time, be well. All right, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessberg Coaching.com. That's J E S S V E R G C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.