Women, neurodivergent people, and the hidden work that’s still wearing them down
Burnout became one of the defining workplace words of the pandemic era, but the way we’ve talked about it has often been far too tidy.
People were exhausted, disengaged, leaving jobs, pulling back, or trying to function on whatever fumes were left in the tank. The conversation grew quickly, but a lot of it stayed on the surface. Burnout got framed as a personal well-being issue and then handed right back to individuals to solve with better boundaries, more rest, and the occasional reminder to log off. Because apparently, the problem was that people forgot how to close their laptops. If only it were that easy.
That framing was always too small.
A lot of people weren’t simply working too hard. They were carrying too much that should never have landed with them in the first place. Over time, that load showed up in their health, careers, energy, relationships, and their ability to keep doing what used to feel possible.
And no, that load wasn’t evenly distributed.
Women were carrying more. Neurodivergent people were carrying more. Caregivers were carrying more. People with health complexity, disability, or limited support were carrying more. The pandemic didn’t invent those fault lines, but it widened them, and many of them never narrowed again.
I’ve written before about how systems quietly offload labour, care, and coordination in women’s health. Burnout belongs in that same conversation. It looks different, but the mechanics are familiar.
We were never just “working from home”
There’s still a weird softness in the way people talk about those years, as though “working from home” was some kind of universal equalizer.
For many people, that isn’t what happened.
They were living at work.
Home became the office. The office became a school. Care became logistics. Health became admin. Rest became the thing people talked about doing someday, ideally after replying to just one more email.
Because so much of that labour happened quietly, it became very easy for organizations to keep pretending things were still functioning.
Technically, they were.
But only because people were privately absorbing the cost.
That’s the part burnout conversations still tend to skip over. Systems can look stable for a surprisingly long time when enough people are compensating in silence.
Women were carrying more than their job descriptions
The numbers back this up, but honestly, so did anyone paying attention in 2020.
In Deloitte’s 2022 Women @ Work report, 53% of women said their stress levels were higher than the year before, and nearly half said they felt burned out. That alone should’ve been treated as a structural warning sign, not a temporary HR issue.
The more current numbers tell a similar story. McKinsey and LeanIn’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that 60% of senior-level women reported frequent burnout, compared with 50% of senior-level men. For senior-level women who had been with their companies five years or less, the number jumped to 70%. Among senior-level Black women, it was nearly 8 in 10. (McKinsey)
That’s a labour distribution issue.
A lot of women weren’t only doing their jobs. They were also doing the planning, smoothing, remembering, caregiving, emotionally regulating, checking in, following up, and quietly making sure everything didn’t slide off the rails.
That labour doesn’t disappear just because it doesn’t show up on a performance plan.
The OECD’s 2025 policy brief on paid and unpaid work made the same point more politely: women still spend fewer hours in paid work and more hours in unpaid work, and those disparities continue to shape career progression, earnings, and long-term economic security. (OECD)
That’s where a lot of burnout conversations fall short. They isolate “work stress” as though people were burning out in a vacuum, rather than within a full ecosystem of demands.
A woman trying to keep up at work while also coordinating a household, caring for kids or parents, navigating healthcare, remembering every loose end, and staying vaguely functional is overloaded.
And when enough people are overloaded in the same direction, that points to a design problem.
Neurodivergent burnout tells a sharper truth
This is where the conversation gets even more honest.
For many neurodivergent people, burnout has never been just about volume. It has also been about friction.
Too much noise. Too much ambiguity. Too much context-switching. Too much self-monitoring. Too much pretending the environment is manageable when it absolutely is not.
That kind of strain doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it looks like someone who’s still showing up, still producing, still answering Slack messages, while internally operating at 4% battery and one vague meeting agenda away from spontaneous combustion.
Research on autistic burnout describes it as chronic exhaustion, reduced tolerance, and loss of skills or functioning after prolonged stress and unmet support needs. That definition still holds because it names something workplace language has largely failed to name. (Autism in Adulthood)
More recent workplace research is catching up. A 2025 review of neurodivergent women in software engineering pointed to a familiar combination of pressures: underdiagnosis, masking, gender bias, exclusion, and sustained invisible load, all of which increase stress and attrition risk. A study on autistic inclusion in software engineering found that clear role definitions, structured work environments, and inclusive collaboration practices were still treated as “supports” rather than basic design requirements. (arXiv)
That should be embarrassing for many workplaces.
For years, many neurodivergent people have been expected to function inside environments that are confusing, overstimulating, vague, socially coded, and somehow still very committed to calling themselves “high performance.”
And for those who’ve spent years masking, the cost was already there long before the pandemic. The pandemic just piled more on top of it.
More uncertainty. More disrupted routines. More invisible labour. More self-management. More environments built around “just be flexible,” which is a deeply irritating phrase when your brain is already doing unpaid overtime.
Many people weren’t really coping; they were just compensating. There’s a difference. And eventually, that compensation catches up with you.
There’s a very specific group of women hitting the wall right now
There’s also a very specific group of women who seem to be arriving at the same breaking point at the same time, and I don’t think we’re talking about that nearly enough.
A lot of Gen X women are now moving through some version of the same convergence: burnout, perimenopause or menopause, caregiving for aging parents, ongoing support for kids or young adult children, rising costs, work demands, and years of being the person who simply “handles things.”
That is a labour pileup.
And it helps explain why so many women in midlife seem less interested in being endlessly agreeable, endlessly available, or endlessly “grateful for the opportunity” than they were ten years ago.
