Women are exhausted, isolated and burned out: Berlin Cameron study

In January, Jennifer DaSilva, president of creative agency Berlin Cameron, was in a virtual meeting with other female leaders who began talking about how they had been spending their time. “Normally, it’s like: I’m doing this huge initiative, and I would love you to take part in it,” DaSilva said. “I found myself talking about binge watching and how I had been doing a lot of it.” DaSilva felt embarrassed by her admission, she said, but then she received notes from others on the call who said they were in a similar rut.

That realization that others were feeling the same, as well as a virtual event she attended with Eve Rodsky, the author of “Find Your Unicorn Space,” a book about creative energy, sparked DaSilva to launch a research project examining exhaustion among male and female professionals. “What we saw across the board is that people are burnt out and exhausted,” she said. “But what we saw from women that is different from men is really an isolation factor. Almost half of women wouldn’t ask for help if they felt burnt out.”