By Jolly Nanda, Founder & CEO, Altheia Inc.
Redefining Success Through Data, Health, and Purpose
It’s time to redefine success for women in leadership — not just by how high we rise, but by how well we live while doing it.
For too long, women have achieved extraordinary professional success while quietly sacrificing physical vitality and emotional bandwidth. As executive women leading companies, families, and communities, we shoulder an invisible load — one that exacts a toll on our health, creativity, and longevity.
But this is not just a personal issue; it’s a structural reality. It’s time we redesign the system for ourselves and for those who come next.
The Invisible Load of Leadership
The data is striking:
- 63% of women executives report chronic stress, compared to 39% of men (McKinsey & Lean In, Women in the Workplace 2023).
- 75% manage caregiving responsibilities alongside full-time leadership roles (Harvard Business School, Women & Caregiving Study, 2022).
- 50% of senior women say they feel burned out on a weekly basis (Deloitte, Women @ Work 2023).
Behind every successful woman is often exhaustion, a second and third shift of caregiving, coordination, and invisible leadership that remains unacknowledged and unsupported. Burnout is frequently mistaken for drive, but in truth, it is a quiet crisis of systemic design.
We cannot continue to normalize depletion as the price of ambition.
What Lies Beneath “Success”
Most women reach executive levels just as their biology begins to shift dramatically. Between ages 40 and 55, hormonal transitions such as perimenopause and menopause impact focus, energy, and cognitive function. Add elevated cortisol, autoimmune risk, and constant connectivity, and the result is physiological overload.
Compounding that are the systemic factors: gender bias in healthcare, time poverty, and the “always-on” digital culture that punishes rest.
Women are leading organizations and health systems that were never designed with their physiology in mind. This is not a failure of resilience; this is a failure of infrastructure.
Six Layers of Burden
From our data and executive research analysis, six recurring stressors define the female leadership experience:
- Caregiving Load – balancing multi-generational dependents while leading full-time careers.
- Aging and Transition – one billion women globally are navigating menopause during prime professional years (The Lancet, Menopause Series 2023).
- Bias and Representation – persistent “only woman in the room” scenarios increase cognitive and emotional load.
- Leadership Pressure – women in C-suites report 1.5x higher chronic stress than male peers.
- Health Neglect – 44% of women delay medical care due to workload (American Psychological Association, 2022).
- Isolation – 56% report professional loneliness in male-dominated leadership cultures.
Stress reduces sleep. Caregiving cuts recovery time. Hormonal transitions amplify burnout. Taken together, these create a compounding ecosystem of depletion.
Leadership should not demand the erosion of well-being.
The Paradox: Women Are the Backbone of Healthcare
Women comprise 75% of the global healthcare workforce, 90% of nursing, 80% of behavioral health, and 60% of pharmacy roles (World Health Organization, Gender Equity in Health Workforce, 2022).
Yet, women still represent only 30% of board members and 25% of hospital CEOs.
We are the caregivers, clinicians, and decision-makers sustaining the system, but too often, the system itself fails to sustain us. Inequity is both moral and economic. When the backbone of healthcare is fatigued, the entire infrastructure bends.
The Health Gap: Data, Disease, and Disparity
Women’s exclusion from clinical trials persisted well into the 1990s (NIH Revitalization Act, 1993). Even today, male-dominant diseases receive twice the research funding (Nature Communications, 2022).
The toll is measurable:
- Autoimmune conditions: 70–80% of patients are women.
- Cardiovascular disease: #1 killer of women, yet symptoms are systematically misdiagnosed (American Heart Association, 2023).
- Neurological disease: women are underrepresented in most early-phase trials, with outcomes rarely stratified by hormone status.
- Female-specific conditions: represent only 4–10% of total global R&D spend, and prostate cancer research receives nearly the same funding as all uterine conditions combined (The Lancet Women’s Health Report, 2023).
When half the population remains underrepresented in data, the science itself becomes biased.
Data gaps become care gaps, and care gaps become generational suffering.
Protecting Our Health, Energy, and Focus
Sustainable leadership begins with treating one’s health with board-level governance.
- Audit your body like your business portfolio: Quarterly “medical business reviews” track trends and exposure.
- Create non-negotiable recovery hours: Sleep and detachment improve focus by 32% (Deloitte, 2023).
- Use preventive testing and digital tracking: Data-driven prevention reduces hospitalization risk by up to 40% (Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2021).
- Outsource non-core stressors: Delegate where possible; clarity follows capacity.
- Mind-body resilience training: Exercise and mindfulness build adaptive stress tolerance.
Health is not self-indulgence; it is leadership infrastructure and strategic foresight.
Reshaping Organizational Culture
Self-care alone cannot offset systemic imbalance. We must evolve institutional culture.
Promote health equity as a business issue, not a perk.
Push HR, DEI, and wellness vendors for gender-disaggregated data, because what gets measured gets managed.
Model authentic boundaries. Share personal well-being practices. This transparency creates “permission cultures” that enable others to thrive.
And critically, move beyond mentorship to sponsorship, formal advocacy that doubles women’s promotion rates. Advocacy multiplies what resilience alone cannot achieve.
