Why Women Leave (their workplace)
“Sometimes it feels like a bomb has been dropped on our entire generation and everyone’s just lost.”
The quote is from my LinkedIn chat to a friend the other day, spurred by our conversation around trying to navigate a job as freelancer in a tight economy and whether to go back into a corporate job – but I found that it actually spoke more deeply than to this specific situation. Over the past months a feeling has been growing and enhancing this statement, as more and more women I speak to express the need to do something different. Women around 40 who are not exactly sure of what or why, but who has a deep sense that something is no longer right with the world – nor the way we live in it.
Part of it might be spurred by the sheer magnitude of chaos around the world and propelled directly at you from media at any given time. Wars, gun shootings, political drama, climate change, and children not thriving – and then we’re just supposed to go about our day, go to work and keep spending hours on more or less meaningful tasks in an office building in front of a computer. But the overwhelm of current world orders does not fully account for the deeper sense of change. For so long we’ve been lured by the promise of bigger and better. A paradigm which requires more energy than most of us have to spare and one that crashes to the ground as you find out that your prospects are not endless and that certainly bigger and better does not necessarily equal happier or more fulfilling. What if it could be done differently?
The women I encounter are starting to question the fundamental structures of our professional lives. Of companies. Questioning the hierarchies, the bullshit bingo, the hours upon hours spent on preparing slides for Board presentations, only for their suggestions to be dismissed because someone “personally doesn’t believe it in”. If the content of those slides even gets properly discussed, rather than set aside for a 10-minute courtesy presentation.
They are questioning why we are playing all this theatre in the workplace. Why we’re not having the real conversations and why everything needs to be wrapped in ego-driven and waste-of-time check-ups and steering committees. Why we are tiptoeing around political agendas and suits rather than rolling up our sleeves, getting shit done and go home. Just because we don’t want to participate in the traditional way of being in the corporate world it doesn’t mean that we’re void of ambition.
Leaving room to live full lives that are multi-facetted and where ambition can exist not only in the office but across many areas. Bad-ass moms, resilient gardeners, proud volunteers, great community builders, strong runners, sound financial investors, good friends and compassionate leaders or employees. Is it asking too much? Or did we finally get to a time where the need to be living a full life as a whole human being is stronger than the structures we’ve been living in so far? A tipping point?
All the thinking made me reflect on my own career in corporate. 12 years in Danish food tech, the final many years as a leader, ending as a senior director with 4 departments under me, responsible for managing the innovation portfolio and driving the R&D strategy tracks. And I don’t recall anyone ever asking me what would make me stay with the company in the long run. I completed countless employee satisfaction surveys, but never was I invited to a round-table discussing how the organisation would future-proof itself to be an attractive workplace for women and female leaders. But I spent many years trying to fit in, assuming what some would call a bulldog attitude in unknowingly trying to replicate the male leaders above me. Until I couldn’t see the benefit or purpose any longer…
While I myself have left corporate to work as an independent (admittedly – I still work for corporate as a freelancer, but run my own show), I know that I did not exactly constitute a representative study population to explore my hypothesis. So, it was my luck that in 2023 Encompass Equality surveyed nearly 4000 women to understand retention and why women leave the workplace1.
The key to retention isn’t to fix women, it’s to fix organisations
According to the research 38% of women are likely to leave their current employer within the next two years. That’s more than a third of the women employed in your company. Imagine the cost of recruitment and onboarding, the knowledge lost and the relationships wilting if that many women leave a company. And while being “likely to” doesn’t necessarily mean that they will eventually leave the number is still large enough to drive both curiosity and action. And, interestingly enough, across age groups this number is very consistent and even deemed a conservative view.
So why do they leave? The 5 key reasons according to this research – with percentages noting the number of women saying that this has “huge” or “significant” impact on their decision about whether to stay - are:
• The day-to-day work itself (85%)
• Support from line manager (82%)
• Prospects for career progression (70%)
• Organisational culture (65%)
• Amount of work (31%)
While flexibility is not on the top-5 it is still considered hugely important both in terms of flexibility of location and time. And while flexibility in where we work is now considered table stakes to many, how we work is a conversation quite tied to the cultural element and a conversation expected to loom on our doorsteps. A point underlined by the “Women in Business 2024” report by GrantThornton2.
Prospects for career progression is deemed extremely important for women when deciding whether to stay at a workplace, and 38% of women in their 40s feel “positive” or “very positive” about their prospect for career progression. Compared to women in their 20s however, where that number is 65%, this might speak of a disillusioning happening as women progress in their careers and find out that either the glass ceiling does in fact still exist or perhaps career progression still require that you play “the men’s game”. Not mentioned in this report but seen in the light of the cultural impact this might not be too far fetched a hypothesis. And while the percentage of female in senior leadership positions globally have seen a slight 1.1% increase to 33.5%, a decline happened in female CEOs dropping from 28% in 2023 to a staggering low 19% in 2024. When female CEOs at larger firms were asked about their reasons for leaving these roles, they cited public pressure, caring responsibilities and sometimes that they felt they needed to behave more like men in these roles2 underlining the line of thought.
Note that none of these reasons are about the women themselves. They are structural elements in the organisation that must be explored and addressed deeply if we want to create a workplace where the strong women stay. We should be having conversations about what truly constitutes an attractive culture if we are being honest about diversity ambitions and not just playing another round of bullshit-bingo or culture-washing.
Ask the women – but only if you’re open to truly listening to the answer about cultural and systemic change
This brings me back to the beginning of this article and all the women I’ve spoken to, read about, seen in stories and articles that all feel like something should be different. That are tired of the promise of bigger and better and want to find a new way of achieving ambition. One that has less theatre and ego, more heart, honesty and humanity.
We’re done with contributing to cultural change, laying out the needs and requirements, and then being told that it cannot be done. Or even worse: “Oh but we already do that, can’t you see?”. We’re done with trying to design new solutions with so many restrictions from the traditional setup that any progress will be equivalent to “an exciting afternoon in the canteen talking about DE&I”. We want action, real life proof and initiatives that actually move the needle. As one of the quotes from the Recommendation section in the report says:
“If you have women who are not feeling motivated by the day-to-day work they are doing, have a line manager they can’t communicate with or a lack of flexibility around how they do their job, then having a menopause offering is not going to stop them from leaving.”
So let me leave you with a repetition of this important statement: Just because we don’t want to participate in the traditional way of being in the corporate world it doesn’t mean that we’re void of ambition. Be curious, brave and let’s draw a different future in corporate.
Sources:
[1] Why Women Leave, July 2023, Encompass Equality https://content.app-us1.com/LoWoN/2023/09/26/5478cd21-0135-48d2-969e-606e2616dd90.pdf
[2] Women in Business 2024 - Pathways to Parity https://www.grantthornton.global/globalassets/1.-member-firms/global/insights/women-in-business/2024/grant-thornton-women-in-business-report-2024.pdf
[3] Women lead here – by why do so many of them leave? Deborah Aarts, The Global and Mail, March 28 2024 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/article-women-lead-herebut-why-do-so-many-of-them-leave/
[4] Why Do Educated, Successful Women Leave The Workforce? Patti Collett Miles, American International Journal of Social Science, Vol. 2 No. 2; March 2013