Investment Banking Burnout in Women: Pressure, Recovery, and Support

A guide to investment banking burnout for women: what the WHO means by burnout, what research on bankers and finance careers does and doesn’t show, how deal cycles and availability can wear on a life, and support while you’re still working.

Sunday night, and the deal is live again

Shanti is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real banker. She’s 40, a vice president in an investment banking group, and it’s 9:40 on a Sunday night in October. She’s on the floor of her daughter’s bedroom, back against the dresser, halfway through a picture book about a bear who can’t sleep. Her phone is face down on the rug beside her. It buzzes twice, then a third time, and she knows from the rhythm that it’s the deal team channel and not a friend.

The buyer’s counsel has sent a new markup. The managing director wants a revised model and a page of talking points before a 7 a.m. call. None of this was on the calendar when she promised herself this weekend would be quiet. She finishes the page she’s on, because she’s already decided she will, and then she says the sentence she’s said more times than she can count: “Mommy has to do one quick thing.”

By 11:15 she’s at the kitchen island with two monitors’ worth of work on one laptop screen. Her husband comes in for water, looks at her, and doesn’t say anything, which is its own kind of saying something. She tells herself this is what the job is. She’s good at it. She’s been good at it for fourteen years. What she doesn’t tell herself is how often lately she opens her laptop and feels nothing at all, not dread, not interest, just a flat gray hum.

If that hum is familiar, this article is for you. It’s about what burnout is and isn’t, what research on bankers and on finance careers can and can’t tell you, how deal cycles and constant availability can wear on a life, what it can cost at home, and what kind of support can help while you’re still in the seat. It isn’t a case for leaving banking. If you’re wondering whether a job that pays this well is supposed to feel this bad, my piece on the golden handcuffs of finance takes that question on directly.

One note before we start. Nothing here diagnoses you. It’s meant to give you words for what’s happening, so you can bring it to a clinician, a coach, a partner or a friend and be better understood.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

Burnout, defined carefully

“Burnout” has become a word people use for any hard stretch, which makes it easy to either overuse it or wave it away. The World Health Organization gives it a narrower meaning. It includes burnout in the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, as an occupational phenomenon, in a chapter for reasons people contact health services that aren’t classed as illnesses or health conditions.

Two parts of that definition matter a lot in banking. The first is the phrase “has not been successfully managed.” It points at the conditions around the work, including how much of your time the job can claim and how predictable that claim is, not only at how well you cope. The second is that burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis. There’s no separate clinical condition called banker burnout, and a checklist in an article can’t tell you what’s going on in your body or your mood.

That second point cuts both ways. Exhaustion, broken sleep, irritability and that flat gray feeling can belong to burnout, and they can also belong to depression, anxiety, a medical issue, or several things at once. If what you’re noticing is persistent, getting worse, or showing up far outside work, that’s a reason to talk with a physician or a licensed mental health clinician rather than sort it out alone. My guide to high-functioning burnout covers the broader pattern in driven women, and my guide to burnout for women in finance looks across the wider industry.

What research on bankers can and can’t tell you

The studies discussed here don’t give us findings limited to women investment bankers, and I don’t want to present them as though they do. What they do offer is useful, as long as we’re honest about their limits.

The closest look I know of comes from Alexandra Michel, then of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, who followed bankers at two Wall Street investment banks over nine years and published the study in Administrative Science Quarterly. Michel had worked as an associate at a Wall Street bank herself before becoming a researcher. Roughly half of the associates she followed were women.

What Michel describes is a pattern over time. In the first three years, the bankers she followed tended to treat their bodies as something the mind controls, and the banks benefited from their hard work. Starting around year four, she writes, “body breakdowns thwarted organizational control,” and performance declined even as bankers tried harder to control their bodies. From around year six, some bankers began to treat their bodies as a source of information rather than an obstacle, and many changed how they worked. She also notes that bankers’ family, friends and partners objected to the work’s demands.

Here’s what that study can’t tell you. It’s one qualitative study of two banks, published in 2011, based on the author’s own fieldwork and interviews, and it isn’t a study of burnout as the WHO defines it. It isn’t a study of women specifically, and it can’t predict what will happen to any one person. What it does offer is a careful, long-term description of how overwork can feel chosen from the inside, and how the body can eventually stop cooperating with that choice.

