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The Careerist Podcast is a collection of spoken, in-your-head thoughts about career — the kind you have quietly, but rarely say out loud.
Think back-of-the-mind reflections, half-formed questions + unfiltered observations about ambition, visibility, power, leadership + work culture, delivered as intimate, conversational episodes.
It’s where career strategy meets cultural commentary. Touching on topics you love, hate or secretly FOMO-scroll past: LinkedIn dynamics, corporate narratives, leadership trends, workplace politics + the stories shaping how women move through their careers today.
Hosted by Natasha Baker, former Big 4 management consultant turned founder, each episode feels like pressing your ear to the door: smart, self-aware + refreshingly honest.
This isn’t advice shouted at you. It’s perspective shared with you.
A weekly moment to think, reflect + recalibrate how you want to show up in your career.
A few weeks ago, I saw a LinkedIn post that stopped my scroll. I have nothing left in the tank. Is this just burnout, or is there something deeper happening? Women's job satisfaction drops by 20% as they move from mid to senior level positions. The higher we climb, the less satisfied we become.
Speaker 1:It's not a mindset problem. It's a structural one. I needed to understand why. The Careerist is for women who've already succeeded and are now asking what else, what next, what's actually mine, whether you're leading inside a company, building your own, or somewhere in between, rewriting the rules as you go. This isn't career advice, it's career architecture.
Speaker 1:Let's get into it. A few weeks ago, I saw a LinkedIn post that stopped my scroll. Someone I'd worked with, a senior, highly successful woman announced she was stepping back. Not retiring, not burnt out, just done performing. The comments were fascinating.
Speaker 1:Half were, yes, finally, someone said it. And the other half were defensive, almost angry, like she'd broken some unspoken rule. And I thought, we are not okay. Not her, us collectively because she's not alone, is Jacinda Arden, New Zealand's first female prime minister, refused a second term despite being the front runner. Her explanation, was it scandal or failure?
Speaker 1:She said, I have nothing left in the tank. A prime minister saying out loud what millions of women are whispering to themselves. So I started asking, is this just burnout? Is this just high achievers having a moment or is there something deeper happening? I pulled the research and what I found was honestly, it was validating and devastating at the same time.
Speaker 1:It turns out career satisfaction follows a u shaped curve. It peaks early in your career, dips hard during mid career and only recovers later on in life. That's from a University of Surrey survey published just last year and I thought okay so the dip is real it's not just me feeling this and then I found the gender split and that's where it gets uncomfortable because according to the conference board's most recent data, women's job satisfaction drops by 20% as they move from mid to senior level positions. And men's, it stays flat. Let me say that again.
Speaker 1:The higher we climb, the less satisfied we become. Not them, just us. So the thing Arden felt, the thing that woman felt on LinkedIn, the thing that you might be feeling right now, it's not a mindset problem, it's a structural one. And once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. I needed to understand why.
Speaker 1:My Instagram has been full of those twenty sixteen versus now comparisons lately. Same women, same ambition, very different energy. 2016 was peak girl boss era. Lean in was still the gospel. Sofia Amarusa was in the cover of everything, the wing had just opened and we all thought this is it, we've got it figured out.
Speaker 1:The narrative was clear. Stay visible, say yes, keep climbing, play the game. Play better than they play it and eventually the system meets you halfway. For founders the message was similar, hustle, scale, bootstrap your freedom, bet on yourself hard enough and you'll beat the system. There was an optimism to it, maybe a naivety.
Speaker 1:And then the wing closed, Amarus' company imploded, Sheryl Sandberg quietly stepped back from Meta. The women who told us to lean in started leaning out and not always by choice. But here's what no one said at the time. It wasn't them. It was the architecture they were leaning into because I started looking into when this model was actually built and honestly, it made me angry.
Speaker 1:The corporate ladder, the hierarchical structure that most companies still run on today dates back to 1947. That organizational model underneath it was designed in the nineteen twenties and the world it was built for, it was in the nineteen fifties where 70% of families lived on a single income. Nearly 65% had a working husband and a wife who didn't work. That's the system. That's what we inherited.
Speaker 1:A career model designed for a man with a wife at home managing everything else. And it hasn't fundamentally changed. We've changed. The model hasn't. What were you doing ten years ago?
Speaker 1:In 2016, I was fresh in my mid career reckoning. I'd moved to Scotland, quit my consulting job at Deloitte and stupidly listened to my husband who encouraged me to do a master's degree. While I hated it, I didn't know what else to do. So it felt like the next best thing. I spent the next few years spiraling from one thing to another because I had no idea what was next.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to go back to a sixty hour work week, I was done with that. I didn't want to pretend I fit back into an employee role but I was also afraid of starting a business because the upside seems so small compared to a steady, lucrative paycheck. And here's the thing about that paycheck that eventually stops working. There's a famous piece of research from Princeton, Kahneman and Deaton, that found day to day happiness plateaus above a certain income. Everyone quotes it, but last year, they published a follow-up that's even more nuanced and honestly more depressing.
