We’re Choosing Sovereignty Over the System

Let me start with what really got under my skin about the latest Women in the Workplace 2025 report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org: the framing. According to their data, for the first time, there’s a “notable ambition gap”—80% of women want to be promoted compared to 86% of men.

And their response? More corporate programs. More manager training. More “fixing” women to fit the broken system.

Here’s what my PhD-trained, pattern-recognizing brain sees: This isn’t an ambition gap. This is a mass exodus being disguised as a deficiency.

Over 212,000 women left the U.S. workforce in the first half of 2025 alone. Women are starting businesses at unprecedented rates—49% of all new businesses in 2024, up from 29% in 2019. That’s a 69% increase in five years. Black women are leading the entrepreneurship boom, with business ownership climbing 32.7% between 2019 and 2023.

These women aren’t lacking ambition. They’re redirecting it.

The Shame Playbook: How Corporate Research Controls Women

Reports like Women in the Workplace use a clever shame mechanism wrapped in data-driven concern. The formula goes like this:

1. Identify that women are opting out of corporate advancement
2. Frame it as a problem with women’s ambition, confidence, or support systems
3. Propose solutions that require women to change, adapt, or advocate better
4. Ignore the fundamental question: What if the system itself is the problem?

The report notes that when women receive “the same career support that men do, this gap in ambition to advance falls away.” Great. But here’s the gaslighting: they’re asking us to believe that if only we had better sponsors, more manager advocacy, and clearer paths to promotion, we’d want to climb the ladder.

What if we’re seeing the ladder for what it is?

Senior-level women in the report are burned out at higher levels than ever. They see the path to the top as unrealistic. They think people in leadership positions are “burned out or unhappy.” And still, the report’s solution is… more leadership training?

We’re not confused. We’re awake.

What Women Are Actually Doing: The Sovereignty Revolution

Let’s talk about what women are really choosing when they “opt out” of corporate America. Because spoiler alert: we’re not going home to bake bread (though no judgment if you are—we all need an outlet.)

1. Building Businesses on Their Own Terms

Women launched nearly half of all new businesses in 2024, with flexibility and autonomy cited as the driving motivations. Three-quarters of women entrepreneurs said they wanted to work according to their own schedules. These aren’t lifestyle businesses—they’re generating over $2 trillion annually and employing more than 11.4 million people.

The women I work with aren’t leaving corporate jobs because they lack ambition. They’re leaving because they’ve calculated the ROI on soul-depleting work and decided their sovereignty is worth more.

2. Prioritizing Mental Health and Well-Being

The report shows 60% of senior-level women experience frequent burnout, and 75% are concerned about job security. When Black women in leadership are burning out at a rate of 77%, we’re not dealing with an “ambition problem”—we’re dealing with a workplace toxicity crisis.

Women are choosing their mental health. They’re choosing to not participate in systems that demand their best ideas, their emotional labor, their strategic thinking—and then question whether they’re “leadership material.”

3. Creating Portfolio Careers and Fractional Leadership Roles

Smart women are building portfolio careers—consulting, fractional executive roles, advisory positions, speaking engagements. They’re packaging their expertise in ways that give them control over their time, their clients, and their compensation.

They’re becoming the architects of their own professional lives instead of waiting for permission from corporate gatekeepers.

4. Investing in Their Own Development (Not Corporate-Approved Training)

Women are getting coaching, pursuing advanced degrees on their own terms, joining mastermind groups, and building skills that serve their vision—not their employer’s five-year strategic plan.

They’re recognizing that “career development programs with content tailored for women” (which the report notes are being discontinued at 25% of companies) were always band-aids on a broken bone.

5. Building Community Outside Corporate Structures

Employee Resource Groups are being gutted. And women are responding by building their own networks, their own support systems, their own funding circles.

They’re creating the infrastructure they need outside systems that were never designed to elevate them anyway.

Opting Out IS Leadership—Just Not the Kind Corporate America Recognizes

Here’s where I want to get philosophical for a moment. The report treats “leadership” as synonymous with “climbing the corporate hierarchy.” But that’s an incredibly narrow, patriarchal definition of what leadership actually is.

True leadership is:

• Making sovereign decisions about your life and work
• Building systems that align with your values
• Creating pathways for others who are waking up to the same truths
• Having the courage to walk away from structures that demand your diminishment
• Trusting your own authority over external validation

When a woman decides that the “broken rung” at the first promotion to manager isn’t worth breaking herself to climb, that’s not lack of ambition. That’s discernment. That’s leadership.

When a senior-level woman looks at the C-suite and thinks “those people look miserable,” and then chooses a different path—that’s not a threat to leadership. That’s leadership in action.

The Economic Argument They Don’t Want to Make

McKinsey estimates that advancing gender equality could add $12 trillion to global GDP. Women-owned businesses generate over trillions annually in the U.S. alone.

But here’s what the corporate world doesn’t want to admit: That economic power doesn’t require us to stay in their systems.

Women can create that value, that innovation, that economic growth—on our own terms. And increasingly, we are.

The Real Threat to Corporate America

The McKinsey report frames declining corporate commitment to women’s advancement as a risk. And it is—but not in the way they think.

The real risk isn’t that companies will “lose progress” on women’s representation. The real risk is that women with the most talent, the most education, the most experience—the ones who’ve been systematically under-supported, under-promoted, and over-scrutinized—are realizing they don’t need corporate permission to lead.

They’re taking their skills, their networks, their strategic thinking, and their ambition, and they’re building something else. Something they own. Something that doesn’t require them to perform “executive presence” while their ideas are credited to men in the room. Something that doesn’t measure their value by how well they can tolerate flexibility stigma or whether they can secure a sponsor senior enough to matter.

What This Means for You

If you’re reading this and feeling the pull toward sovereignty—toward building something of your own, toward redefining what success looks like, toward opting out of systems that were never designed for your thriving—know this:

You are not lacking ambition. You are exercising it.

The choice to leave, to build, to pivot, to prioritize your wellbeing, to trust your own authority—that’s not the absence of leadership. That’s the most profound form of it.

Reports like Women in the Workplace will continue to frame women’s exodus as a problem to solve. They’ll propose more training, more programs, more ways to fit us into structures that are fundamentally extractive.

But we’re seeing it now. We’re noticing how shame is used as a weapon. We’re seeing the gaslighting. We’re seeing that “career advancement” in systems that burn us out, undervalue us, and ask us to perform gratitude for crumbs is not actually advancement at all.

The Invitation

So here’s my invitation: Stop trying to fix yourself to fit the system. Stop measuring your ambition by corporate metrics. Stop letting research reports shame you into thinking that wanting something different means you’re opting out of leadership.

You’re not opting out. You’re opting in—to your own authority and sovereignty, your own vision, your own definition of success.

And that? That’s the most ambitious thing you could possibly do.

If you’re a high level manager or want to leave the C-suite and ready to redefine what aligned success is for you, book a chat to see if Forged By Fire is the right next step. Go here to reserve your spot.