The Hidden Emotional Labour of Female Leadership
- Jun 26
- 5 min read
What building a business, raising two daughters and navigating financial uncertainty taught me about resilience — and why women are still burning out faster than anyone wants to admit.
I want to start with a confession.
Not the kind that belongs in a therapy session — the kind that belongs in a boardroom, a CHRO strategy meeting, or the honest conversation a senior woman has with herself at 11pm when the laptop is finally closed and the house is quiet.
I have built a business from scratch, pivoted it multiple times under conditions nobody planned for, run a non-profit during a war, managed financial uncertainty while parenting, and learned — the hard way — when to push and when to stop. Along the way I experienced panic attacks, pre-burnout stages I learned to catch early, and the particular exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from doing too much while simultaneously managing how all of it looks.
That last part is what I want to talk about. Because it is the part nobody measures.
The Slaps That Built Me
Here is what the last seven years actually looked like:
2019. Made redundant. Decided to build an empire. I had a full business plan — developed at London Business School, reached the top 20 of 100 cases. They told me to fix three things. I was certain I would get there. My Enneagram Type 7 was electric with possibility.
2020. One month after Covid started, the whole concept had to be rethought. It took nearly a year, and led me in the wrong direction.
2022. B2C in Switzerland turned out to be a pandora box of cultural complexity and impossible marketing economics. I reframed Bevel entirely toward B2B. We were already two years in without any financial gain.
2022. War started in Ukraine. Nobody was purchasing wellbeing. I launched Bevel ON — a non-profit to support the social and economic integration of displaced professionals across Europe.
2023–24. Fundraising for a non-profit proved as difficult as selling wellbeing to corporations cutting 40% of global costs and laying off 20% of their people. We began facing leadership and financial strain simultaneously.
2024–25. The cumulative weight started affecting the family. I will keep the specifics private. But I will say this: it was real, and it mattered more than any business metric.
By 2026: mental breaks, panic attacks, one damaged car, and more pre-burnout warning signs than I can count — all of which I eventually learned to catch before they became crises. That is not a tragedy. That is a curriculum. It is also a curriculum that a disproportionate number of high-performing women are taking without having enrolled.
The Data Nobody Wants to Talk About
In 2023, Gallup surveyed over 18,000 workers and found that 33% of women report feeling burned out almost always — compared to 25% of men. An 8 percentage point gap that has more than doubled since 2019. Future Forum found the figure even starker: 46% of women experiencing burnout versus 37% of men.
The standard response to this data is to commission a wellbeing programme. Or a resilience workshop. Or a women's leadership initiative. These are not bad things. But they are solving the wrong problem.
We have been treating a structural problem as a personal one. We offered women resilience training when what they needed was recognition.
The picture gets more complex when you look beyond corporate employment. Entrepreneurship — long positioned as the freedom alternative — carries its own quiet burden. According to Founder Reports, 34% of entrepreneurs experience burnout, 50% struggle with anxiety, and 27% feel lonely or isolated. Women founders are disproportionately likely to report financial worry and impostor syndrome. The GEM 2024/2025 report found that women are 47% more likely than men to close a business for family or personal reasons.
These numbers are not about individual weakness. They are about structural load — work that is real, consequential, and systematically unacknowledged.
What The Research Actually Shows
Between December 2025 and March 2026, I conducted The Unmuted Shift — a qualitative behavioural study using the Jobs to be Done framework, comprising 28 individual interviews with male and female professionals at mid-to-senior management level across Europe and Middle East.
The research mapped three dimensions simultaneously: what people need to accomplish under pressure (functional jobs), how they need to feel while doing it (emotional jobs), and how they need to be perceived (social jobs). We extracted repeated situations, clustered them into struggle moments, and mapped the push and pull forces that drive behaviour — what triggers action, what blocks it, and what exhausts the people navigating it.
What emerged was not a story about women lacking confidence, ambition, or capability. It was a story about invisible work — labour that accumulates without acknowledgement, consumes cognitive and emotional capacity without appearing on any performance dashboard, and eventually drives high-performing women out of leadership, quietly, without a dramatic announcement.
The second phase of the research interviewed male colleagues at equivalent levels with the same questions. The finding was consistent across every geography and sector: men did not see what women described. Not because they did not care — but because the invisible work was invisible to those not doing it.
Nothing changes when the people who could change it cannot see the problem.
That is the stalemate. Women do not raise it because raising it carries social risk. Men do not raise it because they do not have access to the experience. Organisations continue investing in the same solutions and wondering why the burnout gap is not closing.
Why I Write About This?
I am a behavioural researcher, leadership facilitator, and certified Enneagram practitioner. But before any of those titles, I am someone who has lived what I am writing about — not as a case study, but as a practitioner navigating the same terrain as the women I work with.
I write about what is actually happening inside organisations and inside the people leading them. Not the polished version. Not the version that fits neatly into a keynote slide. The version that shows up at 11pm, or in a pre-burnout warning sign you almost missed, or in the quiet decision a talented woman makes to stop trying to reach a leadership level that was never designed to hold her as she actually is.
The data tells us there is a problem. The interviews tell us what it feels like from the inside. And the question I keep returning to — the one I will explore in the next piece in this series — is not how we make women more resilient.
The better question is: what invisible work are our women leaders carrying that nobody has yet acknowledged?
That question changes everything. Including what an organisation chooses to do next.
About the Author
Inna Malaia is a keynote speaker, leadership facilitator, behavioural researcher, and founder of Bevel — a human development practice working at the intersection of leadership, culture, and AI transformation. She is a certified Enneagram practitioner (WEPSS) and the author of The Unmuted Shift, proprietary qualitative research on gender dynamics in leadership across seven European and Middle Eastern markets. Inna works with international organisations, corporate leadership teams, and senior executives across the globe. For speaking, facilitation, or advisory enquiries: impact@bevel.world
Sources
Gallup, What Women Really Want at Work (2023). Survey of 18,000+ workers globally. Female burnout rate 33% vs male 25%.
Future Forum Pulse Survey (2022–2023). Female burnout 46% vs male 37%.
Founder Reports, 17 Mental Health Statistics for Entrepreneurs (2025). Burnout 34%, anxiety 50%, loneliness/isolation 27%.
GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor), Women's Entrepreneurship Report 2024/2025. Women 47% more likely than men to close a business for family or personal reasons.
The Unmuted Shift. Qualitative research by Bevel Sàrl, December 2025 – March 2026. 28 individual interviews, male and female, mid-to-senior management. Countries: Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Romania, UK, Germany, Middle East. Methodology: Jobs to be Done framework. Copyright Bevel Sàrl, 2026.
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