Burnout for Women in Tech: The Cost of Being the Only One

DRIVEN WOMEN & PERFECTIONISM • March 18, 2026

By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719) · Clinically reviewed June 2026

This article is psychoeducational. It isn’t a substitute for individual therapy or medical care. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) any time, day or night.

The Bell Pepper in the Produce Aisle

Lauren was thirty-nine, and by every external measure she was doing exceptionally well. She was a project manager at a pharmaceutical company in San Jose, and she was known, in every meeting she’d ever attended, as the most prepared person in the room. She had a system for everything. Color-coded calendars. Pre-read packets sent forty-eight hours ahead. A follow-up email drafted before the meeting had ended. In eleven years of professional life, she’d never missed a deadline, never been late to a deliverable, never once been the person who dropped the ball.

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, she had a panic attack in the Whole Foods produce aisle.

(Lauren is a composite. Her name and details have been changed to protect confidentiality.)

She was standing in front of the bell peppers. Red, yellow, orange, green. And she couldn’t decide which ones to buy. She stood there for what she later estimated was four minutes, unable to move, her heart rate climbing, her vision narrowing, the fluorescent lights suddenly very loud. A woman asked if she was okay. Lauren said yes. She left the store without buying anything and sat in her car for twenty minutes before she could drive.

She came to me three weeks later. “I don’t understand what happened,” she said. She was still wearing her badge lanyard, twisting the plastic clip between her fingers. “I make decisions all day long. I’m good at decisions. I run a portfolio. And I could not pick a pepper. What is wrong with me?”

Sitting with Lauren that first session, I felt something I’ve felt with dozens of driven women who work in technology. Not alarm. A kind of recognition. Her nervous system had been running at maximum capacity for so long that it had finally, quietly, refused. The pepper wasn’t the problem. The pepper was the last straw on a load she’d been carrying, uncounted, for eleven years. What I’ve come to call the invisible tax had finally come due.

In my work with driven women in technology over the past fifteen-plus years, across senior engineers, product leaders, and founders, I’ve watched this specific burnout pattern accelerate in the women who are objectively among the most capable people in their organizations. Not the ones who are struggling to keep up. The ones who never miss. That’s the part I want to name in the first few minutes of this piece, because if you’re reading it at 2 a.m., you probably think the problem is that you’re not doing enough. You’re doing an enormous amount. You’re just doing most of it where no one can see.

The Invisible Tax of Being the Only One

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the only woman in the room, or one of very few. It isn’t the exhaustion of the work itself. It’s the exhaustion of the constant low-level monitoring that rides alongside the work.

Think of it like driving in a country where you don’t quite speak the language, on the opposite side of the road from the one you learned on. You can do it. You do it well, even. But some part of your brain never fully relaxes, because one lapse in attention has consequences your local colleagues don’t face. That’s what it’s like to be the only woman in a room of men who assume, by default, that the most senior person present is male. You’re doing the meeting, and you’re also reading the meeting: whether the comment that just landed wrong was worth addressing, or whether addressing it would make you the problem. Whether your idea will be heard, or heard three minutes later in a lower voice and credited to someone else.

What this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon is that you leave a forty-five-minute meeting having done ninety minutes of work, and you can’t explain to your partner that night why you’re so tired, because on paper you sat in a chair and talked. This is what researchers call the minority stress of underrepresentation. In tech, where women remain significantly underrepresented at senior levels, that stress is chronic, cumulative, and largely invisible. Invisible to the people around you, and often invisible to you, because you’ve been carrying it so long that it’s become the water you swim in.

Lauren didn’t know she was exhausted from being the only woman in the room. She thought she was exhausted from the work. She thought the answer was to be more organized, more prepared, more efficient. She’d been trying to solve a structural problem with a personal optimization strategy, and here’s the thing: it had worked. For eleven years, it had worked. Until the morning her system looked at four varieties of bell pepper and decided it had nothing left.

Imposter Syndrome Isn’t the Problem You Think It Is

I recently went back and reread Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes’s original 1978 paper, the one where they first named the imposter phenomenon in accomplished women. What stayed with me is how carefully they framed it as something these women had learned, not something they were born broken with. That framing has been almost completely lost in the decades since.