Using Power to Reshape the Ecosystem
Women in leadership today have platform power, in policy, economics, and narrative.
- Policy: Champion caregiving credits, research parity, and inclusive data standards.
- Economic Influence: Direct philanthropy and investment toward women’s health innovation. Corporate dollars have multiplier effects.
- Narrative Change: Normalize discussion of menopause, miscarriage, and mental health in leadership spaces.
- Collaboration: Form Women’s Health Leadership Councils across industries to share best practices and data insights.
Power shared across women leaders is what redefines ecosystems.
And the moment for that power to be used is now, because every delay compounds inequity for the next generation.
Trust, Data, and the Patient Voice
Every year, 12 million adults in the U.S. are misdiagnosed, contributing to nearly 800,000 serious harms or deaths.
That equates to $2.1 trillion globally in preventable costs, litigation, and productivity loss (NCBI, PMC10792094, 2025).
In healthcare, misdiagnosis is not just a clinical failure, it’s a data failure.
That’s why my company, Altheia Inc., built Acuvía, a consent-driven patient data platform that unifies medical records, wearables, life events, and social determinants of health. It empowers patient and care provider collaboration, leading to better outcomes.
Because no one understands the full context of a condition better than the patient themselves.
When patients own and share their full health stories, care becomes not only more accurate, but profoundly more human.
From Self-Care to Systemic Advocacy
Every woman leader can begin advocacy where she already stands, in the doctor’s office.
Use methodical frameworks like PQRST symptom mapping to communicate your symptoms.
The PQRST system is a structured framework clinicians use to describe, assess, and communicate symptoms, especially pain or discomfort in a precise, consistent way. It helps ensure you and your provider are speaking the same diagnostic language.
Here’s how it breaks down:
| Letter | Meaning | What You Describe | Example Questions or Notes |
| P – Provocation / Palliation | What makes it better or worse? | Triggers, relieving factors, activity/exposure links. | “It gets worse when I climb stairs and better when I rest.” |
| Q – Quality | How does it feel? | Texture or character of sensation: sharp, dull, burning, throbbing, stabbing, etc. | “It’s a deep, burning pressure.” |
| R – Region / Radiation | Where is it located, and does it spread? | Exact site and whether it moves or radiates elsewhere. | “It starts in my lower back and radiates to my left leg.” |
| S – Severity | How intense is it? | Use a numeric scale (0–10) or describe its effect on activities. | “It’s a 7/10 and keeps me from sleeping.” |
| T – Timing | When does it occur or how long does it last? | Onset, frequency, duration, pattern, relationship to day/night cycles. | “It began 2 weeks ago, comes every morning, and lasts 30 minutes.” |
and ask your clinician the Triple Question:
- What’s most likely?
- What’s second?
- What’s the most serious thing being ruled out?
Ask for your differential diagnosis list. A symptom may pop up later that may align to something on that list. It may be important to note and communicate that with your care team.
Use Teach-Back methods to ensure clarity. “So, you are telling me that A, and I need to do B and I need to call in if I experience C?”
And treat your physician as you would an executive advisor, come prepared, data-ready, and goal-oriented.
These simple structures help close diagnostic gaps that disproportionately harm women.
Three Commitments for Today’s Executive Women
- Treat your health as a strategic asset, not a personal errand.
- Defend time, sleep, and care with the same rigor as profits and performance.
- Build and share care networks. Connection is a renewable resource.
These commitments not only sustain our leadership, but they also model new norms for those entering behind us.
Why We Must Act Now
This moment is historic, for the first time, four generations of women coexist in executive leadership across global industries. The policies, data systems, and cultural norms we establish in the next five years will either accelerate health equity or entrench another generation of imbalance.
We owe it to the women who follow us, our daughters, mentees, colleagues, and future leaders to ensure they inherit organizations and health systems designed with them, not despite them.
Change is not theoretical; it’s actionable, measurable, and overdue.
The Future of Leadership Is Wholeness
Power, advocacy, and renewal are not competing forces, they are the rhythm of sustainable leadership.
When women claim ownership of their data, advocate fearlessly for equity, and reimagine health as a cornerstone of success, we don’t just preserve our capacity; we transform the architecture of leadership itself.
The systems of tomorrow will be healthier because women today refused to lead from depletion.
Your data is your agency.
Your boundaries are your advocacy.
Your health is your legacy.
The revolution in women’s health leadership starts here and it starts now.
References
- McKinsey & Company & Lean In, Women in the Workplace 2023.
- World Health Organization, Gender Equity in the Health Workforce 2022.
- The Lancet, Menopause Series 2023.
- Deloitte, Women @ Work 2023: A Global Outlook.
- Nature Communications, Sex Bias in Biomedical Research Funding, 2022.
- American Heart Association, Cardiovascular Disease in Women 2023.
- Harvard Business School, Women & Caregiving: The Leadership Hidden Load, 2022.
- American Psychological Association, Stress in America Report, 2022.
- NCBI, PMC10792094 – Diagnostic Error Burdens, 2025.
- The Lancet, Global Burden and Underfunding of Female Health R&D, 2023.
