A 2025 New York Times piece asked whether women have “ruined the workplace,” blaming flexibility and empathy for what’s broken.
Alison Campbell, founder of unBurnt® and former Chief of Staff turned leadership researcher, joins me to set the record straight. We talk burnout, workplace design, working motherhood, and what her new research with Bentley University is uncovering about how people actually feel at work right now.
This is an honest conversation about who’s really responsible for burnout, and it’s not the people asking for flexibility.
The original headline, before they quietly changed it after the internet responded accordingly, was even more direct: “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”
The argument boiled down to this: flexibility, empathy, and the things women have fought to bring into professional environments are somehow responsible for what’s broken. Not decades of overwork culture. Not systemic underfunding of care infrastructure. Not workplace design that was never built for the people actually doing the work.
Women.
That framing is worth talking about. Because it tells you everything about where the conversation still is, and how far it still has to go.
In this episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast®, I sit down with Alison Campbell, founder of unBurnt®, leadership and well-being researcher, and former Chief of Staff who spent nearly two decades climbing through finance, ecommerce, and tech before burning out herself. Alison took that experience and turned it into research-backed tools that help leaders build workplaces that don’t destroy their people.
We get into all of it.
The NYT piece and what it reveals
Blaming flexibility and empathy for workplace dysfunction is a convenient argument. It’s also wrong. We break down what that framing misses and why the real problem is workplace design, not the people asking for it to be better.
What’s actually driving burnout
Alison shares what she’s seeing in her work and from her own experience about the forces that burn people out. Spoiler: it’s not women wanting reasonable working conditions. It’s systems that were never designed to sustain the people inside them.
The Bentley University research
Alison is partnering with Bentley University on a new study looking at how people actually feel at work right now. We talk about what she’s hoping this data uncovers, especially around workplace design, well-being, and the gap between what companies say they care about and what employees are actually experiencing.
The science of working motherhood
This is something we don’t talk about honestly enough. Alison’s research into working motherhood looks at what the future of work and family actually needs to look like if we’re serious about reducing burnout rates. Not platitudes. Structural change.
Building unBurnt® from personal experience
Alison built the unBurnt® framework after her own burnout. She shares which piece of it came directly from a lesson she learned the hard way, and how that shaped everything she does now.
About Alison Campbell
Alison Campbell is the founder of unBurnt, a company on a mission to prevent burnout by addressing the root causes of chronic stress at work. With nearly twenty years of experience across finance, ecommerce, and HRTech, Alison rose to senior leadership before a health scare forced her to rethink how we operate inside our modern, always-on workplace. She now works with leaders to build organizations where ambition doesn’t come at the cost of the people doing the work.
Connect with Alison:
Resources mentioned
- The New York Times, “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”
- Alison Campbell’s research partnership with Bentley University
- The unBurnt® framework
I’m Tara Kermiet — career coach, burnout strategist, and host of The Balanced Badass Podcast®. I help high-achievers and corporate leaders design careers that are successful and sustainable.
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