The term has become so ubiquitous that it now gets used as shorthand for a character flaw. Something women need to fix in themselves. Go to any women-in-tech conference and you’ll find at least one panel on imposter syndrome, and the implicit message underneath most of them is: you feel like a fraud because something’s wrong with you. Work on your confidence. Lean in.

That framing is, I’d argue, exactly backwards.

Feeling like a fraud, in an environment that has structurally communicated to you that you don’t belong, isn’t irrational. It’s information. When you’ve spent your career in rooms where the default assumption is that the most senior person is male, where your ideas are more likely to be reattributed, where you’re more likely to be interrupted, where the bar for your competence sits higher than the bar for the men beside you, then the sense of not-belonging isn’t a distortion. It’s an accurate read of the signal you’ve been receiving.

Here’s what I want you to sit with. The work isn’t to fix your confidence. The work is to understand why your nervous system learned to doubt itself, and to build a relationship with yourself that isn’t contingent on external validation. Of course you feel like a fraud. You’ve been graded on a curve that was steeper than everyone else’s, and then told the problem was your mindset. You’re not imagining how hard this has been.

In my clinical experience, this is consistently what I see in driven women in tech, and I want to be precise about the scope of the claim. Roughly four times out of five, the woman who arrives describing imposter syndrome isn’t low on confidence at all. She’s exhausted from a lifetime of overcompensating for a doubt the environment handed her. The exception, the fifth case, is the woman whose self-doubt is rooted in something older, a childhood where love felt conditional on performance, and in that case the imposter feeling at work is the adult echo of a much earlier signal. I don’t know which one you are from a blog post. But I’d ask, in a first session, and I’d ask early, because the answer changes where the healing has to start.

The Body Keeps the Score, Even in Sprint Planning

Lauren’s panic attack in the produce aisle wasn’t random. It was her body communicating something her mind had been refusing to hear.

Here’s the mechanism, and it’s worth understanding precisely. The body doesn’t distinguish between the stress of a high-stakes product launch and the stress of a predator in the room. It answers both with the same physiological cascade: cortisol, adrenaline, elevated heart rate, narrowed attention. Think of it like a smoke alarm. Useful, even lifesaving, when there’s an actual fire. But if the alarm has been going off at a low pitch every workday for years, the wiring changes. It starts firing at burnt toast. It fires in the produce aisle. What this looks like in a body is a woman who can run a portfolio review flawlessly and then can’t choose a vegetable, because the alarm has been ringing so long it’s stopped being able to tell the difference between a threat and a Tuesday.

For women in tech, the body’s running tab often shows up as chronic tension headaches, a jaw clenched tight enough to crack a molar, trouble falling asleep, digestive trouble, the sense of being permanently, slightly braced. The inability to fully relax even on vacation. The way your shoulders are already up near your ears before you’ve opened your laptop in the morning.

These aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signs of a nervous system that has been working very hard for a very long time. They’re signs that your body needs something different from what it’s been getting.

When Lauren and I traced her Tuesday back, weeks later, she remembered that her shoulders had been up near her ears since roughly 7 a.m., when she’d opened Slack and found forty-one unread messages and a calendar with no gaps before 5 p.m. She hadn’t registered any of it as stress. It was just Tuesday. By the time she reached the produce aisle at 6:15, her body had been braced for eleven hours, and the bell peppers were simply the first moment all day that asked her to make a low-stakes choice with no correct answer. “I think that was the only decision all day that didn’t matter,” she said, “and it’s the one that broke me.” That’s the tell. It isn’t the hard decisions that undo a driven woman. It’s the first easy one, after the alarm has been ringing so long she’s stopped being able to hear it.

The pepper wasn’t the problem. The pepper was the message.

The Loneliness of High Performance

The women I work with in tech often describe a specific relational split: they’re excellent at professional relationships and quietly struggling with personal ones.

They’re skilled at managing up, managing across, managing the dynamics of a complex organization. They’re less practiced at being vulnerable, at asking for help, at letting themselves be seen in their uncertainty and their exhaustion. This isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t a personality defect. The hypervigilance and self-monitoring that a woman in tech develops as a survival strategy don’t switch off when she walks in her front door. The same scanning that helps her read a room full of people who underestimate her also makes it hard to be present with a partner, a friend, a child. The same performance of competence that protects her at work also keeps her from being known.

