Women may unwittingly be living through a turning point in their labor history. Hundreds of thousands are packing their desks leaving their jobs—both by choice, and involuntarily—while people pontificate if they ruined the workplace, and some CEOs call for a more “masculine” company culture. Now, business leaders are calling out the backtrack of women’s careers, and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg warns of a damaging trend.
“I’m 56, so this is my fourth decade in the workplace, and we are in a particularly troubling moment in terms of the rhetoric on women. You see it everywhere, in all the sectors,” Sandberg recently toldCNN. “But what I’ve seen is when we make progress, we backslide, we make progress, we backslide.”
“And I think this is a major moment of backsliding,” she said.
The long-time Meta executive, bestselling author, and billionaire pulled out a slew of worrying facts and figures. She noted that during the first eight months of 2025, more than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce—while 100,000 men stepped into jobs within the same period. And the plight has been even worse for women of color; Sandberg said the unemployment rate among Black women currently rests at 7.5%, significantly higher than the national average of 4.4%, and even greater than the approximate 3.5% of jobless white men and women.
