By wlc
Published March 16, 2026
The higher a woman rises, the quieter it gets around her. It’s time we address this loneliness.
She runs the meeting, sets the direction, makes the decisions, and then she closes her office door and wonders, quietly, if she’s doing it right. Alone.
Nobody talks about this part of leadership.
According to TheLi.st’s research, 80% of women report feeling lonely because of their job, and the feelings intensify as they get more senior.
While men tend to feel less lonely as they climb, according to the research, 40% of women in leadership say their feelings of loneliness and isolation actually increased as their careers progressed.
The higher the responsibility, the fewer the spaces where women can speak without calculating the cost of their words first.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural one.
One of the more talked-about reasons why women rarely advance to top management is their lack of industry networks and such informal organizations, the kind that form easily between men who have always moved through professional spaces the same way.
And the women who do make it to senior roles often find themselves navigating something harder to name, being visible without feeling seen.
Ann Shoket, former editor-in-chief of Seventeen and CEO of TheLi.st, has spoken about this directly. Having climbed to the top of a major media brand before founding her own company, she described feeling lonely while doing it and mistaking it for ordinary stress. “We’ve so deeply entangled loneliness with ambition that it has become synonymous with success,” she writes. “It’s as if loneliness is a penalty we must pay for being ambitious.”
The consequences go beyond how a woman feels, as it’s not new to hear that women have had to let go of a new opportunity or quit altogether because of loneliness. That is not a wellness problem. That is a leadership pipeline problem.
However, what’s quietly changing is that women are building what the professional world wasn’t built to give them.
Peer circles.
Honest communities.
Spaces where rank doesn’t determine who gets to tell the truth.
A study by the Kellogg School of Management found that while a broad network helped women, the ones who landed the most senior roles with the highest authority and pay also had something else.
A close inner circle of female contacts. Not a large one. A real one.
People who understood the specific terrain of being a woman making consequential decisions in rooms that weren’t always designed with her in mind. In the study, 77% of the highest-achieving women had strong ties with that kind of inner circle.
The study also found that women with strong professional relationships with both peers and high-status contacts are 2.5 times more likely to secure a promotion. Connection, it turns out, is not soft. It is strategic.
Inside these circles, something shifts. A leader can say “I’m not sure about this” without it becoming a liability. She can admit something feels heavy without being expected to immediately fix it. And she can hear the words that may be the most clarifying thing in leadership, “I’ve been there too”.
Leadership has always required holding complexity, making decisions under pressure, and staying steady when others look to you for direction. None of that is diminished by having someone you can call. The leaders who last, who grow, who build something beyond their tenure, they almost always have that person.
Build the circle. Protect it. Show up to it honestly. You were never supposed to carry all of this alone.