Speaker 1:What they found is that for the unhappiest 15% of people, more money genuinely stops improving how they feel once they hit the $100,000 mark. The hedonic treadmill is real. Each rung of the ladder delivers less than the one before. My salary went up 15% in the two years at Deloitte and it did nothing for me. Not because I was ungrateful, because the system had already broken and the money was just a better lock on the same cage.
Speaker 1:Like me, the women I speak to haven't lost the ambition. They're not afraid of hard work, but we're all questioning the deal itself because somewhere between then and now, the cost went up and the returns, they got thinner. For the corporate women, it means more responsibility, fewer buffers, more output, less support, more visibility, less protection. For the founder, more freedom on paper, more trapped in practice, more revenue, less margins, more clients, less life. This isn't a motivation problem.
Speaker 1:It's a design problem and the career model hasn't evolved and we have. There's a pattern I've seen in my own career, in the women I work with, in almost every successful woman I know, it goes like this. First, you play the game, you figure out what gets rewarded competence, reliability, over delivery. You absorb the yeses when you want to say no. You make things look seamless and easy and it works.
Speaker 1:You got promoted, you grow, you build something. You earn the trust as the person who handles things, but then the game changes and no one tells you. The behaviors that shaped your first chapter, they become invisible. At work, you stop being someone who's proving herself. You become someone who's simply assumed.
Speaker 1:Assumed to be competent because you've proven it. Assumed to not need support because you've never asked for it. As a founder, you stop being scrappy. You become the bottleneck holding everything together so tightly that the business can't breathe and neither can you. Now I want to share something here because when I found this data, it genuinely changed how I saw my career.
Speaker 1:McKinsey's latest Women in the Workplace report, the biggest study done with Lean In, found that women consistently receive higher performance ratings than men. We are literally outperforming, but this is the part that will make you furious. Women receive 8.3% ratings lower for potential. Know what you've done, what they imagine you could do And because of that gap, women are 14% less likely to be promoted. So you're outperforming and you're still less likely to advance, not because of your track record, because of someone else imagination.
Speaker 1:And apparently, they imagine less for us. That's the stage where you feel the mismatch, where you blame yourself. You're doing more than ever, enduring more stress, but something's off. And when you finally feel the weight of that, when you look around and think, how did I get here? It doesn't feel structural.
Speaker 1:It feels personal, like you've lost your edge, but you haven't. You've reached a point where the old model broke. There's something Cody Sanchez says that I keep coming back to. The most dangerous career advice is the advice that used to be true. Over deliver, stay humble, let your work speak for itself.
Speaker 1:The advice that built your first act, it won't build your second. And part of why the model breaks, the work that got you here becomes invisible even to you. There's a term I keep coming back to invisible labor. We typically use it in the context of home, emptying the dishwasher, school permission slips, meal planning, but invisible labor lives in our professional lives too. And at senior levels, it compounds.
Speaker 1:For women at work, it's organizing the meeting and then doing the pre meeting, it's ordering the lunch and the coffee, the extra read of the room, the constant calculation of how do I say this so it lands without threat. For the founder, it's being the strategist and the admin, the visionary and the one chasing invoices. I wanted to know how much of this is real and how much of it is just how it feels. So I went looking and the answer is staggering. Women spend roughly two hundred more hours a year on non promotable work than men in the same roles.
Speaker 1:That's five full working weeks every single year on tasks that never appear on a performance review and no one will ever thank you for that simply vanish. And it's not because we volunteer. Well, partly. Women face 44% more requests to take on this kind of work than men. And we say yes, 76 of the time.
Speaker 1:Because what happens when we don't? Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan both found the same thing. When men do office housework, they're rewarded for it, recommended for promotions, seen as going above and beyond. And when women do it, it's baseline expected. But when women refuse, they receive worse performance reviews.
Speaker 1:They're seen as less likable. So we can't win by doing, we can't win by refusing. That's not a choice. That's a trap. And here's where it gets heavy because this invisible tax doesn't just quietly accumulate, it exploded.
Speaker 1:When COVID hit, over twenty million women left the workforce in the first wave. Women accounted for fifty three percent of all US labor force exits in the first twelve months. Mothers of small children lost work at three times the rate of fathers. They called it the she session. Women's employment dropped to 63, the lowest level since 1984.
Speaker 1:And the reason was obvious to every woman alive. When the childcare infrastructure disappeared overnight, it was women who absorbed the fallout because that's what the system always expected us to do. Then slowly, women fought back. By June 2023, women's employment hit 75%, the highest ever recorded. We rebuilt it.