About six months into our work together, Lauren told me she’d realized she hadn’t let anyone see her struggle in eleven years. Not her partner. Not her closest friend. Not her family. She’d been performing competence so consistently that she’d lost track of where the performance ended. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “I think I’ve been alone for a long time. Even when I was with people.” She wasn’t crying when she said it. That was almost the hardest part to watch. She said it the way she’d report a metric.

That sentence is one of the most common things I hear from driven women in tech, in one form or another. The loneliness of high performance. The isolation of being the person who always, always has it together.

Both/And: The Tech Industry Is Broken AND You Have Agency

Here’s the both/and that women in tech most need to hold, and most resist. The tech industry has a serious, structural problem with how it treats women, and you have real agency within that structure. Both are true. Holding only one at a time is what keeps you stuck.

If you only hold the first part, the structural problem, you become helpless. You end up waiting for a system that moves extremely slowly to hand you what you need, and your healing becomes contingent on institutional change that may not arrive in time to matter for your one actual life. The rage, which is completely legitimate, has nowhere useful to go. It turns inward and becomes exhaustion.

If you only hold the second part, your own agency, you fall into the other trap: making a structural problem into a personal one. You work harder on your “executive presence.” You try to develop a thicker skin. You invest in strategies to smooth your integration into a system that was built for someone else, and the cost of performing that integration, the invisible tax, compounds instead of shrinking.

The both/and asks you to name the structure accurately, with your full intelligence and your legitimate anger, and to identify the specific choices actually available to you inside it. Including the choice about whether to stay.

Renee, a staff engineer at a San Francisco startup who’d been the only woman on her team for three years, found her way to this reframe about a year into our work. She came in one week, sat down, and before she’d even set down her coffee she said, “I stopped asking how do I make myself fit. I started asking, is this a fit worth making.” I felt the room change. She wasn’t announcing a resignation. She hadn’t left, and she wasn’t sure she would. But the question underneath the question had shifted, and once it shifts, it changes what you’re willing to tolerate. She still had rage about the industry. She was no longer spending that rage on herself.

The Systemic Lens: Why Women in Tech Burn Out at Higher Rates

The higher burnout rates among women in tech aren’t a mystery, and they aren’t primarily a function of individual resilience or stress-management skills. They’re the predictable output of a system that asks women to do significantly more work than their male counterparts. Not only the technical work they were hired for, but the invisible work of moving through environments that weren’t designed for them.

I’ve come back again and again to the work of Arlie Hochschild, PhD, the Berkeley sociologist who, in her 1989 book The Second Shift, put language to something I see in nearly every intake with a woman in tech. She documented how women absorb layers of unpaid, unacknowledged labor that their male peers simply don’t. Reading her felt like reading a description of my own caseload, thirty years later, transposed into an open-plan office. Women in predominantly male environments carry a higher cognitive load because they’re continuously reading the room: whether their competence is being doubted, whether they’re being heard, whether they need to preemptively manage the gender dynamics before those dynamics manage them. That monitoring isn’t chosen. It’s learned, through repeated experience of what happens when you stop monitoring. And it’s metabolically expensive in a way that never shows up on a performance review.

There’s a second structural piece I want to name, because it’s so consistent. Women in tech are far more likely than their male colleagues to be handed the non-promotable work: the administrative tasks, the onboarding of new hires, the coordination and communication that keeps a team functional and leads to exactly zero promotions. Linda Babcock, PhD, the Carnegie Mellon economist whose research on this I return to often, gave it a name I find myself repeating to clients: the “office housework.” What her work showed me, and what I now watch play out weekly, is that this labor is real, widespread, and a major driver of the burnout gap. It isn’t that these women can’t say no. It’s that the cost of saying no, in a room where you’re already the only one, is calibrated differently for them.

So the tech industry’s notorious trouble retaining women in senior roles isn’t primarily a pipeline problem, a confidence gap, or a matter of women making different choices. It’s primarily a structural one: an environment that asks women to subsidize the functioning of organizations that don’t adequately acknowledge, compensate, or address the specific costs of being a woman inside them.

Here’s how that inheritance lives in a body on a Tuesday. It’s the open laptop at 11 p.m. because the coordination work you weren’t credited for still had to get done. It’s the shoulders up before the standup. It’s the way you rehearse a sentence four times before you say it in a meeting, so it can’t be heard as aggressive. You’re not broken. You’re not uniquely fragile. You’ve been solving an equation that was rigged before you sat down at the desk. That’s not personal failure. That’s structural reality, and naming it accurately is where the healing starts.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing from burnout as a woman in tech isn’t about becoming less ambitious. It’s about building your ambition on a different foundation.

