Why Women Quit

Why do women quit jobs to start their own business in such startling numbers?

Why do women quit jobs to start their own business? Childcare and work-life balance are part of the answer, but they aren’t the whole story. Research shows that women still contend with workplace sexism, competence-based microaggressions, and a persistent motherhood penalty. After years of having their expertise questioned, their ideas overlooked, and their commitment doubted, women aren’t quitting work. They’re quitting a workplace that has made working exhausting.

Years ago, my ex-husband and I worked in the same place, in similar roles. Then we had a baby. And I learned something visceral about why women quit jobs to start their own business.

Before the baby was born, I was considered a star. I’d fought my way through thousands of meetings where the men treated me like eye candy or a secretary. I’d fought hard, pushed back, and proven I could carry a workload those men had trouble believing was possible. I was good at my job. I was ambitious. I won awards.

When we had a child, my ex-husband became a father and I became a mother. And in the workplace, those roles come with distinct sets of baggage.

Before the baby, my husband was regarded by management as talented but immature. Fatherhood changed that perception. Suddenly he was a family man. A responsible dad. He was someone who should be taken seriously and who had a family to feed. He was promoted.

Before the baby, I was frequently called a rising star, given groundbreaking assignements, asked to train new people, and invited to high-level discussions. I took on the hard stories. I managed the difficult freelancers. Becoming a mother changed the way management saw me, too.

They told me I was no longer committed to my career and stopped including me in anything of substance.

Having a baby focused me in a way that nothing before had. I had no time for frivolous time-wasting at work. I was paying someone to care for a baby that I wanted to get back to. It gave me confidence and perspective. It made me better at my job.

Still, I was marginalized. I was told by my editor, in a meeting, that I should quit, stay home with the baby, and give other women a chance at the work I’d fought for. It wasn’t only the men pushing this agenda. This editor was a woman.

Same baby. Same workplace. Same mortgage to pay. Same family that needed to be fed.

Meanwhile, this all gave the baby’s father a big excuse to be absent and unhelpful at home, leaving all of that labor to me. In fact, he was so absent that, if my workplace hadn’t abandoned me, I would have left him over it.

I did leave the job, though, to start my own business.

The phenomenon has a name: What happened to me has been termed the motherhood penalty. What happened to my ex is called the fatherhood premium.

Getting the job isn’t the same as getting an equal place in it

The motherhood penalty is best examined in perspective. It is infuriating on its own, but it typically comes after a long sentence in workplace inequality that has already worn that mother down.

Women have gotten good at fighting our way into workplaces. We get the education. We develop the expertise. We get hired. We become managers and executives and engineers and scientists.

And then we spend an astonishing amount of time proving, over and over, that we know what we’re talking about.

In the 2024 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, 54 percent of women surveyed said they’d experienced at least one competence-based microaggression at work. Thirty-eight percent said their judgment had been questioned in their area of expertise. Thirty-nine percent said they’d been interrupted or spoken over more than other people.

If you’ve been a woman in a meeting, these microaggressions are likely familiar.

• You offer an idea. Nobody responds. Five minutes later, Bob offers the same idea. Everyone loves Bob’s idea.
• You point out a problem. You’re being negative. Bob points out the same problem. He is thinking strategically.
• You disagree. You’re difficult. Bob disagrees. Bob has leadership skills.

These individual incidents are small enough that you shrug them off. Cumulatively, though, it is exhausting.

The same McKinsey/LeanIn research found that women who experience these microaggressions are more likely to feel burned out and consider quitting.

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And then we have babies

After years of fighting your way into the room, you have a baby. Then you discover there is a new, previously hidden level to the game and your character has completely reset with no credit for those previous years.

One study found that 50% of women reported that colleagues see them as less competent and committed after they have children.

I write about technology, often focusing on women in technology. I have heard this story countless times. And it isn’t always as overt as it was in my case. Sometimes it shows up dressed as an ally, and you never know your career took a nosedive because of it.

In a story I wrote in 2021 for CIO, Karen Catlin, author of Better Allies, told me about a manager who nearly passed over his highest-performing employee for a promotion because she had young children and the new job required travel. He never asked if she wanted the job; he simply assumed she wouldn’t. Catlin told him that was her decision, not his. So he made the offer. She took the promotion—and excelled. But she very easily might never have had the opportunity.

Add to this constant workplace struggle the labor of raising a new baby and women reach their quitting point.

Current Department of Labor statistics show that 71.5 percent of mothers with children under 18 participate in the labor force. For fathers, it’s 93.3 percent.

Women aren’t necessarily quitting to stay home with the children. They may not be able to afford that option, even if they wanted it. They are being driven out and made to stay home with the children. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Quitting to work harder

The pandemic made some of these pressures spectacularly visible.

In March and April of 2020, women lost 12.2 million payroll jobs—about 55 percent of the jobs lost during those two catastrophic months. Schools closed. Childcare disappeared. Families scrambled.

But there’s an important correction to the story we’ve been telling ever since: women didn’t simply leave and never come back. Maternal employment recovered and eventually surpassed its pre-pandemic level.

Women are working. But an interesting number of us have decided we’d rather do it without an employer.

Women own about 14 million businesses in the United States. The overwhelming majority are businesses without employees—the freelancer, consultant, shop owner, writer, designer, and all the other assorted versions of Fine, I’ll do it myself.

And women aren’t starting businesses only because they dream of building the next billion-dollar company.

In a 2025 survey of new business owners by payroll company Gusto, women accounted for nearly half of the businesses started in 2024. Nearly three-quarters of the women founders surveyed said they wanted to work according to their own schedules, and 62 percent said they wanted to be their own boss.

That is exactly why I quit my job to start my own business.

Starting a business isn’t easier than having a job. In some respects it’s much harder. There’s nobody else responsible for finding the clients, paying the bills, fixing the printer, or building the website.

But it gave me something I hadn’t had before: I didn’t have to persuade anyone that I was still serious, that women can think, or that becoming a mother hadn’t made me stupid. I had only to convince clients that my awards, vast number of published articles, and expertise made me the person for the job. That turned out to be much easier than fighting through layers of workplace bias.