Women are exhausted, isolated and burned out: Berlin Cameron study

In January, Jennifer DaSilva, president of creative agency Berlin Cameron, was in a virtual meeting with other female leaders who began talking about how they had been spending their time. 

“Normally, it’s like: I’m doing this huge initiative, and I would love you to take part in it,” DaSilva said. “I found myself talking about binge watching and how I had been doing a lot of it.”

DaSilva felt embarrassed by her admission, she said, but then she received notes from others on the call who said they were in a similar rut. 

That realization that others were feeling the same, as well as a virtual event she attended with Eve Rodsky, the author of “Find Your Unicorn Space,” a book about creative energy, sparked DaSilva to launch a research project examining exhaustion among male and female professionals. 

“What we saw across the board is that people are burnt out and exhausted,” she said. “But what we saw from women that is different from men is really an isolation factor. Almost half of women wouldn’t ask for help if they felt burnt out.”

With the study, titled The Exhaustion Gap, complete, Berlin Cameron, along with Rodsky, Kantar, and Luminary, a platform for professional women, held the “Rise and Rest Event” on International Women’s Day, March 8, to discuss the findings in an effort to help participants overcome burnout. 

The study, which was conducted online by Kantar, included responses from more 1,000 people — half of them women — in the United States and Great Britain. It found that two-thirds of women had felt burnt out in the last week, and that the same ratio of women also had not received a pay raise during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly 80% had not received a promotion during the pandemic, according to a press release. 

More than half of the women surveyed said they never or rarely do an activity that inspires them and wish they could invest in themselves and their interests and hobbies.

Part of the event was about “acknowledging that it’s okay not to be okay, and it’s okay to share that it’s been tough and that you have been binge watching more than you were or drinking more or whatever your coping mechanism is,” said DaSilva, who is based in Los Angeles and started a LLShe, a division of Berlin Cameron focused on women-owned brands.

DaSilva thinks it’s important for executives to establish a culture in which women “can be open and talk about these difficulties that we are facing right now,” she said. 

She also advises women dealing with burnout to find something they enjoy that isn’t tied to money or responsibility. 

The event also featured a talk from Avni Patel Thompson, founder and CEO of Milo, an app to help tackle the invisible load of raising a family, and a Creative Shake Up! Playful Movement with Piera Gelardi, entrepreneur and creative director.