The day she was laid off, Simone Jordan felt joy.
At 44-years-old, she’d been working ever since she was 15 when she got her first job at Six Flags. The daughter of a single mother, not working had never felt like an option. She paid for college through a work-study program, then climbed the corporate ladder in New York City to become an executive at Unilever.
But the early years of the pandemic drained Ms. Jordan. Her job involved scrambling to help Black-owned small businesses stay afloat in the face of Covid-19 closures and navigating the summer of racial justice protests. She’d also gotten engaged and, in 2022, gave birth to a baby boy at the age of 40, after decades spent sidelining her personal life for her career.
As new mothers go, Ms. Jordan was fortunate. She had a dedicated partner, paid maternity leave, and could afford a nanny. But she realized she didn’t want more child care. She wanted more time with her child. “I waited this long to have this glorious little boy,” she said. “I wanted my moments.”
So when Unilever eliminated her role as part of widespread layoffs last fall, Ms. Jordan decided not to return to full-time work. After a life spent “leaning in,” she decided, for now, there might be other things worth leaning in to.
“People ask me, ‘Oh my gosh, what are you doing now?’” said Ms. Jordan, who is working as a part-time consultant and stay-at-home mother. “I’m like, ‘Everything that I put on pause when I was working.’”
It’s a complicated time to talk — or write — about women choosing to leave their jobs. Conservative policymakers are loudly pushing for more women to make more babies, less loudly implying that they should also stay home to raise them. Women feel forced out of their jobs as child care costs spike. And the old glass ceiling remains intact, making women in high-pressure professional fields wary of confessing to anything less than apex career ambition.
But an emerging slice of women who are shifting away from full-throttle careers defy such easy characterization. These are the women of the “girl boss” era, who have M.B.A.s and legal degrees to match. They’ve read “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg. They’ve stood on the shoulders of the second-wave feminists who fought for their right to work.
Sixty years on from that fight, they are also beginning to wonder whether all that career pressure they’ve been under was another way of forcing them into a box. If they now want something other than more work in exchange for all that work, why exactly is that a capitulation?
“I’ve seen more and more very high-powered women who have been in careers for a very long time — and very successful careers — taking a step to say: ‘What do I want to do now? Where do I want to go?’” said Cate Luzio, the founder and C.E.O. of Luminary, a professional education and networking company geared toward women. Ms. Luzio said a growing number of Luminary’s members have changed careers or left the work force post-Covid.
To hear these women tell it, leaving their jobs — whether for motherhood, starting their own businesses, or otherwise — isn’t some sign that they fell off a broken ladder; it’s a power move.
“I didn’t fall off anything. I made a conscious decision,” said Maribel Lara, who left her role as senior vice president at the media company VaynerX earlier this year and now runs her own marketing consultancy, Beget Love Consulting, based on Long Island. “I wasn’t looking for growth within corporate America. I was looking to have full control of my time.”
In her new book of the same name, the author Neha Ruch calls this period, particularly for working mothers, the “power pause.” She wrote it, partly, based on her own experience with motherhood. She had an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a decade-long career as a brand strategist. When she left her job after the birth of her second child and found herself without her job title, she suddenly felt naked and counted out. “I immediately started hearing the pushback, like, ‘Are you giving up? Aren’t you going to be bored all day?’” she said.
The people asking those questions assumed she was regressing into some 1950s June Cleaver stereotype, sitting at home baking cookies. None of it matched her own experience or the experiences of the other women she met. They had come to motherhood later in life and often had more work and educational experience than their mothers and grandmothers did. They had partners who spent more time with their children. And particularly after the pandemic, they had access to freelance gigs and remote work options that blurred the once-stark lines between work and home. She wrote “The Power Pause” to redefine this transitional period in women’s lives.
She chose the term carefully. Leaning out. Opting out. Stepping back. To Ms. Ruch, those phrases all carry a whiff of surrender. At a moment when she saw motherhood being politicized and the tradwives of TikTok glamorizing retrograde gender roles, the last thing she wanted was to play into old tropes. “Tradwife is a hashtag,” Ms. Ruch said. “It is not a reflection of the majority of American women.”
The “power pause” is designed to give women their agency back. “You’re stepping into a chapter where you’re going to be focused on other priorities,” Ms. Ruch said, “but you’re also growing.”
That Ms. Ruch spent her career in branding is no coincidence. The power pause is, itself, a rebrand on an old concept. “It has always been the case that women moved in and out of the work force as their family needs demanded or made possible,” said Ivana Greco, senior fellow at the think tank Capita, which focuses on children and families. But Ms. Greco, who is a stay-at-home mom herself, said the pandemic changed work to make it possible for women to “combine career interests and family in a way that was harder before we had Zoom.”
