Somewhere in Australia, an exhausted woman is attending a lunchtime webinar about preventing burnout. She’s eating lunch at her desk. Teams messages continue appearing while the facilitator explains the importance of boundaries.
At the end, she will receive a feedback survey where the organisation will be delighted that 87 per cent of participants found the session “valuable”, while the remaining 13 per cent may be reviewed for negativity and a possible failure to embrace the wellbeing strategy.
I have worked in human resources long enough to see workplace wellbeing evolve from the occasional fruit bowl into an entire corporate ecosystem. We now have meditation apps, resilience workshops, mental health webinars and emails reminding employees to practise self-care.
The intention is often well-meaning. But somewhere along the way, workplace wellbeing stopped asking what is making people unwell and started teaching them how to endure it.
Women are already doing the compensating
Women do not arrive at work carrying only their job. Many are also managing school schedules, medical appointments, ageing parents, household administration and the invisible work of remembering what everybody else needs.
Women continue to perform a disproportionate share of unpaid care. This makes them less likely to participate in full-time work, more likely to work part-time or casually and more likely to experience career interruptions. Almost half of employed Australian women work part-time.
Part-time work can provide essential flexibility. But in too many workplaces, a part-time arrangement does not produce a genuinely smaller job. It produces a full-time role compressed into fewer paid hours.
The non-working day becomes the day you read the papers from the meetings you missed. The school pick-up is followed by logging back on after dinner. The promise to respond “only to urgent matters” becomes increasingly meaningless when everything is marked urgent.
The flexibility may be real, but so is the invisible debt many women feel required to repay for receiving it.
We compensate by becoming more productive, more available and less inconvenient. We work additional hours without recording them. We avoid mentioning the logistical machinery operating behind our professional composure.
You can often see the result in one small symbol: the green dot on Teams. It is 8.47 pm. The children may finally be asleep. The paid working day supposedly ended hours ago. Yet the green dot is glowing. That dot might represent dedication. It might also represent an impossible workload, professional anxiety or a woman trying to prove that flexibility has not reduced her commitment.
Australia now has a legal right to disconnect. But legislation alone cannot extinguish the green dot. A woman may have the right to disconnect while still believing that using it will make her appear less ambitious, less reliable or less deserving of her flexible arrangement.
Flexibility is tested when women need it most
I once worked for an organisation that described itself as flexible and family-friendly. During a period of operational pressure, I was asked to travel for several days to attend a crisis-management meeting. I was a working mother with a school-aged child. Attending meant reorganising school drop-offs, pick-ups, care arrangements and another parent’s work commitments. That may have been justified if my physical presence were essential. It wasn’t. The meeting could have been held online. The crisis was real. The travel was a preference.
Yet when the word “crisis” enters a workplace conversation, questioning an unnecessary requirement can sound like a lack of commitment. Apparently, a crisis becomes more manageable when everybody has boarded a plane. I went. I rearranged family life, absorbed the inconvenience and remained professionally agreeable. This is how organisational contradictions survive. It is not because women fail to notice them. It is because women quietly make them work.
A family-friendly workplace is not one that permits flexibility when nothing important is happening. It is one that continues to consider families when everything feels urgent. Workplace wellbeing keeps asking women to adapt. When women are overwhelmed, organisations rarely begin with the most uncomfortable questions.
Is the workload reasonable? Is the role genuinely achievable within its paid hours? Are employees receiving enough support? Is a manager creating unnecessary distress? Is flexibility accompanied by an unspoken availability requirement?
Instead, the conversation often begins with a safer question: what wellbeing initiative can we introduce?
It is easier to purchase a meditation app than redesign a role. It is easier to run a resilience workshop than confront a destructive manager. It is easier to encourage women to establish boundaries than examine a culture that rewards people for having none.
This is what I call the coping transfer: responsibility for workplace harm is shifted from the organisation that creates the conditions to the individual experiencing them.The workload remains unreasonable, but the woman receives time-management training. She is expected to be warm but authoritative, ambitious but grateful, flexible but constantly available and calm while managing the contradiction. She is not only expected to survive the problem. She is expected to demonstrate personal growth in the process.
Women leaders must look like they have their stuff together
The pressure changes but does not disappear when women move into leadership. As a people leader, I am accountable for the wellbeing of my direct reports. I check whether they are coping, help them navigate difficult matters and try to protect them from unnecessary pressure.
But that responsibility can come at the expense of my own wellbeing. Women leaders are often expected to wear the “I have my stuff together” face, even on days when we absolutely do not.
Teams need calm. Senior leaders need clear advice. Stakeholders experiencing workplace problems want confidence and conviction. They do not necessarily want to see the uncertainty, emotional load or competing demands sitting behind the advice.
So I project calm. I make decisions. I absorb some of the anxiety in the room. Then I go home and begin the second shift. There is rarely a wellbeing webinar for the woman who has spent the day carrying everyone else’s wellbeing.
Competence can make women’s pressure less visible. The more capable someone appears, the more the organisation gives her to carry and the less likely anyone is to ask whether she can continue carrying it. Competence should not make a woman’s wellbeing invisible.
EAP cannot become the organisational escape hatch
Employee assistance programs can provide valuable confidential counselling and short-term support. But EAP can also feel like a cop-out.
A woman raises concerns about an unreasonable workload, an unsafe relationship or relentless organisational change. The manager listens sympathetically and sends her the EAP number.
The hazard remains exactly where she left it. “Have you contacted EAP?” can become the workplace equivalent of “Have you tried turning yourself off and on again?”
EAP is a support service. It is not a control measure for a workplace that is causing harm. Safe Work Australia’s model code says organisations must eliminate psychosocial risks, or minimise them as far as reasonably practicable. If the hazard is excessive job demands, examine the demands.
If the support is poor, improve it. If it is harmful behaviour, address the behaviour. Counselling may help a woman process the impact. It does not remove the cause.
There is something deeply contradictory about directing a woman to EAP so she can privately process what the organisation continues to publicly permit.
Organisations frequently measure wellbeing through webinar attendance, app downloads, EAP utilisation and satisfaction scores. These measures indicate whether employees took initiative. They do not tell us whether the work became healthier.
High EAP utilisation could demonstrate accessible support or increasing distress. Low utilisation could mean employees do not need it or that they distrust its confidentiality.
A credible wellbeing strategy should also measure workloads, unpaid hours, after-hours contact, role clarity, psychological injury, absence and turnover. Results should be examined separately for women, carers, part-time employees and people leaders. The most important measure is not how many women used the wellbeing initiative. It is whether fewer women need help coping with preventable workplace harm.
Women do not need another lesson in resilience
Organisations should examine which women are quietly compensating for the system.
Who logs back on after caring responsibilities are finished? Who performs the emotional labour holding the team together? Who works beyond her part-time hours? Who works through illness because nobody else can make the decision? Who appears so competent that nobody thinks to ask whether she is coping?
Women’s distress at work should not automatically be treated as an individual wellbeing problem. Sometimes it is information about the work’s design. A good leader asks, “How can we help her cope?” A better leader also asks, “What are we asking her to cope with and why are we allowing it to continue?” Women do not need another lesson in resilience. They have been resilient for years.
The next era of workplace wellbeing should not ask women to become infinitely better at surviving broken workplaces. It should ask organisations to stop depending on women to quietly hold them together.