You’re Not Burned Out. You’re Undervalued.

Burnout is usually explained as a personal failure.

A lack of boundaries.
A resilience gap.
A nervous system that “can’t handle it.”

For high-performing women, this framing becomes another quiet accusation:
If you were stronger, more disciplined, more self-aware, you wouldn’t feel this way.

That story is convenient.
It keeps systems untouched.
And it places the burden of repair on the person already carrying the most.

After years inside consulting, tech, and leadership environments, I’ve come to see something else entirely.

High-performing women don’t burn out because they lack resilience.
They burn out because their competence is continuously extracted without authority ever being granted.

This is not about working too many hours.
It’s about working without leverage.

Inside complex organisations, the most capable women often become invisible infrastructure.

They are the ones who:

• absorb ambiguity when strategy is unclear

• translate between stakeholders who don’t speak the same language

• hold emotional steadiness when rooms get tense

• anticipate problems before they surface

• keep momentum when systems stall

They are praised for being “calm under pressure.”
For being “reliable.”
For “holding everything together.”

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, that praise turns into expectation.

More work flows through them.
More decisions are escalated to them.
More responsibility accumulates.

Without a corresponding increase in authority, recognition, or decision rights.

This is where burnout actually begins.

Not in exhaustion.
But in misalignment.

You’re accountable without authorship.
Visible in delivery, invisible in decision-making.
Trusted with outcomes, excluded from influence.

And because you are capable, the system keeps taking.

Not out of malice.
Out of design.

Modern organisations are very good at extracting competence.
They are far less skilled at noticing when extraction becomes exploitation.

Especially when the person doing the work does not complain.
Especially when she stays composed.
Especially when she keeps delivering.

This is why so many women struggle to articulate what feels wrong.

They’re not failing.
They’re succeeding in a way that quietly costs them clarity, confidence, and health.

They feel tired, but rest doesn’t fix it.
They feel unmotivated, but they still care deeply.
They feel stuck, but on paper everything looks “fine.”

Because value, in these systems, is often misread.

Effort is visible.
Judgment is not.

Stability is rewarded.
Authority is withheld.

Responsibility accumulates faster than power.

And women are disproportionately placed into roles that stabilise systems rather than shape them.

So when organisations respond with wellness initiatives, time-management workshops, or resilience training, they miss the point.

You cannot boundary your way out of structural undervaluation.
You cannot meditate your way into authority.
You cannot self-care your way into decision rights.

Burnout here is not a signal to rest harder.

It is a signal to recalibrate how value is defined and claimed.

To ask different questions:

• Where am I essential, but not empowered?

• Where am I carrying risk without influence?

• Where am I rewarded for holding things together, but not for shaping direction?

Until these questions are addressed, high-performing women will keep internalising a problem that was never theirs to solve.

And the most painful part?

Many of them will leave — not because they couldn’t handle the work,
but because they could no longer tolerate being unseen while carrying so much of it.

Burnout, in these environments, is not a weakness.

It is a rational response to a system that consumes brilliance
without creating space for it to lead.

What they are experiencing is not burnout as fatigue.

It is burnout as erasure of value.

If this essay reflects your experience at work, you’re not imagining it and you’re not alone.

What you’re feeling isn’t fragility.
It’s clarity arriving late, because the system never named the cost.