Speaker 1:But here's what's happening right now that most people don't know. Since January 2025, two and twelve thousand women have left the workforce again. College educated women's participation has dropped from 70% to 67% in just months. The cause? Return to office mandates.
Speaker 1:Fortune 500 companies requiring full time office presence nearly doubled from 13 to 24% in six months. The flexibility that helped women rebuild their careers is being revoked and women are walking away. Again, this isn't a cycle, it's a pattern and it tells you everything you need to know about whose needs the system was designed for and at some point quietly, you start to pull back. Not dramatically, just strategically. You stop volunteering for that extra thing.
Speaker 1:You make yourself less available. You become resentful about your own business. The headlines call it quiet quitting as if it were laziness. As if 77% of the global workforce has simultaneously decided to stop caring. Gallup studied it extensively and what they actually found was this.
Speaker 1:It wasn't laziness. It was lack of clarity, insufficient growth, feeling uncared for, disconnect from purpose. It was a structural misalignment dressed up as a character flaw. That's not quiet quitting, that's strategic recalibration and it might be the smartest thing you've ever done. So where does this leave us?
Speaker 1:Not with a five part framework, not with a pep talk about finding your passion, definitely not with advice to just set better boundaries, but with a reframe. Here's what I've come to believe and I want you to sit with this. Your career isn't failing. It's asking to be renegotiated, not with your boss, not with your clients, not yet, with yourself. Most of us build our first chapter on momentum.
Speaker 1:One thing led to another, you said yes because it was there, you climbed the ladder because it existed, you measured progress by something arbitrary titles, revenue, your parents' inherited beliefs and momentum works until it doesn't. Mid career is the point when momentum runs out of road, not because you've stopped moving, but because you've started asking different questions. Not what's the next step, but why am I on this path at all? Not how do I grow this? But what am I actually building and is it mine?
Speaker 1:These questions feel destabilizing from the outside. They look like doubt or failure or a loss of direction, but they're not. They're the beginning of something else. A shift from ambition to agency, from performance to alignment, from what you should want to what you actually do. And here's one more piece of data I want to leave you with because it reframes the whole conversation.
Speaker 1:McKinsey found that when women receive the same career support as men, sponsorship, clear advancement paths, manager advocacy, the so called ambition gap disappears completely. It's not that women lack ambition, it's that the system doesn't reward it equally. We're not the problem, the architecture is. We're more educated for the first time in history. Women globally are more educated than men.
Speaker 1:In The US, 47% of women between the ages of 25 and 34 hold a degree versus only 37% of men. We're more self aware, more economically responsible than any generation before. But we're still managing careers with instructors that assume someone else is handling the rest. So the question isn't why are women pulling back? It's why would anyone keep over investing in a system that stopped investing back?
Speaker 1:So here's where we are. I've taken you through the data, the pattern, the structural story beneath the personal one and I realized something as I was putting all of this together. We have the macro data, the McKinsey reports, the Gallup surveys, the workforce statistics, they tell us what's happening. But what we don't have, what nobody has is the full picture of what's happening inside the careers of women like us. Not headline data, not a yes or no satisfaction score, but the real specific messy breakdown.
Speaker 1:Which parts of your career are thriving? Which parts are starving? Where are you genuinely fulfilled? And where are you just performing? So I'm going to find out.
Speaker 1:I've designed something called the Career Happiness Wheel. It maps your career across 10 dimensions everything from reward, progression, leadership, mentorship and so forth. Because every woman's wheel looks different depending on what season of life she's in and no one's ever mapped it like this. I'm sending it to a 100 women. Real careers, real data, no filters and I'm going to share what comes back.
Speaker 1:Not just the numbers, the comments, the patterns, the things women are willing to say anonymously that they never post on LinkedIn. If you want to be one of these 100 women, the link is in the description. It takes five minutes. Just be honest. Your wheel doesn't have to look like anyone else's because here's what I believe.
Speaker 1:The first step to redesigning something is measuring it. And nobody's measured this, not like this. Not for women like us. Nothing's wrong with you. You're just mid reckoning.
Speaker 1:And the reckoning isn't the end of your career. It's the beginning of something different, a different relationship with it. One built on agency, not momentum, intention not obligation, choice real choice instead of inherited scripts. That's what The Careerist is here for. Not career advice, career architecture.
Speaker 1:For women who've already succeeded and are ready to decide what success actually means now. If that's you, stay with me. Next episode, I'm breaking down what happens when competence becomes a cage. The golden handcuffs that keep you trapped in excellence. And I'll have the first results from the career happiness wheel.
Speaker 1:I'll see you there. You've been listening to the Careers to a careers meet culture. If this landed, share it with one woman who needs to hear it and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. So you don't miss out on what's next. I'm Natasha.
Speaker 1:I'll see you inside the next one.