A second line of research looks at careers rather than health. Economists Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz studied people who earned MBAs from a top U.S. business school between 1990 and 2006 and went into the corporate and financial sectors. Men and women started with nearly identical earnings, and the gap widened over the following years. The authors identified three main reasons: differences in training before the MBA, career interruptions, and weekly hours. The presence of children was the main contributor to women’s shorter hours and career breaks, and some mothers, especially those with well-off spouses, slowed down within a few years of a first birth. They describe the financial penalties for shorter hours and any break as “enormous” for MBAs.

That study is about pay and career paths, not burnout or well-being, and its sample is MBAs across corporate and financial jobs, not bankers alone. It’s worth including because it shows how steeply these careers can reward unbroken availability, and how that reward structure can shape the choices couples make at home.

Deal cycles and the cost of never knowing when

Long hours are part of the story, but in banking the hours aren’t always the hardest part. The hardest part is often not knowing. A pitch can appear on a Thursday. A buyer can go quiet for two weeks and then want everything by Monday. A signing date moves, and the weekend you’d planned around it moves with it. The work comes in surges you can’t fully schedule, and the job quietly expects you to be reachable for all of them.

Living that way can create a constant low-level readiness. You check your phone at your kid’s soccer game, at a red light, in the middle of a conversation with your partner, not because anything is due but because something could be. You make weekend plans in pencil. You feel a small jolt when your screen lights up, even on a vacation day. It can feel like never being fully off, even when you’re technically off.

Over time, that readiness can crowd out the things that usually help people recover: sleep that isn’t interrupted, time that’s truly yours, and the feeling that a plan will hold. When rest can be canceled at any moment, it can stop feeling like rest. That doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means the rhythm of the job leaves very little room for your body to come down.

This is also where banking tends to differ from other long-hours professions. In BigLaw, much of the pressure is organized around billable hours. In banking, the clock is often the deal itself, and it can speed up or stop without warning. If you’re comparing notes with friends in law, my piece on BigLaw burnout covers that version of the pressure.

Sometimes the cost shows up physically first: sleep that doesn’t restore, headaches, stomach trouble, jaw tension, getting sick right after a deal closes. Those symptoms deserve a real medical look. They have many possible causes, and stress shouldn’t be assumed to be the only one.

What it can cost at home

Kristie is a second illustrative composite. She’s 48, a managing director, and it’s a Saturday morning in early spring. She’s sitting in the car in her own driveway with the engine off, a coffee going cold in the cup holder, because she’s just finished a forty-minute call and she isn’t ready to walk back into the house yet. Through the kitchen window she can see her husband making pancakes with their younger son. They started without her. That was the right call. It still stings.

“I’m not missing things,” she tells a friend later, a little too quickly. “I’m there for the big stuff. I’m just not there for the small stuff.” She hears herself say it and goes quiet. The small stuff, she’s starting to suspect, is most of it.

Claudia Goldin, the Harvard economist who won the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has a name for jobs like Kristie’s. In an excerpt from her book Career and Family, she calls it “greedy work.”

Goldin’s work is about pay, careers and couples, not about mental health, so it can’t tell you how any particular family will feel. But it names something many banking families live with: the arrangement where one partner’s availability to the deal depends on the other partner’s availability to everything else. That arrangement can work. It can also build up resentment, loneliness and distance on both sides, especially when nobody chose it out loud.

For women in banking, the pressure can run in more than one direction. Some are the partner on call at work and feel guilty about what they’re missing. Some are trying to be on call at work and at home at the same time. Some have stepped back, or are thinking about it, and are weighing that choice against a career that penalizes breaks steeply. My piece on how burnout affects a marriage goes further into what that strain can look like between partners, and my piece on rebuilding connection after burnout looks at what can help afterward.

Both/And: the work can matter to you, and it can still cost too much

One of the traps in this conversation is thinking you have to pick a side. Either you love the work and you should stop complaining, or the work is hurting you and you should leave. Real lives rarely fit either box.

