Latest / Spacious Success / 035 | I Probably Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Naming the Gender Wellbeing Gap

Transcript

035 | I Probably Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Naming the Gender Wellbeing Gap · Spacious Success

• 0:05
  Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
• 0:16
  After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
• 0:27
  On Spacious Success,
• 0:28
  I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
• 0:41
  Thank you.
• 0:45
  Hi, it's Dr. Christy and welcome back to the Spacious Success podcast.
• 0:50
  Sheryl Sandberg told women to lean in, but here's what the research tells us happened instead and why this was never going to work well for women.
• 1:02
  Today's a bit different.
• 1:03
  If I'm honest, this one is quite personal.
• 1:05
  And by the end of the episode, I'm actually going to ask you for something.
• 1:09
  Because for almost two years now, I've been having the identical conversations in different rooms with different women.
• 1:18
  And I've decided that I'm done treating it like it's simply a coincidence.
• 1:25
  Instead, I want to address this head on today.
• 1:28
  Okay.
• 1:29
  Here's what's actually been happening on repeat for years now.
• 1:34
  A friend over dinner laughing so she wouldn't cry, telling me that her search history is now a graveyard of half-finished questions like, is it normal too?
• 1:46
  Insert random question.
• 1:48
  How many hours of sleep is actually dangerous to my health?
• 1:51
  Because she has never had the energy left to ironically read the answer, or her focus is so fractured that she's already opened another tab before the answer has loaded on the website.
• 2:04
  Does this happen to you?
• 2:04
  A coaching client on one of our most recent calls mentioned, almost in passing, that she recently sat in the car,
• 2:13
  Park at the office for 27 minutes before she felt steady and ready enough to go inside.
• 2:20
  A woman queued after a keynote in Melbourne recently, waiting until the room had cleared.
• 2:25
  And then she came to quietly tell me, very quietly, that she hasn't felt like herself in over a year.
• 2:32
  She hasn't told a single person at work.
• 2:35
  She hasn't whispered it to her partner nor to any of her friends.
• 2:39
  Another coaching client confessed that she'd been fantasizing more and more about being bedridden just for a week, just a minor incident.
• 2:49
  But so she would have permission to finally rest.
• 2:53
  She was that exhausted.
• 2:55
  If you think that she's alone, you'd be wrong.
• 2:58
  I recorded a whole episode on the secret fantasies that women have on episode 17 called Women Fantasize About Being Sick, What It Signals About Modern Work.
• 3:09
  Now, these are all slightly different stories, but I believe there's a common denominator, a common thread, a common theme in each of them.
• 3:19
  And the theme is the same.
• 3:21
  It's on repeat, and it's getting louder and louder.
• 3:24
  I hear it in the corridor when I walk off stage.
• 3:27
  I hear it in the lift on the way down to the lobby, and it is a comment in my DMs that land once everybody has gone home.
• 3:34
  It's conversations at the local coffee shop where I've had a woman come up.
• 3:39
  who's recognized me and sit down and she unravels because she's been carrying this load alone and she needed somewhere to put it down.
• 3:48
  It's not only conference rooms and coffee shops.
• 3:51
  I hear this rumbling, this dissatisfaction in group chats with other mums.
• 3:57
  It's in the DMs after I post something honest on LinkedIn or Instagram.
• 4:02
  The woman who emails me weeks after the keynote to say that she's still thinking about something I said in passing on the stage.
• 4:12
  And if I'm honest, for a while, I second-guessed myself over this, thinking it was a coincidence.
• 4:17
  Maybe it was confirmation bias, plain and simple, just me noticing every instance that proved my own theory and quietly filtering out anything that didn't agree.
• 4:28
  Maybe I'd simply become some kind of person that women with this exact experience sought out, which would make it a reflection of my audience, maybe not a reflection of what's actually happening out there for women right now.
• 4:46
  But that theory doesn't hold up.
• 4:48
  Too many of these incredible women had never heard of me before that conversation.
• 4:53
  Too many of them weren't deliberately seeking anything out.
• 4:57
  Maybe the algorithm served it up to them.
• 4:59
  But they were simply sitting in a room.
• 5:02
  Maybe they were scrolling on social media.
• 5:04
  And something about that moment made it safe for them to finally verbalize, finally articulate, say the thing out loud that they'd spent months agonizing over.
• 5:13
  And sometimes, as I speak to both male and female audiences, it was men coming up after a keynote and saying, this is my wife.
• 5:21
  This is my partner.
• 5:23
  And the scale of this took me by surprise.
• 5:26
  I used to think I was hearing from a handful of women that were going through a rough patch.
• 5:31
  And I've been thinking and hearing from a genuine demographic who are often hiding and struggling in plain sight.
