Health Update: Health Update: Corporate wellness vs women’s burnout – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
By Katrina Zalcmane, co-founder | partnerships and growth, Véa
The global corporate wellness market reached US$70.65 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit US$128 billion by 2033 – Europe leads the charge, capturing over 39.5 per cent of market share.
Meanwhile, femtech investment hit US$2.2 billion in 2024, representing 8.5 per cent of all digital health funding.
The message is clear: companies recognise that employee wellness matters and women’s health technology is finally getting serious investment.
So why are women still drowning?
In the UK, 91 per cent of adults report experiencing high or extreme stress levels – despite consumers spending an average of US$3,342 annually on wellness and self-care.
60 per cent of women in leadership positions report feeling constantly burned out, while 69 per cent of women feel emotionally drained after every workday.
Around 1 in 4 working women say they can’t manage workplace stress, with only 44 per cent confident their employer even has a burnout plan.
The numbers don’t add up. Billions flowing into wellness programmes. A femtech revolution promising personalised solutions.
And yet women ages 25-45 – the backbone of the modern workforce – are hitting crisis levels of exhaustion.
The problem isn’t a lack of investment – it’s what we’re investing in.
The Mismatch: What Companies Offer vs What Women Actually Need
Health risk assessments captured 21.2 per cent of the European corporate wellness market in 2024, while stress management programmes hold 13 per cent market share and continue expanding.
Companies are checking boxes: biometric screenings, mental health apps, flexible work, meditation subscriptions.
Yet these programmes consistently miss three critical factors:
1. Emotional data is invisible
Modern workplaces reward thinking, problem-solving and constant cognitive output.
What gets lost is the intelligence that comes from recognising early warning signals in the body – somatic indicators that burnout is building long before it becomes visible.
Women are taught to “think through” stress rather than listen to what their bodies are telling them. By the time burnout shows up in productivity metrics or sick days, the damage is done.
2. Hormonal rhythms are ignored
Corporate wellness assumes constant, linear productivity.
But women’s bodies don’t work that way. Menstrual cycles, perimenopause, fertility journeys – all create natural energy fluctuations that impact focus, stress response and cognitive performance.
Instead of working with these rhythms, most women fight against them, blaming themselves for “productivity dips” that are actually biological.
The result is chronic disconnection from their bodies and accelerated burnout.
3. Emotional labour stays uncounted
Women carry disproportionate loads of invisible work – managing team dynamics, mentoring, smoothing conflicts, holding space for others’ stress.
This labour never appears on performance reviews or workload assessments.
It accumulates beneath the surface until women hit a wall.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
In the UK, mental health-related absences cost the economy approximately £21.6 billion annually, with employees taking 34 million sick days each year due to stress, depression and anxiety.
Employee burnout costs an average 1,000-person company US$5.04 million per year globally. Burned-out employees are 6 times more likely to leave, costing companies 50-200 per cent of salary in recruiting and training.
For women specifically, the crisis deepens.
Women new to leadership report 70 per cent burnout rates; for women of colour in senior positions, it reaches 77 per cent..
Nearly 40 per cent of women actively seeking new jobs cite burnout as the primary reason.
Replacing a mid- or senior-level woman costs up to 213 per cent of her annual salary.
We’re not just losing individual contributors but hemorrhaging the women leaders who hold institutional knowledge, mentor the next generation and drive diversity initiatives.
What Needs to Change
Instead of more generic wellness programs, we need to fundamentally rethink how we support women at work.
1. Shift from crisis response to prevention
Only 44 per cent of women feel confident their employer has a burnout plan – but by then, you’ve already lost.
Companies must teach women to recognise burnout signals in their bodies before a crisis hits. Somatic awareness catches exhaustion early, when intervention still works.
2. Design work around cyclical energy, not constant output
Women need organisational cultures that acknowledge hormonal rhythms as legitimate biological factors affecting performance.
This means training managers to understand energy fluctuations and designing workloads that account for them instead of just offering “flexible arrangements”.
3. Make invisible labour visible
Emotional labor must be quantified, acknowledged and redistributed.
This requires new frameworks for measuring contributions beyond traditional output metrics and structural changes preventing this work from defaulting to women.
4. Prioritise personalisation over one-size-fits-all
Workforce wellness now centres on personalisation powered by AI and data analytics.
A 27-year-old establishing her career has completely different needs than a 42-year-old navigating perimenopause while caring for ageing parents.
AI-driven platforms can deliver tailored support – virtual health assistants, personalised insights, telemedicine – making care more accessible for women balancing careers, family and wellness.
The Opportunity
Closing the women’s health gap could add at least $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040.
But unlocking that value requires interventions addressing burnout’s root causes, not just symptoms.
The market is already voting.
Virtual workplace wellness programmes saw substantial growth following the pandemic and Europe continues leading corporate wellness investment.
Companies in the UK and France are implementing AI-driven burnout assessments, hybrid wellness platforms and data-driven mental health monitoring.
Still, investment alone isn’t enough.
The question isn’t whether companies will spend on women’s wellness – they already are.
The question is whether they’ll invest in solutions that actually work: reconnecting women with somatic intelligence before burnout becomes visible, designing around hormonal rhythms rather than fighting them and making invisible labour visible so it can be redistributed.
The companies that do will win the talent war.
The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their best women keep leaving.
About Véa Workshops
Véa offers evidence-based corporate wellness workshops designed specifically for women professionals, addressing the root causes of burnout that traditional programs miss.
Grounded in neuroscience, psychology and somatic awareness, Véa workshops focus on prevention rather than crisis response – teaching women to recognise emotional data and somatic signals, work sustainably with hormonal rhythms and make invisible labor visible.
Available in formats from 45-minute executive sessions to half-day leadership offsites, these workshops support sustainable performance without asking women to step back from ambition.
Learn more at veajournal.app/workshops.