Marie Claire Newsletter Celebrity news, beauty, fashion advice, and fascinating features, delivered straight to your inbox!
It's sold as the ultimate career goal, but many women are deciding that management isn't worth the reward. (Image credit: Left and right: The Vault Stock; centre: Getty Images (185324851)) Jump to category: When Did Being the Boss Become Being... Everything? The Mid-Career Calculation The Missing Rung What If You Want to Get Ahead, But Don't Want to Be the Boss? Share Copy link Facebook X Pinterest Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Growing up in the late Nineties and Noughties, the party line was that women could—and should—have it all. This was the era of girl power, Sex and the City , and glossy magazine covers promising us we could 'smash the glass ceiling ' and have rich personal lives. No wonder my generation grew into twenty-somethings who swallowed the girlboss culture that followed.
From a young age, it was impressed upon us that the hard-won rights our predecessors had fought for were there to be exercised. We were encouraged to enjoy the fruits of their labour, so to speak, but there was also an expectation that we should make the most of the opportunities they'd secured.
Enter: a generation of women who believed not only in meritocracy, but that getting promoted was the obvious goal. You worked hard , proved yourself, impressed the right people and, eventually, somebody handed you a bigger title, a better salary and a team of people to manage. Congratulations. You'd made it.
At 36, Abi Hill had the senior management title she'd spent years working towards. She also had a nine-month-old baby and a working day that routinely ran from 8am to 8pm. Her career was going well, but she was beginning to question what she'd been working towards. So she left.
54% of female professionals in the UK and Ireland are less motivated to seek promotion than they were just two years ago.
Three years later, Hill runs Just Starting Out, a platform supporting early-stage business owners. "I didn't leave because I lacked ambition," she tells me. "I left because I'd started to question whether the version of ambition I'd spent years working towards was actually what I wanted."
According to a 2026 survey by recruitment firm Robert Walters, Hill is not alone. ,In fact, 54% of female professionals surveyed across the UK and Ireland said they were less motivated to seek promotion than they had been two years earlier.
This isn't to suggest that the quest for career equality is over. Women are still underrepresented in senior leadership and the gender pay gap persists, with the prospect of equal pay remaining maddeningly distant — according to the most recent stats, I'll be retired by the time we reach gender pay parity (I'm 36).
Celebrity news, beauty, fashion advice, and fascinating features, delivered straight to your inbox!
But another conversation is bubbling away alongside those battles. For a generation raised on the premise that women could (and again, should) climb as high as men, it's a complicated one. Having spent our formative years being encouraged to reach relentlessly for the next rung, some of us are looking at what that entails and wondering whether it's worth the climb.
As burnout prompts more women to reassess their ambitions mid-career, is climbing the corporate ladder still worth the personal cost?
Part of the problem is that management has changed. Beyond overseeing performance, managers are now expected to navigate employee wellbeing , hybrid working, organisational change and the impact of AI , often without the training or support required to do any of it very well.
"Managers are no longer simply managing people and performance; they're being asked to absorb uncertainty, protect culture, support wellbeing, navigate constant technological change and keep everyone motivated through it — all while delivering increasingly ambitious commercial results," explains Hermione Olivia , founder of CEO YOURSELF , who left a CEO role she'd spent years chasing.
While these demands aren't exclusive to female managers, women face additional expectations, many unrelated to the work they're actually employed to do.
"Women are often expected to perform an additional layer of invisible leadership," Olivia points out. "They are more likely to be the person noticing who is struggling, remembering what is happening in people's lives, mediating tension and protecting the emotional atmosphere of a team. This work can be enormously valuable, but it is rarely recognised in a job description, performance review or salary negotiation."
Empathy is a leadership strength, but it should not become an expectation that women will absorb the emotional needs of an organisation
Tamu Thomas , who works with women on leadership and ambition, has seen this play out with women in senior positions being expected to take meeting notes or clear away cups, even when their male counterparts aren't. These small requests can be particularly pernicious. Object, and you risk being labelled 'sensitive' or 'not a team player'. Say nothing, and you reinforce the assumption that making life easier for everyone else is simply part of your job.
There's another balancing act in management. Female leaders are expected to be approachable and emotionally intuitive, but too much warmth can undermine their authority. Set a firm boundary, meanwhile, and they risk being seen as difficult or cold.
As Olivia puts it: "Empathy is a leadership strength, but it should not become an expectation that women will absorb the emotional needs of an organisation. Pastoral leadership is real work, and it needs to be recognised, supported and shared."
It's easy to see how a promotion can start looking less like an opportunity and more like a list of demands. Perhaps the question isn't whether women have become less interested in leadership, but whether leadership has become a job that asks too much and gives too little back.
Until this summer, Natalie Trice, 52, had a plan. After 30 years working in PR, and with her sons now at college and university, she was going to build an agency, recruit a team and establish herself as a leading name in her industry. Then she spent much of the summer recovering from pneumonia and reconsidered the whole thing.