It can be difficult to measure how widespread this phenomenon is, but a survey conducted by one parenting platform shows that from 2022 to 2023, the percentage of women identifying as stay-at-home mothers grew by 60 percent. In 2024, that number dipped slightly, but the percentage of mothers working part-time from home doubled. Another 2023 survey commissioned by Ms. Ruch’s organization found that one in three working mothers were likely to leave their jobs to become stay-at-home parents in the next two years.
It’s not just working mothers with young children shifting course post-pandemic. McKinsey and Ms. Sandberg’s organization, Lean In, have surveyed women in the workplace every year for the past decade. Since 2020, the overall number of women considering reducing their hours, taking a less demanding job or leaving the work force has grown. Last year, roughly one in five women said they were considering taking a less demanding job. And in 2021, the researchers recorded the highest percentage of women leaders leaving their companies in years. Not all of them were leaving the work force entirely, but they were often seeking more flexibility than their employers could provide.
Ashley McCreary, for one, used to believe the pinnacle of success would be becoming the vice president of a health care company. Then she became one, helping lead a start-up through an acquisition, which enabled her to cash in on her equity. To Ms. McCreary, whose parents divorced when she was 16, women’s financial freedom had always been paramount, and she’d never considered being a stay-at-home mother. “Growing up I was like, ‘Why would you ever do that?’” she said.
But after having her first daughter during the pandemic, and another, two years later, she understood. It wasn’t that she couldn’t balance work and family. She worked remotely from her home in Louisville, Ky., and set work-life boundaries that her colleagues respected. Whatever “having it all is,” Ms. McCreary felt she had it. But she didn’t want it. Among other things, the periodic travel her job required now seemed totally unappealing. “So many of us are told what being successful is we never really thought about whether we want that or not,” she said.
She left her full-time job in December of 2023 and has since been the primary caregiver for her children, while building her own coaching service for women going through similar transitions. But just because the move was hers to make does not mean it was easy. Ms. McCreary knew that opting to scale back was a privilege. Who was she to make that decision when so many women couldn’t? “I’m partially really proud that I set myself up to make a choice,” she said. “At the same time, I think to myself: ‘Are people judging me for not working? Are people judging me for not having to work?’”
In a LinkedIn post last year, Ms. McCreary wrote a “defense of pulling back” to explain her decision. In retrospect, she admits she was really trying to justify it to herself and her would-be critics. But the response she got was broadly supportive. “Overall, the feedback has had the tone of, ‘I wish I could do that,’” she said.
Women making these moves also often grapple with what they owe to the women they leave behind. That’s especially true for women of color, who make up just 7 percent of C-suite positions, according to the McKinsey and Lean In survey. “I recognized that I was a role model,” said Ms. Lara of Beget Love Consulting. “That was actually one of the hardest parts about leaving. There was definitely a sense of guilt, like, I’m leaving them on their own.”
Other women, like Maria Weaver, struggle with the loss of identity that can come with such a major career change. Ms. Weaver was previously global chief marketing officer at Comcast Advertising and most recently global president of Warner Music. But last year, as Warner Music went through a reorganization under its new C.E.O., Ms. Weaver decided to leave the company and has since started her own jewelry business, XO Maria Louise. At the age of 56, she said she feels like she’s reinventing herself. “You have to get to a place where you don’t care what other people think,” she said.
Of course, women are not making these choices in a vacuum. They’re making them at a time when women still take on a disproportionate amount of child care, earn 85 percent of what men do on average and hold just 29 percent of C-suite roles.
For Claudia Timmermans, that imbalance was decisive. She and her husband met at law school and both became lawyers, but his career advanced faster. When Ms. Timmermans was laid off from her job at Ernst & Young in 2023, that disparity factored into her decision to shift careers to make more room for family. She is now an executive coach and contractor, which gives her more time with her two children.
It was her decision, but, she said, “It came with a lot of grief, because I had worked really hard on that career.”
The truth is, many of the women pursuing this path still want to work. They just want to do it in a way that works for them. “People are clamoring for more in-between options,” said Suzanne Slaughter, a tech industry product marketing professional who recently quit her job to focus on building a matching service to connect mothers to part-time work. In April, when she posted on LinkedIn asking people to respond if they were interested in potential opportunities, 800 candidates wrote back in less than a week. “I was completely blown away by the scale of this response,” she said.
Ms. Jordan said the reaction to her decision to take a career break had also been affirming. “Everyone was actually very hopeful that it would result in a healthier and happier me,” she said.
So far, Ms. Jordan is enjoying life in the in-between. Once a week, she and her son go to cooking classes together. In June, she finally got married, something she had put off while she was working full-time for Unilever. She has reconnected with friends who turn to her for advice that they used to think she was too busy to give. And she’s relishing getting to work under her own name.
“I don’t have a C-suite title. People consult with me because of who I am,” she said. “That’s nothing anyone could take away from me after this chapter is over.”
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