Women pursuing “lazy girl jobs”—one with minimal stress and decent pay—are anything but lazy. Rather than shirking hard work, new research has found that they are actually just trying to escape burnout.
In fact, while men have become less burned out as bosses force workers to return to pre-pandemic norms, women are still feeling drained.
Gallup surveyed over 18,000 workers and found that 33% of women are almost always burned out, right now. Just a quarter of men feel the same.
What’s more, the burnout gap between men and women has widened from 3 percentage points in 2019 to 13 percentage points in 2023.
It’s why, according to the research, women are increasingly looking for work-life balance from their next role—in other words, a “lazy girl job.”
While the anti-work movement is nothing new—with both men and women “quiet quitting” during the pandemic—Gallup’s findings explain the recent surge in female-focused terms for rejecting hustle culture.
Around 70% of women cite greater work-life balance and personal well-being as the reason why they’d change jobs, compared with 58% of men.
What’s more, work-life balance is the top reason women would take another job—and it’s more important than a big salary boost or job security, according to the study. By contrast, significantly increasing their income was more important for the men surveyed.
The ‘lazy girl job’ movement was born from burnout
Despite common misconceptions, the “lazy girl job” trend never endorsed laziness or a lack of ambition.
It’s about “having a job where you can truly exercise work-life balance,” Gabrielle Judge, who coined the term, explained in the original TikTok video on the movement.
In consistency with Gallup’s findings, Judge was forced to find a well-paid and relatively stress-free job after being left burned out from her high-flying corporate consulting career—and that’s how the “lazy girl job” was born.
“It’s consciously controversial as a statement,” Judge admitted to Harper’s Bazaar. But it’s clearly resonating with working women everywhere: The hashtag #lazygirljob has accrued over 35 million views, with countless women sharing their own experience with quitting hustle culture.
And as business leaders mandate burned-out women to return to the office, interest in the trend isn’t dying down.
Just yesterday, Judge warned that workers risk losing their “lazy girl job” status, if they don’t advocate for their boundaries—such as whether they want to return to their desks—and the TikTok video has already racked up thousands of views. “Does that actually fulfill your goals and your work-life balance needs?” she recommended her 170,000 followers ask themselves in light of RTO mandates.
‘Finding the right balance is the real key to success’
“Lazy girl jobs” aren’t just blowing up on TikTok. Career coach Natalie Trice previously told Fortune that she’s observed a similar shift in her clients’ attitudes as businesswomen seek a more balanced way of life—and contrary to popular belief, she doesn’t believe that it’ll cost women their careers.
“This doesn’t diminish the ambitions of women; rather, it appreciates that work doesn’t have to be a constant battle to prove worthiness, especially to the detriment of everything else in life,” she said.
In a world where everything has become instant, Trice thinks it’s important to remember that a career is a marathon, not a sprint—we have around 50 years to climb the ladder, after all.
“Slowing doesn’t mean the end of your career and dreams but that you need time for other things as well,” she adds. “As someone who has experienced burnout more than once in the relentless pursuit of reaching the next goal, I know only too well that finding the right balance is the real key to success.”