The foundation most driven women in tech are standing on is fear. Fear of being found out, fear of not being good enough, fear of what happens if they stop performing for even a moment. That foundation is exhausting precisely because fear is exhausting. It demands constant maintenance and permits no rest. The foundation I help clients build is different. It rests on self-knowledge rather than self-monitoring, on genuine competence rather than performed competence, on the slowly earned understanding that your worth isn’t contingent on your output, your title, your last review, or whether the men in the room take you seriously.

This isn’t a quick fix. In my experience it moves through roughly three overlapping layers, though the order and pace differ for every woman, and I’d never promise a timeline.

The first layer is physiological. The body has been keeping the score, and before anything else, that baseline of low-grade threat has to come down. This is more than a vacation. A vacation you spend mentally rehearsing next week’s deliverables doesn’t count. It means finding what actually regulates your specific nervous system, not what you think should relax you, and building those practices into your week as non-negotiably as your sprint cycles. For some women that’s running. For some it’s genuinely unstructured time with people who want nothing from them. The practice matters less than the consistency and the genuine capacity to switch off.

The second layer is psychological, and this is the work therapy is built for. The woman who has fused her entire sense of self with her professional competence, who experiences any limitation or ordinary human inconsistency as evidence of fundamental inadequacy, isn’t going to genuinely recover until that fusion loosens. The performance continues because stopping feels existentially dangerous. Loosening that requires looking, with support, at the early experiences that first taught you your value was conditional. That you had to earn your place, prove your worth, be twice as good to get half as far. There’s real grief in that layer, for the years spent running on fear. It’s worth grieving.

The third layer is structural: making real changes to the conditions that produced and sustained the burnout. A different role. A different company. A different schedule. Or the internal stability to renegotiate your current conditions from solid ground rather than from the bottom of the tank. These changes are best identified after the psychological work has cleared enough space for you to see what you actually want, rather than what you’ve always been performing toward. If you’re sorting through the career-architecture question, executive coaching can run in parallel with the therapeutic work. The strategy and the healing don’t have to wait for each other.

Anjali, a senior product manager at a Bay Area company who came to therapy after her second anxiety attack in three months, put it this way at around the eighteen-month mark. “I thought recovery meant getting back to where I was. I was wrong. Recovery meant building something different. Not better performance. A different relationship to performance altogether.” She smiled when she said the last part, which she almost never did in our early sessions. It took longer than she expected. It changed more than she expected. She told me she was glad it did.

A quick word on when to reach for more help, because burnout lives on a spectrum. Early on, when it’s mostly a growing sense of going through the motions and struggling to recover on weekends, boundary changes and genuine recovery practices can sometimes restore equilibrium. In the middle, with chronic activation, emotional numbing, and somatic symptoms you can’t ignore, trauma-informed individual therapy is usually what’s needed, because the problem has become systemic rather than situational.

At the far end, where burnout has produced clinical depression, an anxiety disorder, or serious physical health consequences, please reach for fuller support, which may include a medical evaluation and medication. If you ever find yourself in genuine crisis, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. Reaching for that level of help isn’t evidence that you’ve failed. It’s evidence that you’re taking an accurate measurement of the load.

Lauren is still in tech. She’s still excellent at her job. She’s also, now, able to stand in front of the bell peppers and choose one without her heart rate climbing. She keeps the badge lanyard she was twisting that first session in a drawer at home. She doesn’t wear it anymore; she works somewhere else now. She doesn’t throw it away either. It sits there as a kind of witness. She’s told her partner, out loud, for the first time, that she isn’t always okay. “I feel like I’m actually here now,” she told me not long ago. “Like I’m in my life instead of managing it. Most days. Not every day.” Most days, not every day. That’s what healing actually looks like. Not a finish line. A held breath that finally lets out.

You’ve been carrying this for a long time, and you’ve been carrying more of it than is fair. If you’re ready to begin the process of genuine recovery, not just rest before the next sprint but actual healing, I’d be glad to support you. Strong & Stable, my weekly letter for driven women, is one place to keep this conversation going. Wherever you start, you don’t have to figure out the next move from the bottom of the tank. We can build some capacity first.

Warmly, Annie.

Medical Disclaimer