Five years after the COVID lockdown sent millions of women toward career exits that the data shows most never fully recovered from, the question for HR leaders is: what changed? Karen Browning’s pandemic resignation letter—written in the summer of 2021 as a candid account of what her employer failed to provide — remains a precise diagnostic tool for assessing organizational flexibility readiness. The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2024 report shows the structural gaps she named are still present in most organizations.
Key Takeaways:
What Karen’s resignation letter identified as the specific policy failures that drove her exit, and which remain unaddressed in most organizations five years later
The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2024 data: where workplace equity has improved and where the gaps persist
The single intervention that would have retained Karen—her exact words: “If leadership had reached out to me and said, ‘I know things are hard, would you like the opportunity to go part-time while we get through this and share your job with another person?’ I would have leapt at that opportunity to keep my job and my health”—and Karen’s broader advocacy for cross-training so no one is an unreplaceable single point of failure
The SurveyMonkey Women at Work 2025 finding—21% of women have seriously considered quitting in recent months, with work-life balance as the #1 factor—as evidence that the conditions driving Karen’s 2021 resignation are still active, not historical
Research & Resources:
Explore job sharing: workmuse.com
Episode Website: workmuse.com/32 Transcript here
