When Emma Grede described herself as a “three-hour mum,” the internet reacted exactly as you would expect. Emma Grede is a British entrepreneur (co‑founder of SKIMS and Good American) went viral after saying she’s a:
“Max three‑hour mum” on weekends.
The same trait that gets a man called confident gets a woman called difficult. The same trait that gets a white woman called passionate gets a Black woman called aggressive.
This is not about personality. It is about who is allowed to lead and how.
Same behaviour. Different consequences.
For women, leadership is judged against contradictory expectations. For Black and women of colour, those expectations are filtered through bias, history and proximity to power.
What if burnout is not about workload at all? What if it is about exposure, to bias, to vigilance, to invisible labour, to environments where psychological safety is unevenly distributed? When we ask that question, the experience of BAME women in toxic workplaces stops looking like an individual wellbeing issue and starts looking like a systemic failure hiding in plain sight.
For years, organisations have framed burnout as a personal weakness. Stress management courses proliferate. Mindfulness apps are subsidised. Resilience is praised, demanded and quietly weaponised. But when a specific group keeps burning out faster, earlier and more severely than others, the problem is no longer individual. It is structural.
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
My Response,
We need a BBC Coverage to bring this to the forefront of the public.
We need women of colour to come forward and together we hold ministers accountable- we should be able to speak out without victimisation. Victimisation of women of colour is no different from a gangster that harm others in the world.
We need the Human Right Commissioner to act to protect BAME women with a system that works. We need the Commissioner to meet with Black Women and hear their experiences across the country before changing the law.
Until we take the bull by the horn, nothing will change. Mandela had to be imprison for 27 years to free blacks. The same for Martin Luther King. We need laws that work not laws that organisations have mastered the art of building policies to cover up and systems that are tick box exercises to cover up systemic racism.