Surprising Trends Impacting Women at Work
Episode 469 | Author: Emilie Aries
The latest Deloitte Women at Work study highlights that we still have work to do.
The experiences and rights of women in the workplace are constantly evolving, for better or for worse. We talk about these changes every day—on this podcast, in the break room, over social media, at coffee with our friends—but what do the numbers say?
Recently, Deloitte released their 2024 Women @ Work report, which surveyed 5,000 women across 10 countries and seven sectors in late 2023. In reading the report, I came across a few trends that surprised me.
Women confirm their rights feel under attack—this truth received its own headline in the report. It just makes sense that all the political, policy, and activist movements around issues that affect us personally would make it into our working lives, and the study reflects this. A total of 14% of women report that women’s rights have deteriorated in their home country over the past year.
A lack of questions on reproductive freedoms
Interestingly absent from the report, however, was any mention of women’s reproductive freedoms in particular. Granted, the U.S. might have been disproportionately affected by this particular issue in recent years, but I was surprised that the survey did not include any specific questions around reproductive rights and freedoms. An alarming 29% of women did report that their right to live free from violence has deteriorated, and since the survey lacked an option for reproductive freedoms, perhaps this is encompassed within the broader sentiment.
Burnout is declining - for some women
I was cautiously but pleasantly surprised to see that burnout appears to be on the decline. Since 2020, this topic has been at the forefront of so many work and life discussions—certainly, we’ve talked about this a lot on the Bossed Up podcast. The good news is that in the most recent study, only about one-quarter of women report feeling burnt out, compared to one-third in 2023 and almost half in 2022. (It peaked in 2020, with more than 50% of the U.S. workforce reporting feelings of burnout
This could be linked to the 43% of women who say they receive adequate mental health support from their employers, though it’s important here to remember the still significant disparity between white female workers and who the Deloitte study refers to as “ethnic minorities.” Only 28% of the latter reported this increase in workplace support.
Issues impacting older women are getting more attention
The final piece of study data that I want to highlight is the increase in attention that’s finally being paid to older women at work. The report shares that around 40% of women are working through the pain and discomfort of menopause symptoms, compared to 20% last year. This is a topic that I’m excited to explore more deeply in upcoming episodes.
Though more nuanced than the other hard data, the survey also highlighted an increase in women taking on elder care—a common occurrence for Gen Xers who are balancing full-time careers and looking after aging parents. The wording could be clearer, but the results show that 60% of women involved in the care of another adult report taking the greatest responsibility for this person, compared to 44% in 2023.
From this intel, it’s hard to say whether the number of women caring for another adult has increased, but it certainly highlights a crisis that has been brewing for a long time and ties directly into the enormous onus placed on women around unpaid care.
Have you read the 2024 Deloitte Women @ Work report? What trends jump out to you, and what other topics affecting women in the workplace would you like to see covered on the Bossed Up podcast in the future? Let me know in our Courage Community on Facebook, or join us in our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Read the Deloitte Women @ Work 2024 report
TAKE ACTION to advocate for
gender equity at work—and beyond
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 469. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to get into what is top of mind for women in the workplace globally.
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I was just re-reading the 2024 Deloitte's Women in the Workplace study. I mean, they take a lot of data into account for their annual reports. This year's report surveyed 5000 women across ten countries and seven sectors between October of 2023 and January of 2024. So really Q4 of last year into Q1 of this year, they surveyed women in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Really interesting findings. It's definitely worth a read if you have the time, because there's a lot more trends in here than I'll talk through in detail today. But I want to just highlight a few of the trends and findings in this year's report that I found most surprising.
And the first is that women report their rights feeling under attack. This is not a surprise to most of us, but I was a little bit intrigued to see everything that I think about in the realm of public policy and activism and politics, kind of finding its way into the workplace conversation, around women's rights in the workplace. According to the report, quote, “14% of women believe that women's rights have deteriorated in their home country over the last year”. They're talking about rights related to equal wages, the right to live free from violence, and 13% of women surveyed said that this has affected them personally.
Now, what felt glaringly missing from this section of their survey was anything about women's reproductive freedoms and rights. And I know this is particularly acute in the United States right now. Perhaps nothing so much in other countries. I don't know. I'm not a global expert here, but, I mean, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by our Supreme Court happened in 2022, and we are just seeing serious rolling back on women's reproductive freedoms and rights. That affects a lot of people personally, myself included. I'm not keynoting in states that don't have abortion protections as a pregnant person. God forbid, [KNOCKING NOISE] knocking on all the wood that I should have a pregnancy complication that requires a D&C. Like, if I'm keynoting in Florida as a pregnant person and something happened like that, I would have to be in a deadly condition in order for me to get the reproductive care that I need to be safe and to survive.
That is so devastating to a lot of people in the United States and elsewhere. But their survey question that they used didn't even include an option related to reproductive freedom. So I have to wonder, of all the women who report, 29% who report that the right to live free from violence has deteriorated, I wonder if that has been incorporated into the reproductive freedoms that we're seeing rolled back. I don't know.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to see this headline that women's rights are under attack as the number one takeaway from this year's Deloitte survey. Because I think we have to be talking about this because we've taken some of these fundamental rights for granted. We've been so busy talking about negotiating for equal pay that living free from harassment and violence and having basic autonomy over our bodies were rights, I think so many of us have been taking for granted, that I feel like they're moving in the wrong direction. So it was really intriguing to see that show up in Deloitte's report, of all places.