"I realised I was chasing [a] dream that I actually woke up from years ago," she tells me. "This really was a hangover from my TV career days, and I was still trying to prove myself - and half killing myself by doing so."
Trice changed her website to focus on herself, stopped accepting CVs and abandoned the agency-building plans. She wanted to finish her novel, spend more time swimming outdoors and, as she put it, didn't like people enough to manage them.
Perhaps true career progression is less about climbing the ladder and more about deciding what success looks like for us as individuals.
B. Hersch, now 44, hit a similar crossroads. In her late thirties, she was working at Google with clear next steps: a bigger position, a bigger team, more responsibility. At home, sh e had two children under three.
"I think women in their mid-30s and 40s are often given a false choice: climb harder or scale back. There is a third option, which is to get much more precise about what you're exceptionally good at and build from there."
Hersch eventually left Google without another job lined up and established Better Futures, an executive communications consultancy. She realised the skills she'd developed throughout her career could be valuable outside the hierarchy she'd spent years navigating.
The ambition of a 49-year-old doesn't have to look like her ambition at 29.
The mid-career stocktake is a recurring theme. It makes sense. Earlier in a career, a bigger title might represent possibility. Later, when you've seen how an organisation works and watched senior colleagues manage competing demands, the trade-offs become harder to ignore. Plus, you've taken on enough challenges and responsibilities to know what suits you and what doesn't. "The ambition of a 49-year-old doesn't have to look like her ambition at 29," explains Tamu Thomas.
Of course, there's a luxury in being able to walk away from a salaried job or abandon plans to expand a business, and it isn't available to all of us. Equally, running your own company doesn't automatically - or indeed often - mean more free time.
What's interesting, though, is how little room there is for reconsideration in the way we talk about career progression. We talk about climbing, moving up, reaching the top. For women who want to stay in their jobs rather than strike out on their own, that presents a difficult problem.
So, what if you enjoy your work, want to earn more money, have greater influence and continue developing your expertise, but have no interest in managing people?
If you're no longer a junior, but don't want to be the boss, where exactly are you supposed to go?
Clinical psychologist and executive coach Anne Welsh argues that we're so accustomed to equating career advancement with people management that we treat them as synonyms. She suggests thinking about ambition as a web rather than a ladder, with progression taking different forms: greater autonomy, deeper expertise, creative freedom or increased influence.
She points to a client working in technology who has advanced as a senior individual contributor, earning well and being promoted without taking on direct reports. It's a route that makes sense, yet it remains elusive in organisations that measure seniority by the number of people someone manages, meaning that choosing not to pursue leadership can mean accepting a ceiling on your earnings and influence.
For women, there's another complication: we're still fighting for equal access to the senior positions that do exist.
The 2026 Women in Work Gender Equity Measure report found that women accounted for 49% of manager-level talent among the employers analysed, yet received 40% of promotions into senior leadership. Charlotte Davies , LinkedIn's career expert, points to the disproportionate impact of caring responsibilities on women's career progression.
On the one hand, there are women fighting to get into positions of power. On the other, there are women looking at those same positions and wondering whether they want them at all. If the only way to progress is to take on a team, where does that leave everyone who'd rather not?
For a generation raised on the promise that we could be anything we wanted, it's a frustratingly limited set of options.
"I still wanted to grow; I just realised there was a difference between wanting to grow and wanting to give more," says Justine Sterling Converse, founder and CEO of Brigade Events.
That doesn't mean managing people is inherently undesirable. Good managers can transform careers, create opportunities and make work immeasurably better. Plenty of women still want those roles, and they should have every opportunity to get them.
But it's worth questioning why we're so attached to the idea that anyone who's good at their job should eventually aspire to managing everybody else doing it.
Having the opportunity to be the boss and being expected to want it are two different things.
Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments, argues that employers need to rethink how they recognise and reward talent, rather than encouraging women to put themselves forward for promotion. That could mean creating senior roles for specialists, making promotion criteria more transparent or giving managers the training and support they need to do their jobs without sacrificing the rest of their lives.
For years, we've been told to lean in, speak up, ask for more and refuse to settle. Those messages emerged for good reason, in workplaces where women were regularly overlooked and underestimated. There's still plenty of work to be done on that front.
But we might've reached a point where we can ask what, exactly, we're being encouraged to lean into. Having the opportunity to be the boss and being expected to want it are two different things. And, after all those years of being told we could be anything we wanted, wouldn't it be nice if that included not wanting to be the boss, too?
Mischa Anouk Smith News and Features Editor Mischa Anouk Smith is the News and Features Editor of Marie Claire UK , commissioning and writing in-depth features on culture, politics, and issues that shape women's lives. Her work blends sharp cultural insight with rigorous reporting, from pop culture and technology to fertility, work, and relationships. Mischa's investigations have earned awards and led to appearances on BBC Politics Live and Woman's Hour . For her investigation into rape culture in primary schools, she was shortlisted for an End Violence Against Women award . She previously wrote for Refinery29 , Stylist , Dazed , and Far Out .
Source: Fashion
0 Comments