Women Thrive: Conquer Workload & Wellbeing

Burnout Burden on Women

Australian workplaces are confronting a deepening crisis in women's wellbeing tied to escalating workloads and unbalanced responsibilities. Reports from 2025 highlight rising stress levels, chronic energy depletion, and role overload among women, often compounded by the 'second shift' of caregiving and domestic duties. This strain persists despite women's workforce participation reaching a record 63.5% in early 2025, up from 58.6% a decade earlier, signaling greater economic integration but also heightened exposure to workplace pressures.

Recent data underscores the toll. Gallagher's 2025 Workforce Trends Report shows overall burnout climbing to 26%, a 3% increase from the prior year, amid sustained employer inaction on wellbeing. Great Place to Work analyses reveal women's wellbeing scores eroding significantly between 2023 and 2025, alongside drops in perceptions of fairness and leadership trust. Surveys indicate up to 72-80% of women reporting burnout experiences in recent periods, driven by heavy workloads, staff shortages, and post-pandemic adjustments.

Regulatory shifts add complexity. The 2024 Work Health and Safety Code of Practice mandates employers to manage psychosocial hazards like excessive workloads, while right-to-disconnect laws reshape after-hours boundaries. These aim to curb burnout but have unfolded against economic pressures and cost-of-living strains, contributing to transitional dips in wellbeing metrics. Progress on gender equality remains uneven: the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's scorecard shows a persistent 21.8% gender pay gap, and only about 27% of organisations achieve balanced gender representation.

Non-obvious tensions emerge in these dynamics. While women's higher education levels and participation rates suggest advancement potential, structural barriers—such as occupational segregation, unequal caring loads, and slower leadership pipelines—amplify overload. Initiatives to boost flexible work and parental leave uptake (with men now taking 17% of primary carer leave) offer partial relief, yet broader redesign of workloads lags. Inaction risks higher turnover, absenteeism, and lost productivity, particularly in female-dominated sectors like health and care, where shortages already strain systems.