When Brandy Morton was laid off from her role as head of marketing at a global company last year, her first instinct was to panic.

"I have to get another full-time job," she remembered thinking before she started doing the math.

A friend in public relations asked her a simple question: With 20 years of marketing experience, why not find a client instead of a boss?

She founded her own firm, Brandy Morton Marketing , after calculating that three fractional clients at her rate would nearly double her old salary, with full control over her schedule. Now, Morton serves as fractional chief marketing officer for five clients and six brands.

She turned down a full-time counteroffer to keep it that way.

Morton is just one person showing up in the data: women who spent two or three decades climbing the corporate ladder are choosing not to climb any further. Instead, they’re stepping into consulting, fractional executive roles or building their own companies.

The Data Behind Departure

The numbers back up what recruiters and career coaches report anecdotally: Women in leadership, from senior manager to the C-suite, hit a breaking point in 2022 when they left corporate roles at the highest rate — the “Great Breakup” — since McKinsey and LeanIn.Org began tracking attrition in their annual Women in the Workplace study.

Women still hold just 29% of C-suite seats, a number that remains unchanged since 2024. And for the first time, McKinsey’s 2025 survey found a measurable ambition gap between men and women at senior levels: 84% of senior women said they were competing for a promotion, compared with 92% of senior men.

Many women respondents cited the lack of robust sponsorship and support as they climb the corporate ladder. The 2025 report notes that only about half of companies say they prioritize women’s advancement.

A Second Act In The Classroom

When experienced women take themselves out of the corporate rat race, where are they going? Many of them transition into independent work.

Women started nearly half of all new U.S. businesses in 2024, up 69% from 2019, according to Gusto's New Business Formation Report , and women-owned businesses grew 12% between 2022 and 2025, nearly double the pace of businesses owned by men, according to Wells Fargo data . Interestingly, MIT research has found the average successful startup founder is 45, not 25, and that generally, founders in their 50s outperform their younger counterparts.

That last point matters to Callie Rich, who spent 18 years teaching English and dance in a Riverside, California high school before leaving the classroom for good three years ago. A Fulbright fellowship, a pandemic-shuttered dance studio and, eventually, a state arts-funding windfall pushed her toward consulting.

She now helps school districts build and staff dance programs. Her income roughly halved, from $135,000 to $60,000 or $70,000 last year, with an expectation of returning to six figures in 2026. She said she would not trade her reduced income for the stress of working in education.

"I’m making about half of what I was making, but I’m not working nearly as much," Rich said. “And, I also haven’t missed a track meet or graduation since leaving [the classroom].”

What Companies Are Losing

Another question worth answering is what companies lose when experienced women with institutional knowledge walk out the door.

The first cost is harder to quantify, but it is increasingly well documented. Morton calls it a "superpower" for collaborative leadership and stronger team performance, combined with decades of hard-earned judgment that newer hires, no matter their comfort with AI tools, have not had time to develop.

Her instinct has some backing in neuroscience. Wharton neuroscientist and professor Michael Platt posited in a February 2026 piece that as artificial intelligence grows more capable, leadership advantage will increasingly come from communication, creativity, perspective-taking and judgment under pressure. Platt said these skills are not replicated well by AI, and it may never master them.

A December 2025 study in PLOS One found women scored significantly higher than men on empathy and perspective-taking across age groups, and a 2023 American Psychological Association article cites research that found women outperform men on seven of eight traits tied to effective leadership, including communication and creativity, and are 9% more likely to score higher on leadership effectiveness overall.

When women with these traits and years of experience leave the traditional workforce, they leave behind a vacuum. Morton described it as watching companies fill that vacuum with people "who have never lost a pitch."

The second cost is more measurable. Replacing a single employee can cost 150% to 200% of that person’s annual salary in 2021, according to Gallup . That price rises exponentially for senior and specialized roles once lost institutional knowledge and disrupted client relationships are factored in.

Rich put it more simply, describing what school districts lose when veteran teachers exit: The accumulated, undocumented know-how of "the cost of training that a corporation would experience," minus the mentorship a newcomer can't get anywhere else.

Neither Morton nor Rich think of their exit from corporate America as rejecting ambition. Both have plenty but want to pursue their goals on their own terms by having more control over how they spend their time and with whom.

For the companies they left behind, the more urgent question may not be why they are leaving. It’s whether those organizations can afford to keep losing leaders like them to the version of the job these women built for themselves.