My Ambition Didn’t Die. The System Made the Status Quo Unlivable.
Burnout, resilience scams, and the capitalist patriarchal system women are opting out of.
I started waking at 4 am with panic attacks while working in a deeply toxic workplace. I was in my late 40s, entering perimenopause, and suddenly my body became the explanation for everything wrong.
This piece is about how women’s biology gets weaponised to excuse bullshit workplaces, how “resilience” has become a managerial cop-out, and why burnout is not a personal failure but a design flaw. It’s also about what we do next, because naming the problem without changing it helps no one.
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The 4 AM Wake-Up Call
I was in my mid-40s, working in a workplace so toxic it had its own gravitational pull. My boss was the kind of leader who could be generously described as a corporate psychopath. Public charm, private cruelty, constant unpredictability. The type of environment where I was always on edge, scanning for danger, waiting for the next axe to fall, and terrified it would be on me.
I did what many women do when work turns hostile. I worked harder. Longer hours. More vigilance. Fewer boundaries. I tightened my grip on everything I could control because the workplace itself was unsafe.
Then the 4 am wake-ups started.
Bolt upright. Heart racing. Breathing like a monster was chasing me.
I hadn’t had a bad dream or particularly stressful thoughts (well, no more than usual), but I just woke up with this bolt of terror that made absolutely no sense to me in the quiet of my own bedroom. Every. Single. Morning.
At the same time, another factor entered the picture. My age.
What starts for many women around the age that I was? Perimenopause.
I went to my GP. She was a woman. She was excellent. She knew menopause and perimenopause inside out. She diagnosed perimenopause quickly and told me the panic attacks were an escalation of anxiety.
I said, honestly, “But I don’t have anxiety.”
We did a quick test.
She said, “You do.”
So there it was. Something I assumed everyone lived with, I had been navigating my entire life. Thank you to every fucking doctor who missed it.
My GP did her job. She treated what was happening in my body, and I’m grateful for that care.
What I am not grateful for is what happens next to so many women.
When Biology Becomes the Headline
Here is the dangerous pattern I see over and over.
A woman is in a toxic workplace. The leadership is abusive, chaotic or has permanently gone to lunch. The workload is unreasonable. The culture is punitive. Psychological safety is nonexistent.
At the same time, her body does something entirely normal across the female lifespan. Pre-menstrual syndrome. Menstruation. Perimenopause. Pregnancy. Postpartum. Chronic pain. Endometriosis. Anxiety. Burnout.
Suddenly, her biology becomes the explanation.
Her hormones are the problem.
Her resilience is lacking.
Her stress tolerance isn’t what it used to be.
Meanwhile, the workplace remains completely uninterrogated.
I am a massive advocate for greater research into women’s reproductive health. I am absolutely all-in on workplaces taking women’s bodies seriously and designing work that accounts for different physical realities across a lifetime.
What I am NOT here for is women’s biology being used as a smokescreen for organisational harm.
Truth Bomb: A capitalist, patriarchal workplace was never designed with women in mind.
This type of workplace rewards overwork, dominance, emotional suppression, and control. The people most incentivised to keep it exactly as it is are the people who benefit from it.
So why, when women start breaking under the pressure, are we told to take another supplement, do more yoga, practise breathing exercises, and be more resilient?
Yes, some of what we experience is biological.
Truth Bomb: A hell of a lot of it is about workplaces that are toxic by design.
Why Women Work Harder When Things Get Bad
I see this pattern everywhere, including in myself and in a friend with whom I had a beautiful conversation today, who, frankly, inspired me to write this article.
When work turns toxic, women work harder.
Why?
Because we’ve been trained to.
Women are socialised to fix, carry, smooth, nurture, and compensate. Those traits are celebrated in theory and exploited in practice.
In workplaces, this shows up as invisible labour. Emotional management. Culture repair. Covering gaps. Keeping the wheels turning while pretending everything is fine.
Then, when women finally break, the story becomes personal.
She couldn’t cope.
She needs resilience.
She needs to manage her hormones (better).
The workplace gets a free pass.
Truth Bomb. Overwork is not a phase. It’s a design choice.
If an organisation relies on people burning themselves out to function, resilience training is not the solution. It’s the cover-up.
If you are a woman reading this at 4 am, heart racing, blaming yourself, hear me clearly: you are not broken. The workplace might be.
The Resilience Scam
This is where resilience enters the chat.
When women are struggling at work, we are rarely offered structural change. We are offered coping strategies.
Be more resilient.
Build your stress tolerance.
Manage your mindset.
Bounce back faster.
Author, Soraya Chemaly dismantles this beautifully in The Resilience Myth. She argues that modern resilience culture prioritises individual endurance over collective care and systemic change. Framed this way, resilience becomes a bankrupt ideal that protects a corrupt status quo.
Resilience, as it’s sold to women, is not empowerment. It is endurance training.
It teaches women to absorb harm quietly, so organisations don’t have to fix what’s broken.
My Ambition Didn’t Die, It Shifted.
Fran Ayala read the latest Lean In and McKinsey Women in the Workplace report, which I thank her for, because frankly, I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude (or resilience)to read this year’s report. (I now, depressingly, have) It’s just more of the same old, same old, but it also, from my readings, from reading material from Fran and other women authors, told me what I already knew. After a decade or more of being told to lean in, women are leaning out because the return on effort is appallingly low.
I am a sample size of one, but I have heard enough stories from women to know that I’m not alone.
When I hit 50 and looked at my career trajectory, which I had been carefully curated for at least 20 years, I remember being shocked at my inner turmoil and realising, after reflecting, that I DIDN’T want it anymore.
What I DID want is to make the world a better place for women and girls.
What I DONT want is to make old white privileged people even richer and be constantly exhausted from being the dissenting voice in the room.
Truth Bomb: My ambition didn’t die. It shifted.
I now know I have a matriarchal leadership ambition. Not the capitalist patriarchal lie I’d been sold since I entered the workforce.
The system is a capitalist patriarchy.
Truth Bomb: McKinsey and LeanIn don’t get this and never will, as they are the system.
The fox is looking after the henhouse here!
If you’re sitting there nodding, angry, relieved, or quietly thinking “holy shit, that’s me”, the next section is where I stop diagnosing the problem and start laying out what actually changes things.
This is where I get practical about what women can do, what managers must own, and what organisations need to redesign if they’re serious about keeping women in leadership.
You’ve got a few ways to keep going with me.
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