Apparently, empathy is ruining the workplace now.
The New York Times published a piece last year asking whether women have "ruined the workplace."The original headline was even more direct before they quietly edited it after the internet responded accordingly. The argument went like this: flexibility, empathy, and the values women have pushed into professional spaces are what’s making work worse for everyone. I read it sitting at my desk, after a full day of work, and I just stared at it for a minute. Because if you’re someone who has been grinding inside a workplace that doesn’t function properly, you already know what’s broken. And it isn’t the person two cubicles over who asked to leave at 4:30 on a Thursday to pick up their kid. Here’s what I keep coming back to. Blaming women, or empathy, or flexibility, for the current state of work is the most convenient possible explanation. It means nobody has to look at how the workplace was actually built. Gallup’s 2026 data shows global employee engagement dropped to 20%. Eighty percent of workers are not engaged. The percentage of employees who strongly agree that their organization cares about their overall well-being has been in freefall since 2020. And 50% of U.S. workers are experiencing significant daily stress. That is not a flexibility problem. And it's not an empathy problem. That is a design problem. The systems most people work inside were built for output, not for the humans producing it. The workloads, the meeting loads, the always-on culture, the org charts that keep flattening while expecting the same results from fewer people. Those are structural decisions made at the top. When those structures start failing, the instinct is always to blame whatever changed most recently. And in a lot of workplaces, what changed most recently is that women started saying: this doesn’t work for me. This pace is unsustainable. This culture is burning people out. That’s not ruining the workplace. That’s diagnosing it. If you’re inside a workplace right now that feels like it’s slowly falling apart, and you keep hearing that the problem is people being “too soft” or wanting “too much,” I want you to try something this week. Look at where the friction actually lives. Not the personalities. Not the complaints. But the structure. Is the workload realistic for the number of people doing it? Are the expectations clear, or do they shift every quarter with no real explanation? When someone raises a problem, does it get addressed, or does it get reframed as an attitude issue? That’s the 5 Cs lens I use in my coaching work, specifically the Conditions and Culture drivers. When the conditions of the job don’t add up and the culture punishes people for naming it, burnout is inevitable. You don’t have to fix the whole system this week. But you can stop accepting the narrative that the problem is people wanting work to be livable. I talked about all of this on this week’s episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast® with Alison Campbell. Alison is the founder of unBurnt®, a former Chief of Staff who spent nearly twenty years in finance and tech before burning out herself. She’s now doing research with Bentley University on how people actually feel at work, and she has a lot to say about workplace design, working motherhood, and what needs to change if burnout rates are ever going to move. It's one of those conversations where you'll find yourself nodding along with. Take care, Tara |