• 5:39
  They're too embarrassed, too ashamed, and if I'm honest, too exhausted to know what to do about any of it.
• 5:46
  And underneath all of these, there's almost a passive acceptance that this is simply what life looks like as an ambitious woman in 2026.
• 5:57
  I actually feel something close to grief saying that out aloud.
• 6:00
  Not because it's surprising to me, but because it shouldn't be normal.
• 6:04
  It shouldn't be commonplace.
• 6:06
  Somewhere along the line, we let this become exactly that.
• 6:09
  We've normalized stress, exhaustion and burnout.
• 6:13
  I don't want to settle for this being our norm.
• 6:15
  I don't want to sit back passively and watch exhaustion get quietly written into the job description of what it means to be an accomplished woman.
• 6:24
  I don't want to keep watching capable women hand over what I've started calling a success tax.
• 6:30
  They're constantly paying a success tax year after year and simply accept that that's the entry price of their ambition now.
• 6:39
  I refuse to let women...
• 6:42
  think that they need to just survive when the reality is they should be thriving.
• 6:48
  The cost of doing well for a woman in midlife is apparently her sleep, her nervous system, and the version of herself that she recognizes and actually likes in the mirror.
• 6:59
  We would never waive that trade
• 7:03
  through for anyone that we loved.
• 7:06
  And I'm not willing to keep waving it through for an entire generation, a collective of women who are suffering in silence, myself included.
• 7:14
  There's a specific shape to how I see this arrive to.
• 7:18
  It often follows some version of the same four words.
• 7:22
  I probably shouldn't be telling you this.
• 7:25
  Except she tells me.
• 7:27
  And so does the next woman and the one after that.
• 7:29
  Different industries, different postcodes, different job titles.
• 7:33
  Almost the same sentence, the same struggles.
• 7:37
  This is me too.
• 7:39
  And I am sick of whispering about this.
• 7:42
  I'm sick of glossing over it.
• 7:44
  There's also something particular about who these women are.
• 7:49
  they may not look to be struggling despite being capable.
• 7:52
  They're often struggling just because of how capable they are, because they've learned to perform competence.
• 8:00
  And they've learned this so convincingly that no one around them, sometimes not even their own partner, their boss at work, clocks what's actually costing them to keep this facade up.
• 8:12
  And here's what strikes me the most.
• 8:15
  Listening to all of this is,
• 8:17
  So many of these women are brilliant.
• 8:20
  They're kind.
• 8:21
  You'd never guess that they were struggling.
• 8:23
  And they don't have anyone in their corner who they can say this out aloud to honestly.
• 8:30
  They have colleagues.
• 8:31
  Yes, they've got LinkedIn connections.
• 8:34
  And I'll be honest with you, I nearly didn't share any of this publicly either.
• 8:38
  I run a business that is built on people believing that I've got this figured out.
• 8:44
  Admitting and acknowledging that I still recognize every single one of those women in myself too, on my harder weeks, felt dangerous.
• 8:53
  It felt risky to say it out aloud.
• 8:55
  But if I, of all the people, given what's happened to me...
• 8:59
  And what you already know, if you've heard episode one, I'm still tempted to whisper and shirk away from this conversation instead of actually naming it.
• 9:09
  I don't think it's fair then to expect anyone else to go first.
• 9:13
  For a long time, I treated this conversation as an isolated incident, a hard season here, maybe a difficult manager, a woman going through something private.
• 9:24
  But you cannot hear the same sentence 50 times, 70 times from women who have never met each other in 100 different rooms and keep calling it serendipity.
• 9:36
  It's not coincidence.
• 9:39
  I remember exactly where I was when it clicked.
• 9:42
  Collecting these stories privately was no longer enough anymore.
• 9:48
  It was a hotel room after a Perth keynote.
• 9:50
  My laptop was open and I was trying to write some notes up from the day.
• 9:54
  And I was realizing that I had, without ever meaning to, been building an archive of women's exhaustion and burnout for years.
• 10:03
  Notes on napkins, voice memos, the back of business cards, DMs, feedback forms, all of it sitting in a digital drawer.
• 10:12
  None of it able to change anything because none of it had ever been pieced together properly or asked for a purpose.
• 10:20
  These anecdotes and observations were once just stories.
• 10:25
  But an anecdote 50 times over, well, that's a pattern.
• 10:28
  And I've decided I'm no longer willing to let this pattern stay off the record.
• 10:35
  So today I want to name what it actually is because it has a name and it is not a personal failing or a flaw.
• 10:43
  It's the gender well-being gap.
• 10:45
  And it means that more women than men are reporting stress, exhaustion and burnout at rates meaningfully higher than what men do.
• 10:56
  Consistent across industries, seniority levels and across countries.