The second finding that I thought was really surprising was that burnout is actually on the decline. And I think there's been a lot of ink spilled about burnout since 2020, rightfully so. I've been on the burnout train for, you know, 15 years around here talking about the gender differences and how burnout particularly and acutely impacts women and women of color. But this year, only about a quarter of women report feeling burnt out, compared to more than a third of women in 2023. And nearly half of women in 2022. Basically, in 2020, burnout hit that majority number. Like, over 50% of at least the US workforce reported feeling burnt out in 2020 and 2021 and 2022.
So it's nice to see those numbers coming back to normal. It's not great, certainly, that, like, a quarter of women report feeling burnt out, but that's a hell of a lot better than half of women. I mean, that's a huge decline. Interestingly, slightly more women than last year say that they get adequate mental health support from their employer, 43%, which is another encouraging statistic.
The one really important caveat here is that when you look at all women and their relationship to burnout, it really doesn't tell the full story. Like so many elements of Feminism, you really need to bring an intersectional lens here to understand how this acutely shows up for women of color differently.
There's a really great chart with attribution, but I'll include it in our corresponding blog post today on, bossedup.org But if you look at women who are deemed ethnic minorities, according to the Deloitte survey language, the numbers are way higher. So let's just look at the last statistic I talked about, that 43% of women in 2024 report getting adequate mental health support from their employer. That's true for all women, but that's only true for 28% of minority women. So that's a really big difference. We just have to acknowledge that white women are doing quite well in a lot of these characteristics. But women who are the ethnic minority in their country have a different story and a totally different narrative. So I don't want that to be glossed over or ignored.
That being said, I'm still encouraged by the burnout on the decline narrative, and I want to do more podcasting here about like, life beyond burnout, quite frankly, the decentering of our careers from our sense of self and our identities is a very interesting macro trend that I think is contributing to this. But we have so much more to talk about in another episode about that.
The last point that really stood out to me, the observation that I've made from this year's Deloitte report on women in the workplace globally, are that issues that impact older women in the workplace, are finally becoming more pronounced, or at least more acknowledged in a really important way.
Two issues in particular stood out in this year's survey. One has to do with menopause in the workplace. About 40% of women who report experiencing high levels of pain or discomfort due to menopause say that they just work through it, compared to just 20% of women in 2023. So that number of women suffering with menopause symptoms that they're just muscling through in the workplace has doubled year over year. And that really stood out to me as like a huge increase, something we need to be talking more about, and something we will be talking more about on this very podcast.
The other issue impacting older women in the workplace has to do with elder care. We usually kind of lump in elder care with childcare conversations because we know that women, on the whole, tend to shoulder the majority of that unpaid labor of caretaking duties as compared to our male counterparts. But it's important, I think, for us to specifically acknowledge that there's a rising rate, a significantly rising rate of women who are taking care of other adults, and that has a really different dynamic in our workplaces that don't really have a lot of support systems for that caregiving hat that so many women are wearing.
The way the study covered it is a little bit nuanced, but their finding was that, quote, nearly 60% of women who are involved in the care of another adult say that they take the greatest responsibility for this, a significant increase from 44% who said so in 2023.
So there's a couple different ways you can interpret that data. If only 44% of women said that they shoulder the majority of caregiving for another adult, does that mean men were doing a lot more, or like their counterparts were doing a lot more, or someone else was doing a lot more of the caregiving? Older adults in their life were cared for by like, professionals at the time. It's kind of hard to parse through that data because it's not saying that the number of women who are involved in the care of another adult has increased, like the sheer volume necessarily, although that could be true as well. But they're saying that 60% of women who are involved in the care of another adult do more of that care than their partners or anyone else in the household.
So it's kind of a nuanced statistic, but it just belies a bigger crisis that I think has been brewing for a long time when it relates to elder care and women's unpaid caregiving labor that makes our whole world go round, something we will also be talking about a lot more. I guess I should conclude by saying I was reading this report earlier in the year as inspiration for who we should have on this podcast. What topics have we not yet covered that are seriously impacting women in the workplace, both in America and globally?
And so you'll see a lot of guests coming up who directly speak to some of these issues that are impacting women that, you know, I found kind of surprising and I didn't know that much about. And I haven't covered that much here on the podcast in the past. I would love to hear from you if you read the study or if you have a chance to read the Deloitte report, which I'll link to in today's show notes like, what stood out to you? What trends do you see impacting women in the workplace in particular, and what should I be talking more about here, quite frankly? Like, what podcast episode topics do you want to see more of?
I'm all ears. As always, my inbox is open at emilie@bossedup.org, and I want to keep this conversation going in real time.
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So as we wrap this episode up, head to the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group, and let's keep the conversation going in real time there. Until next time, keep bossin’ in pursuit of your purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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