How Women Can Avoid Work Burnout

By Gabrielle Karol

Symptom No. 1: You look forward to your mid-afternoon snack to break up your workday.

Symptom No. 2: You’re critical or impatient with your cubicle-mate.

Symptom No. 3: You feel like you should be working more efficiently at the office, and that there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Diagnosis? It could be a standard case of the good ol’ Monday blues … or you could be on the path to burnout.

Burnout is a psychological stress syndrome that occurs as a “response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job.” Besides feelings of excessive stress, burnout can ruin personal relationships and cause fatigue, insomnia, depression and anxiety.

What’s worse? It may be spreading through Gen Y women like wildfire.

What’s going on
Larissa Faw, a Forbes writer, claims that burnout among under-30 women is pandemic. Pointing to McKinsey research, she writes that while 53% of entry-level corporate jobs go to women, they make up only 37% of midmanagement and just 26% go on to become vice presidents and senior managers. Meanwhile, men are twice as likely to advance at every stage.

The culprit? Faw says that women may “have simply reached their breaking point after spending their childhoods developing well-rounded resumes.” Additionally, many women may have had unrealistic expectations about the working world, including the long hours demanded of them and the “day-to-day drudgery,” which may come as a shock after college.

To top it all off, working women are worse at caring for themselves, she says: Men are 25% more likely to take breaks during the day for personal activities and 35% more likely to take time solely for relaxation. They also go for walks and head out to lunch more often than their female colleagues.