• 11:02
  The clearest number I've seen on this comes from McKinsey and the Lean In Women in the Workplace Research that was published in 2025.
• 11:10
  60% of senior level women reported frequent burnout.
• 11:16
  For senior level men, it was closer to 50%.
• 11:18
  10 points at exactly the identical level of seniority where organizations can least afford to lose their people.
• 11:28
  And it doesn't stop there.
• 11:30
  Women's Agenda's recent ambitions research found that 72% of Australian women reported burnout in the past 12 months.
• 11:42
  Separate research, separate data sources on women's health found that 60% of women feel exhausted all or most of the time.
• 11:53
  And Deloitte's 2025 Women at Work study, which surveyed thousands of women across 15 different countries, found more than a third of women reported that their stress levels were higher than what they were the year prior.
• 12:08
  Now, if you listen to episode two in the Spacious Success podcast called The Stress Superstorm, you possibly know part of why that might be the case.
• 12:17
  Women's stress response isn't a smaller, gentler version of men's.
• 12:21
  It runs on different hormonal architecture.
• 12:25
  It's shaped by estrogen and progesterone.
• 12:28
  It responds to chronic load differently across the month and across the decades.
• 12:34
  Now, I'm not going to rerun that whole episode here, but if you want to know more, please go back and have a listen if you haven't.
• 12:41
  But that biology is the flaw in this gap.
• 12:45
  It's the flaw on which this gap is built on.
• 12:48
  And there's a term for what accumulates when stress doesn't get resolved properly over and over and over for years.
• 12:55
  It's called allostatic load.
• 12:57
  And it's the cumulative physiological and psychological cost of staying in a heightened stress response for longer than what your body was ever designed to hold it.
• 13:09
  It's not about one bad day.
• 13:12
  It's what happens when the bad day doesn't stop.
• 13:15
  When one bad day blurs into another becomes the whole quarter and becomes years without ever enough recovery built in to let your system reset.
• 13:26
  And here's the part that turns this from a health story into a leadership pipeline issue.
• 13:32
  Deloitte puts the cost of under-supporting this at more than 2 million lost workdays a year and 16.5 billion US dollars in missed opportunities.
• 13:45
  This isn't abstract.
• 13:46
  That's capable women at the exact point in their career, that exact seniority where their judgment, their networks matter the most.
• 13:55
  And they're quietly deciding...
• 13:57
  Do I want to sustain this or do I want to step back?
• 14:00
  Do I want to lean out?
• 14:02
  And it's not just women feeling it.
• 14:04
  I sit across from chief people officers and HR leads constantly now.
• 14:09
  And in the Q&As after keynotes and in the debrief after the keynote, the language has shifted.
• 14:15
  Two years ago, the question wasn't about engagement.
• 14:18
  No.
• 14:19
  Now, it's often about retention of their most senior people, specifically women.
• 14:26
  And most organizations don't yet have the data to explain why it's happening and more importantly, what they can do to counteract this.
• 14:36
  And so what I keep coming back to is this.
• 14:38
  We have decades of data proving that stress affects men and women differently.
• 14:44
  We have far less data telling us what happens next once a woman decides that she's had enough of absorbing it quietly.
• 14:52
  Does she scale back?
• 14:53
  Does she leave the industry?
• 14:54
  Does she leave the workforce entirely?
• 14:57
  Does she stay or does she simply stop bringing her full self to the table?
• 15:02
  Right now, many of us as organizations are guessing, and this is a significant leadership pipeline problem.
• 15:10
  If you're guessing about your leadership pipeline, that is a problem that you can't actually fix.
• 15:16
  There's also a widely cited idea that a leader's own well-being and dysregulation doesn't stay contained to them.
• 15:23
  It has a contagion effect.
• 15:25
  It sets the tone for the whole team underneath them.
• 15:29
  In fact, Gallup research reveals that managers account for 70% of the difference in team engagement, meaning that when a manager themselves experiences burnout, the negative impact quickly spreads to the entire team.
• 15:47
  The mechanism itself, which is a burnt-out leader or manager producing a burnt-out team, tracks identically with what I'm seeing in organizations that I'm currently working with, which is exactly why this matters beyond any one woman's inbox.
• 16:06
  We were told that women need to lean in, but they're leaning out.
• 16:10
  Honestly, many of them just want to lay down.
• 16:14
  Now that's not a mindset problem, that's a biological problem, and it's your organisation's potential retention problem.
• 16:22
  But right now, most of what exists on the GAP comes from large, aggregated workplace surveys, often international surveys, not Australian or Asian research.
• 16:34
  Useful, but distant.
• 16:36
  Almost no one has gone and asked ambitious, accomplished women directly what this actually looks like inside their own week.
• 16:44
  And that's the gap I want to close here in Australia and internationally as well.