You can find deal work genuinely absorbing. You can like being the person who holds a complicated transaction together, who knows where every number came from, whom the client calls when it gets tense. And the way the work is structured right now can still be taking more from your sleep, your body and your family than you want to give. The first doesn’t cancel the second. Noticing the cost isn’t disloyalty to the work or to yourself.

Shanti, on Monday morning, is a small example of what that can look like in practice. She joins the 7 a.m. call with the revised model finished. Afterward, instead of letting the next request land on her evening by default, she asks the managing director a plain question: which of this week’s deliverables actually need to be done tonight, and which can wait until morning. It’s a small question. It’s also the first time in months she’s treated her evening as something worth protecting rather than something to give away.

That’s often what Both/And looks like from the inside. Not a dramatic decision. A little more room to hold two true things at once.

The Systemic Lens: availability as the job’s hidden price

It would be easy to read everything above as a list of things you personally need to fix. That would miss the point. By the WHO’s own framing, burnout comes from workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed, and managing it isn’t only the job of the person under it.

Michel’s study describes banks whose stated values emphasized autonomy and balance while the everyday rhythm of the work produced overwork that felt self-chosen. Bertrand, Goldin and Katz describe careers where the financial penalties for shorter hours and career breaks are very large. Goldin describes jobs that pay a premium for being on call. None of that describes the intentions of any particular bank, group or manager. But taken together, it describes a structure where availability itself is part of what gets rewarded, and where the cost of that availability often lands at home.

That structure can land differently on women. When children still shape women’s hours and career breaks more than men’s, as the MBA study found, being on call at work and on call at home can collide. The choice to step back, when it happens, can carry a steep financial and professional price. None of that is a personal failing. It’s the terrain the career sits on.

The proverbial foundation of how you respond to pressure may well have been laid long before your first analyst class. You may have learned early that being reliable and uncomplaining kept things steady. But the ground that foundation sits on, the way availability is priced in this industry, isn’t yours alone to fix, and it’s fair to expect firms and teams to share in the work of making it steadier.

Support while you’re still in the seat

Leaving isn’t the only answer, and for many women it isn’t the answer they want right now. These are some forms of support that can help while you’re still working. None of them is a cure, and none of them requires you to have everything figured out first.

Get the physical symptoms looked at. Sleep problems, headaches, stomach trouble, frequent illness and changes in your cycle deserve medical attention in their own right. Stress may be part of the picture, but it shouldn’t be assumed to be the whole of it.

Make one piece of your time predictable. You may not be able to control when a deal surges, but you can often protect one small, specific window: one evening a week, the first hour after you get home, the bedtime routine. Tell the people who need to know. Watch what actually happens when you do. Shanti’s Monday question is a version of this.

Ask for priorities, not permission. “Which of these needs to be done tonight?” is a professional question, not a confession. In many teams the answer is less urgent than the request made it sound.

Talk about the arrangement at home, out loud. If one of you is on call at work and the other is on call for everything else, it can help to name that directly and decide together what’s working and what isn’t, rather than letting it be decided deal by deal.

Consider therapy, and be clear about what you’re asking for. Therapy is clinical care from a licensed clinician. It can help you sort out what’s workload and what’s pattern, look at the history underneath the patterns if that’s relevant, and support you through whatever decisions you make. Executive coaching is a different service with a different scope. It can help with leadership, communication and career strategy, but it isn’t mental health treatment. My guide to therapy for women in finance covers what that can look like.

Keep the career questions separate, and give them their own time. You may eventually decide to change groups, move to the buy side, go in-house, or leave finance. Those are real decisions, and they deserve better than a choice made at midnight after a canceled weekend. My piece on why driven women in finance can’t stop working looks at the pull that can make stepping back feel impossible.

A good therapist won’t tell you whether to stay or go. What therapy can offer is a place to think where your phone isn’t the one setting the agenda.

Starting before the next deal closes

It’s tempting to wait for a natural break before you let yourself ask for help: after this deal, after bonus season, after the promotion decision. The trouble is that in this work there’s almost always another deal. You don’t need a crisis to justify taking this seriously. If you’re reading this late on a Sunday, phone buzzing beside you, that’s reason enough.

You’ve spent years being the person who’s reachable when everyone else needs you. It’s reasonable to want some of that reliability for yourself, and it’s reasonable to start before something forces the question.

Warmly,
Annie.