Corporate America is crushing senior-level mothers. Here's how they're coping

"“Do other women have hobbies? Rich social lives? Energy enough to do much more than collapse into bed and scroll for a few minutes before passing out?” a chief content officer with one kid wrote. Some of the hacks they offered unconsciously mirrored the hellscape they lived in. One mother said she used AI to generate a bedtime story read aloud in her own voice for her children during business trips. Another gave her child a toy laptop and trained her to “work” on it while she works."

"“Stop hacking the system and literally burn the system down. It does not work, clearly,” Colleen Curtis, the head of community growth at Reddit and a single mother with two kids, commented. The intensification of everything Senior-level mothers are caught in a two-way trap: the intensification of work and the intensification of parenting."

"The pandemic gave rise to remote jobs, but it also gave rise to the infinite work day as organizations discovered the boundary between work and home could be erased. This is a gift for working parents juggling school pickup times and nap schedules, but it's also an exhausting burden for moms trying to power down during non-work hours. According to Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Annual Report, on average, workers receive 117 emails a day and 153 Teams messages, and go two minutes between interruptions whether it's a meeting, email, or message."

"Emails sent after 8:00pm have increased 16% in the last year, and the average worker receives over 50 emails after work hours. One third of workers said the pace of work over the past five years has made it impossible to keep up. The intensification is hitting leaders hard. In its 2025 Global Leadership report, the leadership consultancy firm Development Dimensions International found 71% of the nearly 11,000 leaders it surveyed reported a significant increase in their stress level after taking on their current role, up from 63% in 2022. Another report found leadership burnout rose to 56%"

Senior-level mothers experience intensified work and intensified parenting at the same time. Remote work expanded the workday by erasing boundaries between home and office, making it harder to power down during non-work hours. Workers receive high volumes of emails and Teams messages and experience frequent interruptions, with work continuing into evenings. Emails sent after 8:00pm increased, and many workers receive substantial messages after work hours. Many workers report that the pace of work has become impossible to keep up. Leadership roles also show rising stress and burnout, with large majorities reporting significant stress increases and burnout reaching over half in recent findings.

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