Female Execs Step Back

○ Departures of burned-out Gen X managers is shrinking the pipeline that leads women to C-suite jobs

- Jonnelle Marte

The data alarmed employers and economists as the shock waves of the pandemic hit the US. Women were leaving their jobs in droves. By the end of 2020, their share of the labor force had fallen to its lowest level since 1987. Two years later, the female participation rate is steadily returning to pre-pandemic levels. Problem solved? Not exactly.

Another one is festering below the surface: Many senior-level women, exhausted and torn between their career ambitions and personal lives, are now bowing out. Some are switching to less demanding positions or changing industries, while others are giving up lucrative paychecks and simply walking away, raising troubling issues for the decades-long national effort to diversify the top ranks of corporations. Several recent studies have documented the same disturbing trend—which government data aren’t fully capturing.

Reshma Saujani, founder of groups that support female advancement like Girls Who Code, says working women are no longer willing to tolerate companies that don’t support them in their roles as mothers. The exodus of women in leadership roles “should really be a wake-up call for corporate America.”

A 2022 survey that McKinsey & Co. conducted for women’s advocacy group LeanIn.Org—started by Sheryl Sandberg, who in 2022 departed as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc.—found that women leaders were leaving companies at the highest rate since the groups began collecting data in 2017. “This is wildly problematic for organizations because women are still underrepresented,” says Rachel Thomas, LeanIn.Org’s chief executive officer. “So now companies are losing their few precious leaders on top of that.”