The institution did not break these women. It ran them at a deficit so precisely calibrated to their capacity that they could not feel it happening until the cost was already significant. That is not an accident. That is a design.
The women at the top of the structure in 2025 are operating under what Monclaire is naming the carrying cost: the unpaid labor required to make a system function as if it were equitable. It is cumulative, uncompensated, and largely invisible, and the institution depends on it without accounting for it, while the wellness industry has been monetizing it for a decade without once naming its source. The carrying cost is not burnout. Burnout is the acute version, the one that gets the think piece and the leave of absence and the LinkedIn post about what she learned from stepping back. The carrying cost is chronic. It does not announce itself. It is what happens to a woman who has been excellent under conditions that were not designed for her, for long enough that excellent becomes the floor rather than the ceiling, and the floor keeps dropping.
Over half of women in senior leadership told Deloitte they feel consistently burned out. Women reported burnout at 59 percent in 2024 versus 46 percent for men. Women in senior leadership are leaving their roles at the highest rate McKinsey has ever recorded. And junior women, watching them leave, told researchers that one of the reasons they do not want to be promoted is that the people at those levels seem burned out and unhappy.
The pipeline is not losing the women who are depleted. It is losing the women who looked at those women and made a rational decision. This is not a wellness problem. It is a structural indictment dressed in athleisure, and the fact that it has been handed to the wellness industry to solve is the most precise illustration of how a system protects itself from accountability.
What the Carrying Cost Actually Contains
The research on women working a full professional day and then returning home to the majority of domestic labor has existed since Arlie Hochschild named it in 1989. What has changed at the senior level is the addition of a third category of labor that nobody named until the data became too obvious to ignore.
At home, irrespective of earning level or seniority, the domestic load persists. Irrespective of how senior a woman rises in her organization, McKinsey found, she continues to carry household responsibilities that her male counterparts shed as they ascend. The word shed is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Men do not lose the responsibilities. They transfer them. To her.
At work, senior women do far more sponsorship than their male peers, disproportionately hold diversity and inclusion responsibilities, and check in with employees more on wellness, workload, and balance. McKinsey & Company This is the layer of organizational labor that makes institutions function and appears nowhere on the organizational chart, nowhere in the performance review, and nowhere in the compensation structure. When it does not get done, it is noticed in ways that have professional consequences for the woman who was supposed to be doing it.
Together, these layers constitute the carrying cost: professional output, domestic labor, and organizational maintenance, running simultaneously, without compensation for the latter two, without acknowledgment that the combination is materially different from what her male counterpart is carrying, and without any institutional mechanism to address the difference. It is not a phase. It is the permanent operating condition of senior women in 2025.
Why Invisibility Is the Point
Depletion that can be named is depletion that can be addressed structurally. Depletion that cannot be named, that looks like ambition from the outside and feels like competence from the inside, is depletion that can be managed indefinitely by an institution that has no interest in its resolution.
The institution benefits from senior women operating at a chronic deficit because that deficit is precisely what produces the outcomes the institution values: extreme availability, self-managed workloads, emotional labor performed without compensation, and the quiet suppression of needs that would otherwise require accommodation. The carrying cost is not the unfortunate side effect of demanding careers. It is the price the institution charges for admission to the upper levels, and it charges it almost exclusively to women.
And here is where the system achieves its most sophisticated move: the same culture producing the depletion has also produced a $4.5 trillion wellness industry to absorb it. The exhausted senior woman is not a structural problem to be solved. She is a consumer to be served. She can purchase a retreat, a supplement, a meditation subscription, a journal with the right prompts, a sound bath, a sleep tracker, a coach who will help her build resilience, which is the word institutions use when they mean the capacity to absorb structural stress without requiring structural change. She emerges from the weekend slightly less depleted than when she entered it, ready to re-enter the system that produced the depletion in the first place.
The wellness industry does not benefit from the system changing. It benefits from the system remaining exactly as it is. Every yoga mat sold to an exhausted senior woman is a transaction that depends on her exhaustion persisting. The industry and the institution are not in tension. They are in partnership, and the product they are jointly selling is the idea that her depletion is a personal condition with a personal solution, rather than a structural condition that would require a structural response.
The institution is never implicated. The woman is perpetually in recovery.
Over 50% of women in leadership roles report feeling consistently burned out, outpacing their male counterparts in both distress and disillusionment. ResearchGate The institutional response to this finding, across most organizations, has been to expand the employee assistance program and add a wellness stipend. A stipend. For the depletion they designed.
What Depletion Looks Like When It Is Invisible
The particular cruelty of the carrying cost is that it does not announce itself. It does not arrive as collapse. It arrives as efficiency: the capacity to function on less sleep, absorb more feedback, run the meeting and manage the relationship and send the follow-up and still be whatever the evening requires. It arrives as competence, and competence is rewarded, and reward creates the incentive to keep going, and the cycle self-reinforces until something breaks that takes much longer to repair than anyone expected or than any institution will acknowledge on the record.
The most depleted woman at the top is often the most indispensable, and this is not accidental. Indispensability is the mechanism by which the institution ensures her continued availability. The woman who holds the institutional knowledge cannot step back. Everyone's first call cannot stop answering. Having made herself essential, she finds that the institution has quietly made her depletion structural: not something it caused, but something it depends on.
In a 2022 Deloitte survey, 69 percent of C-suite executives reported considering resignation due to burnout. By 2025, that figure had risen to 70 percent. The ROOTED Way The ones who did not resign are running at the chronic deficit their institutions never designed to accommodate and have not, in any meaningful structural way, addressed. They are keeping things running. They are very good at it. They are not fine.
The Pipeline Problem Nobody Is Naming
Women in the Workplace 2025 found that women decline promotion in part because people at those levels seem burned out and unhappy in their roles. Lean In This is treated in most organizational literature as a pipeline problem: insufficient aspiration, a gap in ambition, not enough women wanting to advance. It is not a pipeline problem. It is a witness problem.
Junior women are watching the senior women ahead of them with complete clarity. They see the carrying cost. They see the depletion that looks like success in the press release and looks like something else entirely from inside the organization. They see women who arrived at the top and found it was not designed for them, carrying loads distributed inequitably, performing labor that was uncompensated, managing the slow erosion of the very reserve that made them exceptional at their work in the first place. And then those junior women are asked why they are not more ambitious.
The question is insulting. The data is right there.
What the System Would Have to Admit
A genuine structural response to the carrying cost would be inconvenient. It would mean admitting that the emotional and organizational labor currently performed without compensation by women at the senior level is real labor with real value that should either be compensated, distributed equitably, or removed from the expectation structure entirely. It would mean admitting that the domestic load is not a personal arrangement but a systemic condition that the institution has never built structures to accommodate. It would mean admitting that the wellness industry is not a solution to a workplace problem but a revenue stream built on the calculated preservation of the problem itself.
Most institutions will admit none of this. They will expand the employee assistance program. They will add a meditation app to the benefits package. They will put a senior woman on stage at the annual leadership summit to talk about resilience, and she will be very good at it, because performing not-depleted is a skill she has been developing for the entire length of her career.
She will have been running the carrying cost that morning. She will be running it when she gets home. The institution will post the photograph on LinkedIn.
The caption will say something about inspiration.
