Are Women at the Crossroads of Ambition and Exhaustion?
By Lori Bieda
I’ve walked the tightrope of ambition and exhaustion for decades.
I even fell off once or twice, completely burnt out, and seriously considered whether I should get back on.
Yet after years in the C-suite as a Chief Data, Analytics and AI Officer for a global bank and leading woman in STEM, I looked around the table and realized there were so few of us around the table. I came to realize that career navigation and support for women, while always brutally hard, is now becoming even more complicated.
What's interesting is that, as women, we've never been more educated, accomplished, or ambitious. Yet many of us right now are stopping to ask questions we didn't ask a decade ago.
What do I really have to do to move up?
What am I willing to sacrifice to achieve it?
Is the path I'm on still the one I want to follow?
Because let's face it — the move up, whether you're pursuing a promotion, expanding your reach, or reinventing yourself entirely, can be exhausting.
The data tells an interesting story.
Women are upskilling and reskilling at record rates. More women are exploring career reinvention than ever before. Female entrepreneurship continues to rise, with women now accounting for nearly half of new entrepreneurs.
At the same time, AI is reshaping the future of work. Research suggests that the jobs most likely to be transformed by AI are disproportionately held by women, meaning women could experience the impact of AI-driven change at triple the rate of men.
The pandemic also fundamentally changed many women's relationship with work.
It gave us a different lens through which to evaluate our careers, and brought flexibility to the forefront in a way few of us had experienced before. For some, remote and hybrid work created the breathing room needed to better balance the competing demands of career, family, caregiving, health, and personal wellbeing. For others, it exposed just how unsustainable our pace had become.
Either way, many women emerged from that period asking different questions, and the march back to the office has only reinforced them.
And all those recent realities are on top of the uneven terrain we started with...
Because despite decades of progress, research consistently shows that women are promoted into management at lower rates than men, creating the "broken rung" — the first critical step up the leadership ladder where many women fall behind.
And of course women report receiving less sponsorship, advocacy, and access to stretch opportunities than their male peers, even though these experiences are often the very things that accelerate careers.
And then there’s the not-so-small matter of confidence.
Women are still more likely to experience self-doubt and imposter syndrome, particularly in leadership roles and male-dominated industries. Many of us hesitate to raise our hands until we feel fully qualified, while men are often more comfortable stepping forward before they have all the answers.
The result is a compounding effect: fewer sponsors, less visibility, fewer stretch opportunities, and a persistent tendency to underestimate our own readiness for the next step.
And none of this is because women are less capable. It’s just that for decades we've been navigating systems that haven't always reflected our value back to us.
So when you bring it all home women aren't simply navigating a changing workplace. We're navigating a changing workplace while still carrying many of the same burdens we've carried for decades.
The difference is that the stakes are getting even higher.
At the very moment women are trying to break through old barriers, the rules of work itself are being rewritten. We're being asked to gain visibility, sponsorship, and leadership opportunities while AI reshapes careers, industries, and the skills required to stay relevant — adapting faster than ever, while many of us are already exhausted from the climb.
Women aren't standing at the crossroads of ambition and exhaustion because we lack drive. We're here because we're navigating unprecedented change on top of challenges that were never fully resolved in the first place.
We need a backpack full of different tools for this journey, because it’s not one any of us have travelled before.
And for many women, it's prompted a deeper question:
How can I move up and not lose myself doing it?
This isn't a hands-in-the-air, give-up moment. Far from it.
What I see is a generation of women who remain deeply ambitious, but more intentional about where that ambition goes — asking how to navigate this next turn, and how to access proven guidance that actually makes a difference.
Women aren't stepping back. We are stepping back to evaluate.
I've long believed the answers are within us. But throughout my career, I couldn't always find the women who held the keys — or access their wisdom when I needed it most.
The answer isn't to abandon ambition. Maybe there’s just a different way of navigating it.
I'd love to hear your perspective — share this with another woman navigating what's next.
And if you haven't already, Join the Circle to receive future Women by the Numbers Blogs, and get Early Access to the solution for women’s career guidance launching in September.
Next month, in Women by the Numbers blow, I'll dig the next piece of the journey: To Refuel or Reset.