43% of Women Are Thinking About Quitting... Here's What That Means for Your Company's Profits

She's Smiling in Meetings, and Updating Her Resume at Night

A few months ago, I sat with a VP (call her Maya) who'd just closed her best quarter. Her team hit every number. In the leadership meeting, she was the one everyone deferred to.

That same week, she asked me, almost in passing, "Do you think it's normal to feel invisible at the top?"

She wasn't burned out in the way people usually mean it. She wasn't underperforming. She was doing everything right and still watching her manager sponsor other people for the room she'd already earned a seat in. So quietly, without telling anyone, she started interviewing.

Maya isn't unusual. She's the data.

The Number Behind the Story

A 2025 survey of more than 1,700 professionals (most in tech) found that 43% of women who leave their jobs cite the same root cause: no clear path up, thin sponsorship, not enough investment in their growth. Not one dramatic breaking point. A slow accumulation of "no one is actually building my next step," until leaving feels like the only proactive move left.

And Maya's version of this is playing out at scale. Lean In and McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace report (the largest study of its kind) found something that hadn't shown up in ten years of tracking: for the first time, women's ambition to advance is measurably lower than men's. 80% of women want the next promotion, versus 86% of men, and the gap widens sharply at the senior level, where six in ten women report regular burnout. Catalyst's newest research puts a real number on the exodus: more than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce in the first eight months of 2025 alone, 58% of them by choice.

Here's the detail that changes how you should think about all of this: in that same McKinsey research, the ambition gap disappears entirely when women receive the same sponsorship and support as men. Maya wasn't losing ambition. She was losing access.

What Maya Walking Out the Door Actually Costs

If Maya leaves, it isn't a line item... it's a chain reaction. Research from the Center for American Progress puts the cost of replacing a senior leader at up to 213% of their salary once you count recruiting, the six-to-twelve months it takes a replacement to ramp up, the institutional knowledge that walks out with her, and the dip in her team's output while everyone adjusts. For someone at Maya's level, that's not a hiring cost. That's a deal that slips, a team that stalls, a client relationship that has to be rebuilt from scratch by someone new.

Now multiply Maya by every high-potential woman on your leadership bench who's quietly doing the same math she was. That's the real profit exposure... not one departure, but a pattern your P&L never labels correctly.

What Changed for Maya

Maya didn't leave. Not because the job magically got easier, but because she started working with a coach who helped her see what was actually happening (that her instinct to push harder and stay quiet was the opposite of what she needed) and helped her build the visibility and sponsorship relationships no one had handed her. Within two quarters, she wasn't interviewing anymore. She was being talked about for the next level.

That's not a fluke... it's the pattern the ROI data actually shows. A widely cited Metrix Global study found a 788% ROI on executive coaching, driven substantially by productivity and retention gains. ICF's research puts the median ROI at roughly 7x the investment. Retention isn't a side effect of that number... it's one of the main things generating it. Coached leaders don't just perform better. They stay, and they bring their teams with them.

Run the comparison plainly: coaching a high-potential leader costs a fraction of what replacing her would, and the return compounds rather than resetting to zero every time someone new has to ramp up.

There is a Solution

Maya smiled through every meeting right up until the moment she almost left. If there's a Maya on your team right now, she probably won't tell you. The data says she'll just go.

I run a High Performance Executive Accelerator built to give high-potential female leaders the tools and support they need to want to stay... helping them build the visibility, sponsorship, and sustainable performance that keep them in the room instead of quietly job-hunting. I've got fresh data from the current cohort on the engagement, promotion, and retention shifts we're seeing. If you're weighing whether this kind of investment pencils out for your team, I’d love to share the report with you.

Simply email me at sheryl@sherylkline.com, and I’ll have it sent to you.

Cheering you on always,
--Sheryl

Sources: La Fosse 2025 workforce survey; Lean In & McKinsey, Women in the Workplace 2025; Catalyst, 2026; Center for American Progress; Metrix Global; International Coaching Federation. "Maya" is a composite illustration of women executives I coach, not a specific individual.