• 16:49
  So here comes my ask.
• 16:51
  Here's what I'm going to do about it, and this is where I need your help.
• 16:55
  I'm working on a white paper around the gender well-being gap, and it's actually going to feed directly into my next book, which I have started writing.
• 17:04
  And I don't want to build it only on other people's surveys and statistics.
• 17:10
  Yes, those numbers are useful, but I want to build it on your week
• 17:14
  what your observations are, what your personal experiences are.
• 17:19
  What does it look like for an ambitious, accomplished woman right now?
• 17:23
  Not the tidy version, not the one that's just statistics.
• 17:27
  So I am launching a survey and I'm asking you to be part of it.
• 17:31
  Not just numbers on a form, although there's plenty of tick boxes, but I want to hear your stories, your anecdotes, your observations, what you've noticed in yourself, what you see in the women that you work with, in the women that you manage and lead.
• 17:47
  I want the anecdotes as much as the data because the anecdotes are where the patterns and I think the solutions will actually live.
• 17:57
  Now, I promise it's quick, predominantly closed item questions that you can answer on the fly.
• 18:03
  It should take you roughly around 12 minutes to complete.
• 18:06
  Now, for everybody who completes a survey, I am going to donate $1 to a women's cause yet to be determined.
• 18:14
  And you will also go in the draw to win a 90-minute coaching call, one-on-one call with me that's valued at $2,000.
• 18:23
  You don't need polished stories.
• 18:24
  You don't need more than a few longer responses if you choose to at all.
• 18:30
  All of it is useful, but none of it needs to be dressed up.
• 18:34
  I want to hear your honest, first-hand answers and experiences.
• 18:38
  I want to hear your anecdotes.
• 18:39
  I want to hear your challenges.
• 18:42
  I want to be clear about what this is not.
• 18:44
  This is not another list telling women to have a bubble bath and to breathe their way out of it.
• 18:49
  That's not a solution.
• 18:51
  It's actually, frankly, I believe part of the problem because it puts the fix back onto the laps of individual women instead of the system that she's operating in.
• 19:02
  I'm not interested in adding to that pile at all.
• 19:05
  So here's what I can tell you.
• 19:07
  You don't need to put your name to it if you'd rather not.
• 19:11
  You can complete the survey anonymously.
• 19:15
  But if you would like a copy of the white paper or the book, then we do need your details.
• 19:20
  You can complete the survey via the link that will be in the show notes.
• 19:25
  I would really appreciate if you could not only complete this yourself personally.
• 19:30
  If you want to, feel free to email me your stories, your observations, whatever you've noticed.
• 19:36
  I will personally read and respond to every single one.
• 19:40
  And if you're listening from inside an organization and you think that your fellow females might have something to contribute, might want to articulate what they're silently struggling with, please come and share this survey with them.
• 19:55
  The details will be provided in the show notes today.
• 20:00
  Thank you for considering this really important issue today.
• 20:05
  Here's the topic or the reframe that I want to leave you with today.
• 20:09
  This needs to stop being something that you carry alone.
• 20:13
  The moment I think enough of us start saying it out aloud, we put it on record, we articulate it together, the shame won't survive.
• 20:22
  It's going to be documented.
• 20:23
  The shame only survives when we whisper about it.
• 20:27
  And if you only take one thing from today, please consider this.
• 20:31
  The opposite of burnout isn't rest.
• 20:33
  It's being fully seen.
• 20:35
  So I want you to be seen.
• 20:36
  I want you to be heard.
• 20:39
  Please send this episode to a friend to know that she is seen.
• 20:43
  The struggles that she is silently challenged by know that she is not alone.
• 20:49
  I would love to help you.
• 20:51
  to catalyze your performance and wellbeing.
• 20:54
  And that's the exact purpose of this entire podcast.
• 20:58
  But I need your help to get the data, the stories, the anecdotes and the observations so we can turn this data into pragmatic, sustainable and systemic solutions that will put an end or will at least start to close this gender wellbeing gap.
• 21:17
  I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist,
• 21:22
  author and executive coach who uses biometric data.
• 21:26
  Thank you for listening to the Spacious Success podcast.
• 21:29
  Before you go, I want to tell you about something new.
• 21:33
  I have recently launched the Powered Up Table, which is an executive keynote for female leaders delivered around an actual table, a lunch table or a breakfast table built on the exact science of what I've talked about in today's episode.
• 21:49
  If you lead a team of senior women and you want to give them something real, something of weight, something tangible, more than cupcakes at a morning tea, please head to drchristigoodwin.com forward slash powered up table or reach out so we can send you details on this new offering.
• 22:10
  Thank you for your time today.
• 22:11
  And I look forward to seeing you next on Spacious Success.