Symptom #1: You look forward to your mid-afternoon snack in order to break up your work day.
Symptom #2: You're critical or impatient with your cubicle-mate.
Symptom #3: You feel like you should be working more efficiently at the office and that there aren't enough hours in the day.
Diagnosis? It could be a standard case of the good ol' Monday blues... or you could be on the path to burnout.
Burnout is a psychological stress syndrome that occurs as a "response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job." Besides feelings of excessive stress, burnout can ruin personal relationships and cause fatigue, insomnia, depression and anxiety.
What's worse? It may be spreading through Gen Y women like wildfire.
What's Going On
Larissa Faw, a Forbes writer, claims that burnout among under-30 women is pandemic. Pointing to McKinsey research, she writes that while 53% of entry-level corporate jobs go to women, they make up only 37% of mid-management and just 26% go on to become vice-presidents and senior managers. Meanwhile, men are twice as likely to advance at every stage.
The culprit? Faw says that women may "have simply reached their breaking point after spending their childhoods developing well-rounded résumés." Additionally, many women may have had unrealistic expectations about the working world, including the long hours demanded of them and the "day-to-day drudgery," which may come as a shock after college.
To top it all off, working women are worse at caring for themselves, she says: Men are 25% more likely to take breaks during the day for personal activities and 35% more likely to take time solely for relaxation. They also go for walks and head out to lunch more often than their female colleagues.
And, in Addition...
Given that many young graduates started their college careers in the recession and have doubtless been hounded by data on the flagging job market (have you seen that, for the first time in history, more unemployed people have some college education than not?), it could actually be more than too-high expectations and too-little self-care (though those are undoubtedly factors).
Rather, we believe that any burnout particular to young women stems (in addition to the usual culprits of unclear expectations, dysfunctional office dynamics, poor job fit and lack of control) from the fact that women have many expectations placed on them in addition to those set at the office.
Expert Carol Frohlinger, author of Her Seat at the Table and Nice Girls Just Don't Get It agrees, saying women grapple with society's expectations that they should be in a committed relationship, with their eyes on the prize, so to speak, of marriage and family. (And once they achieve those things? Then they have to deal with the "double shift" of work and motherhood.)
Symptom #2: You're critical or impatient with your cubicle-mate.
Symptom #3: You feel like you should be working more efficiently at the office and that there aren't enough hours in the day.
Diagnosis? It could be a standard case of the good ol' Monday blues... or you could be on the path to burnout.
Burnout is a psychological stress syndrome that occurs as a "response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job." Besides feelings of excessive stress, burnout can ruin personal relationships and cause fatigue, insomnia, depression and anxiety.
What's worse? It may be spreading through Gen Y women like wildfire.
What's Going On
Larissa Faw, a Forbes writer, claims that burnout among under-30 women is pandemic. Pointing to McKinsey research, she writes that while 53% of entry-level corporate jobs go to women, they make up only 37% of mid-management and just 26% go on to become vice-presidents and senior managers. Meanwhile, men are twice as likely to advance at every stage.
The culprit? Faw says that women may "have simply reached their breaking point after spending their childhoods developing well-rounded résumés." Additionally, many women may have had unrealistic expectations about the working world, including the long hours demanded of them and the "day-to-day drudgery," which may come as a shock after college.
To top it all off, working women are worse at caring for themselves, she says: Men are 25% more likely to take breaks during the day for personal activities and 35% more likely to take time solely for relaxation. They also go for walks and head out to lunch more often than their female colleagues.
And, in Addition...
Given that many young graduates started their college careers in the recession and have doubtless been hounded by data on the flagging job market (have you seen that, for the first time in history, more unemployed people have some college education than not?), it could actually be more than too-high expectations and too-little self-care (though those are undoubtedly factors).
Rather, we believe that any burnout particular to young women stems (in addition to the usual culprits of unclear expectations, dysfunctional office dynamics, poor job fit and lack of control) from the fact that women have many expectations placed on them in addition to those set at the office.
Expert Carol Frohlinger, author of Her Seat at the Table and Nice Girls Just Don't Get It agrees, saying women grapple with society's expectations that they should be in a committed relationship, with their eyes on the prize, so to speak, of marriage and family. (And once they achieve those things? Then they have to deal with the "double shift" of work and motherhood.)
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