A 2025 Mayo Clinic study found that women aged 45 to 60 who were providing family caregiving while also navigating menopause had nearly double the risk of moderate to severe menopause symptoms, with those providing 15 or more hours of care per week especially affected. (Mayo Clinic, PubMed)
That should set off every alarm in the workplace and the healthcare system.
A huge number of midlife women are trying to function through brain fog, poor sleep, mood disruption, physical symptoms, work pressure, elder care, family logistics, and a cultural expectation that they should still somehow be “holding it all together.”
That’s where a lot of the anger is coming from.
There’s also a kind of cumulative rage sitting underneath this that I don’t think we talk about enough. Not irrational anger. Not “women becoming difficult.” Just the very normal human response to realizing how much you’ve been expected to absorb while everyone around you kept calling it normal.
And honestly, the anger makes sense.
This is what happens when the same group of people keeps getting handed the admin, the care, the emotional regulation, the invisible planning, the family diplomacy, the workplace smoothing, the medical follow-up, and the social expectation to stay pleasant while doing all of it.
At some point, “resilient” starts to sound like an insult.
“Recovering perfectionism” isn’t always cute
There’s a version of this that gets laughed off at work as “recovering perfectionism.”
You’ve probably heard it in a meeting. Someone says it with a little self-aware smile, everyone chuckles, and then everyone moves on.
But what are we actually talking about there?
For a lot of women, perfectionism isn’t a quirky personality trait. It’s a survival strategy.
It can be the thing that kept you safe. Kept you useful. Kept you above criticism. Kept you indispensable. Kept you from being seen as emotional, difficult, unreliable, messy, hormonal, forgetful, distracted, dramatic, or not leadership material.
That doesn’t come out of nowhere.
And if you’ve spent decades being rewarded for over-functioning, hyper-vigilance, emotional self-management, and getting things right before anyone else notices they’re even on fire, it makes perfect sense that your body, brain, and patience would eventually have something to say about it.
Many women don’t need another lecture on resilience. And no, they don’t need another SSRI. You should reassess your ROIs. Because if your workplace, systems, or leadership model only functions because women are quietly overcompensating for what’s missing, that’s not resilience. That’s subsidy. And the people bearing the cost are growing weary of footing the bill.
The rates changed. The strain didn’t.
Some of the headline numbers have improved since the worst of the pandemic years. That’s true and worth acknowledging. However, the newer data indicates something more complex than just recovery.
A 2026 CNBC/SurveyMonkey poll found that 45% of women workers say they feel burned out from work, while Gallup’s Q4 2025 data, published in 2026, found that 31% of women say they very often or always feel burned out at work, compared with 23% of men. Gallup also found that women continue to report higher engagement and higher burnout at the same time, which is such a perfect summary of modern work, and it almost feels rude. (SurveyMonkey, Gallup)
That contradiction deserves more attention.
A lower burnout number can mean people are doing better. It can also mean people have already adapted by shrinking their ambitions, leaving the role, numbing out, or accepting a lower baseline for what life now feels like.
That’s not exactly a triumphant return to normal.
It’s also worth noting what’s happening around the edges of these numbers. Remote work is being rolled back, care costs remain high, job insecurity is rising, and many of the people who were already carrying the most are being asked to absorb yet another round of institutional “adjustment.” Time reported in 2025 that women’s workforce participation had already begun slipping again in some sectors as flexibility eroded and care burdens remained stubbornly one-sided. (Time)
That means this conversation is still current. It’s just become easier to normalize.
Burnout followed the fault lines
This is the part I believe we need to state more clearly. Burnout wasn’t accidental. It was a result of existing fault lines.
Gender. Caregiving. Disability. Neurodivergence. Health complexity. Class. Role expectations. Who had help. Who had to improvise. Who was expected to quietly absorb what the system couldn’t hold.
That’s why I keep returning to offloading. Because that’s what much of this has been.
When systems get strained, they don’t magically become more humane. They tend to preserve themselves by shifting the burden of complexity and care onto individuals and hoping no one notices.
And for a while, that can look like things are still working.
The meetings still happen. The deadlines still get met. The kid still gets picked up. The meds still get refilled. The project still launches. The inbox still gets answered. Everyone keeps smiling in a square on Zoom, like this is all very sustainable and fine.
But if the only reason any of that still occurs is because someone is privately bearing the cost, then no, the system is not functioning. It’s being subsidized by human depletion. And somehow that never appears in the quarterly report.
A more honest version of this conversation
A lot of people have not failed over the past several years. They overextended themselves to survive systems that kept demanding more adaptation, more flexibility, more care, more emotional labour, and more tolerance than any one person should’ve had to provide on their own. That’s what happens when too much gets handed to the same people for too long.
So yes, burnout deserves attention. Not because it became a trendy workplace word, but because it tells us something important about who was carrying the most, who got praised for “holding it together,” and who’s still paying for that now.
And if we want to talk honestly about burnout, we need to stop reducing it to a self-care problem with a branded water bottle solution.
We need to start asking harder questions about workload, care, labour, accommodation, and what organizations keep quietly treating as “personal.”
That’s the burnout story we’re still not telling.
Research and references
This piece was informed by a mix of research and reporting. A few of the key sources include:
- McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2025
- Deloitte, Women @ Work reporting (2022–2024)
- CNBC / SurveyMonkey, Women at Work 2026
- Gallup, Women Show Stronger Employee Engagement Amid Higher Burnout (2026)
- OECD, Gender gaps in paid and unpaid work persist (2025)
- Raymaker et al., “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout
- Mayo Clinic / PubMed research on caregiving and menopause symptom severity
- 2025 workplace research on neurodivergent women, masking, and invisible load in work environments
Related reading
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Women’s Health Isn’t Only Underfunded, It’s Being Offloaded
