2026 Workforce State of Mind

The chronic strain crisis
New data reveals why chronic strain is quietly eroding productivity and engagement — and what it takes to build a resilient workforce that can perform through change.

In data from our 2026 report, Workforce State of Mind, you can find over the past year that 73% of women say mental or cognitive strain has hurt their productivity, compared with 67% of men. Women are also more likely to report that strain is affecting their sleep quality (83% vs. 70% of men), their ability to focus (80% vs. 67%), and their engagement at work (69% vs. 59%). AI didn’t create this gap, but it’s making it wider.

The domestic load doesn’t get redistributed just because both partners work. Women remain the default family managers, the go-to emergency contacts, appointment schedulers, and people tracking everyone else’s needs. At work, they’re still expected to be the emotional connective tissue of their teams, as the conflict diffuser, the morale keeper, and the one who notices when someone’s struggling. This is all layered onto an already demanding reality from just living in a woman’s body. Women spend 25% more time in poor health than men, driven by diagnostic delays and treatments that weren’t designed for female physiology. Hormonal shifts across the monthly cycle, through pregnancy and postpartum, and also into perimenopause can affect sleep, focus, and cognitive capacity in ways that are rarely addressed at work.