You landed your dream job, or so you thought. But quiet doubts grow harder to ignore: “Did I choose right?” “Can I do this for the rest of my life?” “I want something more.”
These questions seem to collide with major life transitions that often hit in your 30s or 40s: raising children, paying mortgages, and caring for parents in the same way they once cared for us. All of it converges into a pivotal decision: Do I stay on this career path, or do I shift and create something on my own?
To better understand this shift, we conducted interviews with 13 women entrepreneurs and business owners in New Jersey. They came from a range of industries, including finance, food, consulting, retail, health, and services. Despite these differences, their stories pointed to the same underlying shift: Women entrepreneurs are choosing work that makes room for life.
We found that most of the women did not initially plan to become entrepreneurs. In fact, most pivoted into entrepreneurship in mid-career, typically after between five and 20 years in traditional roles, and primarily in their 30s and 40s. Many had already invested significantly in their careers and were on leadership tracks, but they decided to leave after years of navigating environments that did not line up with their needs, values, or realities.
Why Women Are Shifting
As a prime example, the mismatch often came between the sacrifices required to meet both caregiving responsibilities (like needing to take a loved one to a doctor’s appointment) and work (like working longer hours to make up for that appointment and not fall short of expectations).
Every woman we spoke to was managing caregiving in some capacity, whether for children, elderly parents, ill family members, or others in their lives. Corporate roles were often not designed to allow the flexibility needed to be present at work and at home simultaneously. At the Rutgers Center for Women in Business, we refer to this struggle as caregiving strain. For many women, entrepreneurship became a way to build work around life rather than life around work.
Critically, the women leaving were not early-career employees still exploring options or unsure of where they were going professionally. They were not changing their minds because they lost ambition. Many occupied key organizational roles, managing teams, mentoring employees, maintaining client relationships, and carrying years of institutional knowledge. These women were already in leadership or on the path toward leadership roles.
Scholars refer to this pattern as the “leaky pipeline,” but often without understanding why the leaks are happening. Some leaks stem from unclear promotion pathways and leadership structures never designed with caregiving realities in mind. Others emerge from workplace cultures that reward constant availability while penalizing flexibility—producing burnout and environments that push employees out.
The irony is that corporations often are pushing out employees with the exact human-centered skills increasingly identified as essential in the future of work (such as adaptability and emotional intelligence).
Importantly, we found that entrepreneurship did not necessarily reduce workload. Many women described working even more than before. The difference was control: Instead of fixed schedules and externally imposed demands, they could decide when, how, and where work occurred.
For many of the women, the transformations were apparent. Several women described better physical health, reduced stress, and greater overall fulfillment when given this form of adaptability. As one woman put it simply: “Freedom gives you power.” This aligns with broader work examining how women feel more powerful in their careers when they feel free rather than forcing themselves to fit into traditional workplace power archetypes.
One example of this shift was Melissa Jenkins, founder and owner of BAM Desserts, a bakery in Somerset, New Jersey, specializing in custom desserts for individuals and corporations. Entrepreneurship was not always part of her plan. Earlier in her career, Melissa worked as a sales and marketing manager and was steadily climbing the corporate leadership ladder. The skills she developed there ultimately became foundational to the business she would later build herself. Yet despite the professional growth, corporate life felt relentless with an “always on” environment. In her late 40s, what is considered mid-career, Melissa decided to leave corporate work and pursue a long-standing passion for the creativity of baking. That passion eventually became BAM Desserts. Although she now works long hours building her company, she does so because she feels the need to work if she wants the company to grow.
Her transition also reflected a broader reality many mid-career women described throughout the interviews: Entrepreneurship often emerged alongside increasing caregiving demands. While building BAM Desserts, Melissa was simultaneously navigating her father’s dementia, her mother’s illness, and the responsibilities of raising a teenage daughter. Financially, remaining in her corporate role likely would have been more practical, she acknowledged. The salary, benefits, and stability would have better supported the rising costs associated with caregiving and family responsibilities. Yet entrepreneurship provided something her previous role could not: flexibility. She gained more control over when she worked, which days she took off, and how she responded when family needs arose, which was invaluable to her.
Entrepreneurship Without a Safety Net
This shift into entrepreneurship is not without cost. Entrepreneurship is not an easy conquest. Several women described periods of financial instability, including covering payroll out of personal savings and navigating inconsistent income while building, and, for some, sustaining their businesses. Unlike corporate roles, entrepreneurship often came without safety nets: no guaranteed salary, employer-backed healthcare, or predictable financial security. Many entered with no outside funding, relying instead on prior earnings, savings, family support, or second jobs.
This reflects a broader reality: Women-owned startups receive only a small fraction of venture capital funding, and many women report earning less as entrepreneurs than they did in traditional employment. What should be alarming to companies is that many women still view entrepreneurship as the more sustainable option for their lives despite those risks.
If experienced women are willing to trade financial predictability and stability for greater flexibility and adaptability, it signals that existing workplace structures may not be meeting the needs of employees during one of the most demanding stages of their careers: the mid-career years, when caregiving strain becomes one of the primary reasons many women begin considering exit altogether. Organizations often focus on surface-level policies, penalize those who take advantage of them, and overlook the broader cognitive burden many workers carry outside of work. In this sense, burnout and caregiving strain can be seen less as individual problems and more as structural ones.
There is also a generational shift underway, particularly among Gen Z and Alpha women moving toward entrepreneurship earlier than previous generations. Women-owned businesses now represent 40% of all U.S. companies, a fact that suggests broader changes in how workers define career sustainability and success.
Retaining experienced women requires rethinking how work is structured: expanding caregiving support, normalizing flexibility without career penalties, improving paid leave policies, and building more sustainable pathways to leadership.