The Instant Pot Within: Why Women’s Biology Demands a New Approach to Workplace Burnout

Founding Momentum, by Malika Boukhelifa, PhD

Woman in an office holding an Instant Pot, with settings for career caregiving, emotions, and leadership and labeled for PMS, Pregnancy and Lactation, and Perimenopause

A recent survey on LinkedIn reveals a stark reality: 74% of women experience burnout, significantly higher than men at 61%. Studies suggest that much of this can be attributed to women’s “double shift”. After clocking off work, women are still expected to handle home chores, care for children, aging parents, and fulfill family duties.

Social norms and gender expectations contribute significantly to this gap. To close it, organizations and societies must consider how gender role pressures lead to stress and exhaustion on the job. Working mothers face even higher burnout rates, while many women feel underutilized at work and are overlooked for promotions.

All of these factors are real and important to consider. Let's pause on that statistic—74% of women burning out is staggering. That's 7 women out of 10. While the double shift theory is absolutely valid, even Eve Rodsky, who wrote "Fair Play" (emphasizing equal workload at home), realized that women still weren't satisfied with just balanced chores. She later published "Finding Your Unicorn," encouraging women to focus on self-expression and finding "what makes you YOU."

This could help, but that 74% statistic kept nagging at me. Something was still missing from all these studies and solutions. Then it hit me: women's biology.

The Missing Piece: Women's Biology

Throughout their lives, women's bodies undergo extensive transformations: hormonal and physical changes that demand unimaginable energy. These transformations are exhausting and often hard to channel. I call these phases the "instant pot" phases, named after the Instant Pot cooking utensil, that became a hit in the cooking world because it could be used to prepare any dish you want in one pot. You could sauté meat, make soup, yogurt, dessert, rice. The settings were endless. A woman's body is a bit like that.

If you look at a woman's lifetime timeline, like her male counterpart, she goes from being a baby to becoming a little girl, going through growing pains, changing teeth, building her brain, and so on. Then both boys and girls enter puberty, a hormonal stew where the instant pot goes crazy with all settings pushed at the same time. We all remember the puberty phase: not fun for us or our parents. As we start getting used to periods and, for 8 out of 10 of us, dealing with PMS (another chaotic setting) and period cramps, we already learn to work through pain and uncomfortable situations. We have to build logistics around every activity or work we do. From school to the workplace, the system was not built for us. Yes, there were pads and tampons in the bathrooms, but we still had to miss classes or sit for exams through fatigue and pain.

Then, for those who have children, comes pregnancy, another instant pot moment, where all settings are pushed at once. We become home to another human being. Our hormones change, we make new kinds of hormones, we must satisfy our cravings and feed the baby or babies. For 9 months, our bodies expand, our skin stretches, our ribs extend, and we build a room with all the amenities such as kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, inside of us for our little one(s). We become Bob the Builder. For those working, we're still pushing through all these transformational phases.

Then when baby arrives, our body gets another new setting: lactation. A whole new thing that adds to lack of sleep, postpartum anxiety, and a protective instinct toward our baby. In addition to this, after a short maternity leave, we work both at the job and at home while going through all of this. Motherhood comes with its own challenges, and on top of this, in our late 30s to early 50s, we're talking about 4-11 years of perimenopause of erratic settings on the instant pot. Another unknown, often unrecognized phase.

At this point, the body undergoing these drastic changes is exhausted, physically, and mentally. Everything shifts just when we are climbing the career ladder and discovering what we want to be and do. Ironically, this often happens when most women are raising independent teenagers or are empty nesters, yet we're more exhausted than ever.

This is also, precisely when many talented women leave their jobs or change careers entirely. Why?

First, let's put this upfront: the erratic instant pot phase is not a weakness. If anything, it shows women's strength and ability to multitask when needed, work through their pain and emotions, and deliver on all fronts. This strength goes often unrecognized by both society and women themselves. Women are deemed as "too emotional" or weak, while in fact they are warriors inside their own bodies.

A System Built for Straight Lines, Not Metamorphosis

Now that we understand women's biology better, let's talk about the work system. The work system was built by and for men. A man is supposed to go to work while women traditionally work at home, providing a good environment for men to get their energy and strength for their workday. After-hours meetings or work are normal and only starting to change now. Men do not go through physical/biological changes throughout their careers. Their career is a straight line. The system is not built for bodies that are going through metamorphosis. Pauses are not allowed, and women are stretched thin.

A butterfly larva spends weeks eating to store energy, and when their transformation begins, they build a chrysalis inside which they pause and let the transformation occur for weeks until they emerge as their most beautiful self with the gift of flying. Women need a system that would allow them to build their own cocoon when the instant pot settings get erratic, so they can give their best without burning out.

The Inequalities of Career Building

In addition to their biology, women are often seen as too young in their twenties and too old in their mid-30s, giving them a very short 5-10 years to make it in their career compared to men who get over 30 years. This has been reported by many women, especially in the acting business, but this is relevant in any workplace. So as women, we are forced to speed up our ladder climbing, overworking to compensate for time we are about to lose, all this in addition to our biology and second shift. This is a real daily sprint.

From their mid-40s and 50s, women are completely dismissed and pushed to the side. Many quit their jobs during menopause, when their bodies are going through intense transformations that organizations fail to acknowledge or accommodate. This exodus, dubbed the "Hot Resignation," takes a real toll on the economy: over $2 billion lost each year as women in midlife leave the workforce, stretched so thin they finally crack. The loss of this brilliant, experienced talent pool represents both an economic tragedy and a profound waste of human potential.

While we keep talking, sometimes joking about midlife women having "brain fog" and forgetting where they put their keys, we omit acknowledging that these are just phases for which they sometimes need to just some space to wrap themselves in a cocoon to allow their transformation to occur peacefully. Let's be clear, this isn't about weakness, it is about intensity. Women's bodies are not failing; they are operating under immense, often invisible, physiological demands.

After 50, most women have reached that peaceful place where they can concentrate on what they want to do or their work. They can set the instant pot on one setting at a time. They know how to navigate through storms; they have infinite emotional and logistic knowledge. They should be given a chance to blossom in their career. But instead, they are pushed to the exit door.

Women have been pushing through growing pains their whole lives. How can the system allow them to choose their pace and ways to have valuable contributions? Women are very productive and strong; they just need a system that allows them to showcase their qualities.

I hope I have convinced you that women's high burnout numbers are due not only to invisible societal culture and the double shift but also to an inadequate system built for a man's body, not a woman's body. We don’t need to teach women to cope better; we need to build environments that honor their full biology, strengths included.