Is the Culture of Silence Costing Women Their Mental Health and Their Careers?
The modern workplace speaks openly about performance, productivity and resilience. It speaks far less honestly about fear. For many women and particularly for Black women and women of colour, silence around mental health is not a personal choice. It is a risk calculation.
The fear is not abstract. Research from McKinsey & Company has consistently shown that women already experience weaker sponsorship, lower psychological safety and higher scrutiny at work.
Add mental health disclosure into an environment shaped by fragile job security and silence often feels like self-protection rather than avoidance.
In sectors such as marketing, communications and leadership roles where perception, confidence and “energy” are often conflated with competence, many women quietly carry emotional exhaustion while continuing to perform.
This is not a failure of resilience. It is a rational response to unsafe systems.
How the Culture Of Silence Shows Up At Work
In workplaces where trust is limited and job security feels precarious, silence becomes a survival strategy. Women in leadership often manage distress privately while maintaining a public image of composure. This shows up as over-functioning, people-pleasing and an unwillingness to ask for help, even when workloads are unsustainable.
UK data from the Office for National Statistics shows rising work-related stress, anxiety and depression, with women reporting higher rates than men. Yet disclosure remains low in environments where absence, flexible working or mental health conversations are subtly penalised. The message many women receive is unspoken but clear. Cope quietly or risk being seen as unreliable.
Precarious Job Security and the Fear Of Being Judged
For many women, mental health disclosure feels dangerous because employment itself feels fragile. Short-term contracts, restructures, performance-based cultures and constant “change” narratives mean stability is often an illusion. In this context, sharing vulnerability can feel like handing over leverage.
This fear is magnified for Black and women of colour. Economist William Darity Jr. has written extensively about how structural inequality shapes economic insecurity, making job loss far more destabilising for marginalised groups.
Sociologist Fenaba Addo further shows how limited wealth buffers mean Black women often carry greater financial risk when employment is threatened. Silence, again, becomes a rational strategy.
Trust Gaps and Emotional Labour
With toxic work environments, unpredictable management and a lack of trust does not only silence mental health conversations, it intensifies emotional labour.
Women are often expected to manage relationships, morale and team dynamics while suppressing their own emotional needs. This double burden contributes to burnout that remains hidden until it becomes unmanageable.
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that intersectionality matters. Black women experience overlapping pressures of gendered and racialised expectations, which makes disclosure even riskier.
Admitting emotional exhaustion in spaces where bias already exists can feel like confirming harmful stereotypes rather than seeking support.
What Women Are Feeling Beneath the Silence Post Covid_19
Behind the professional exterior, many women are carrying chronic overwhelm, persistent under valuation and deep emotional fatigue that intensified after COVID-19 rather than receded. Occupational psychology research consistently links these experiences to environments where control is low, scrutiny is high and expectations remain relentless despite depleted capacity.
The pandemic blurred boundaries between work and home, increased unpaid care responsibilities and normalised crisis-level workloads, particularly in leadership, marketing and knowledge-based roles where “always on” became the default.
For Black and women of colour, the post-COVID workplace has carried additional weight.
Alongside grief, health anxiety and financial precarity, many were expected to stabilise teams, absorb emotional labour and model resilience while navigating racialised stress, bias and under-recognised contributions. Black psychologist Joy DeGruy has long highlighted how historical and cultural trauma compounds stress responses.
Post-COVID, this burden has intensified as workplaces often failed to acknowledge the unequal social, health and economic realities different groups were returning with.
These feelings are not signs of individual weakness or reduced capability. They are indicators of systems that demand sustained performance in a post-crisis world without rebuilding trust, safety or humane working conditions.
Silence, in this context, becomes a rational response to environments that have not adapted to the psychological cost of the pandemic, especially for women whose security, credibility and wellbeing already felt fragile before it began.
What Needs To Change For Workplaces to Become Safe
Evidence points to several clear interventions.
First, leadership behaviour matters more than policy. Psychological safety is built through consistent, trusted actions, not wellbeing statements.
Second, job security and fair management practices reduce silence. When people believe mistakes or vulnerability will not be punished, disclosure increases.
McKinsey research shows organisations with inclusive leadership practices report stronger retention and engagement. UK and US studies alike confirm that trust, autonomy and transparent management reduce burnout more effectively than resilience training alone.
For Black women and women of colour, culturally competent management and bias-aware leadership are not optional, they are foundational to safety.
Moving From Silence To Support
Breaking the Culture of Silence Is a Leadership Responsibility
Silence around mental health is not a personal failure. It is a workplace signal.
When women do not speak, it is rarely because they lack self-awareness or courage. More often, it is because past experiences have taught them that honesty carries consequences.
Silence is learned behaviour in environments where disclosure has led to stalled progression, subtle exclusion, performance questioning or job insecurity. In this context, quiet endurance becomes a form of self-protection rather than disengagement.
Addressing this reality requires more than encouraging people to “speak up” or launching awareness campaigns. Openness cannot exist without safety. Leaders must examine the conditions that make silence necessary in the first place.
Precarious contracts, inconsistent management responses, bias in performance assessments and cultures that reward overwork while penalising vulnerability. Without structural change, invitations to be open can feel performative, or worse, risky traps that expose those who are already marginalised.
For women and particularly for Black women and women of colour, the stakes are even higher. Disclosure often sits at the intersection of gendered expectations and racialised scrutiny.
Emotional exhaustion may be interpreted as incompetence. Stress may be reframed as a lack of resilience. Grief or overwhelm may be quietly logged as a “risk factor” rather than a human response. Leadership accountability means recognising these dynamics and actively dismantling them, not assuming neutrality where lived experience proves otherwise.
Leaders who want sustainable performance must therefore build trust deliberately and visibly. This means creating cultures where honesty does not threaten employment, where judgement is replaced with curiosity and where support is embedded into everyday management practice rather than outsourced to wellbeing initiatives or one-off programmes.
Psychological safety, done well, is not about fragility or lowering standards. Until workplaces take responsibility for rebuilding trust, many women will continue to suffer quietly while delivering visibly.
Organisations will continue to mistake silence for strength, right up until burnout, attrition or breakdown makes it impossible to ignore.
For leaders, this is about building environments where clarity, trust and human sustainability allow people to perform at their best for the long term. When leaders choose to design for safety, they do not just prevent burnout or attrition, they unlock healthier teams, sharper decision-making and organisations that can truly endure.
If this resonates with your experience or leadership practice, like this post. If you have insights or reflections, share them in the comments. If you believe this conversation needs to reach others who influence workplace culture, please share it.
Disclaimer: This post is for informational and reflective purposes only. If you are experiencing persistent stress, anxiety, depression or emotional distress, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional or healthcare provider.
