Women face a 20% higher risk of burnout than men. That statistic gets quoted a lot. What gets discussed far less is why — and what it actually tells us about the systems women are operating inside.
This isn't about stress management. It isn't about resilience, self-care routines, or learning to switch off. Those conversations, while not useless, consistently locate the problem in the individual woman rather than in the structure she's navigating.
The problem is the structure.
20%
Women face a 20% higher risk of burnout than men —
not because they're less capable, but because the load is genuinely heavier.
Here are nine reasons women are burning out at the rate they are — and why understanding them matters more than another tip about journaling.
Reason 01
The system is extractive by design
Most of the structures women work within — professional, domestic, social — were not designed with women's capacity, biology, or wellbeing in mind. They were designed for maximum output. When a machine is optimised for extraction rather than sustainability, the people inside it eventually break down. This isn't a personal failing. It's a structural inevitability.
Reason 02
Self-care has been weaponised
The self-care industry — worth billions — has successfully repackaged rest as a consumer product and sold it back to the same women being depleted by the system. A face mask is not a structural solution. A yoga class does not address invisible labour. When self-care becomes another item on an already exhausted woman's to-do list, it has become friction, not relief.
Reason 03
The myth of "not enough" runs deep
From childhood, many women receive a consistent message: you are not quite enough as you are. Not productive enough, not thin enough, not agreeable enough, not ambitious enough — and then simultaneously, not present enough, not gentle enough, not selfless enough. This contradiction is load-bearing. It generates constant low-grade effort with no arrival point, because the goalposts are designed to move.
Reason 04
Socialisation creates compliance, and compliance is exhausting
Many women were raised to be agreeable, to play nice, not to rock the boat. As adults, these patterns become invisible tax: staying in situations past their expiry date, absorbing poor treatment, over-delivering to compensate for feeling like an imposter, performing competence and warmth simultaneously and relentlessly. The "good girl" conditioning doesn't disappear at 40. It shows up as burnout.
"Burnout is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that something has been wrong with your conditions for a very long time."
Reason 05
The pressure to "have it all" was always a trap
Feminism opened doors that were genuinely worth opening. But it also — in some of its popular iterations — created a new burden: the expectation that women should now excel in every domain simultaneously. Career, motherhood, partnership, health, social presence, creativity. "Having it all" turned out to mean "doing it all" — and doing it all is not sustainable for any human being.
Reason 06
The double shift is real, invisible, and unending
Most women finish a full day of professional work and then begin their second shift: cooking, managing the household, administering the family calendar, providing emotional support, remembering the dentist appointments and the school permission slips and the birthday cards. The invisible workload is not small. It is substantial, continuous, and almost entirely unacknowledged — which makes it uniquely depleting.
Wondering if friction is what's behind your exhaustion?
The Low Friction Audit is a free, gentle guide — no action plan, no to-do list. Just an honest look at where life may be asking more of you than it should.
Reason 07
Perimenopause is almost never part of the conversation
For women in their late 30s through 50s, perimenopause is frequently operating silently in the background — disrupting sleep, amplifying anxiety, creating brain fog, altering emotional regulation. Most women don't know this is happening. Most doctors don't raise it. Most workplaces don't accommodate it. Women going through perimenopause are often doing so while being held to the same standard as before, with significantly less physiological resource — and no acknowledgement of why everything feels harder.
Reason 08
Imposter syndrome keeps women working twice as hard
The persistent belief that you haven't quite earned your place — that you'll be found out, that your successes were luck or timing rather than competence — keeps many women over-delivering, over-preparing, and over-explaining. This is not a personality quirk. It is the predictable outcome of operating in spaces that were not designed for you, where the benchmark was set by someone else, and where the messages about adequacy have been mixed at best.
Reason 09
There is rarely a structural off-ramp
When everything demands more of you than you have, where do you actually go? The advice is usually more self-management: better routines, more discipline, healthier habits. What's missing is permission — and a pathway — to change the structure itself. To work differently, live differently, carry less. The absence of a visible alternative keeps many women trying harder at a game they are never going to win by trying harder.
What this means in practice
Understanding why burnout happens doesn't fix it. But it does change the question you're asking.
Instead of "what's wrong with me and how do I fix it," the question becomes: "what in my structure is unsustainable — and what would need to change for it to be different?"
That's a harder question. It has slower answers. But they're the ones that actually hold.
Low Friction Living is built on a simple premise: the problem is not the woman. It's the amount of friction her system is carrying. When you reduce friction — structural, cognitive, emotional, physical — capacity returns. Not through willpower. Through subtraction.
Lianne Byrne
25 years in digital and marketing. Burnout survivor. ADHD diagnosis at 40. Perimenopause. Location-independent since 2023, travelling with three kids. Founder of Low Friction Living.