• Senior-level women say they're frequently burned out.
• The burnout level among these women is the highest it has been in the past five years, said a report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org.
• The report also found that women want promotion less than men — unless they receive the same support.

Women are hitting the top of the corporate ladder only to find something waiting for them: exhaustion.

According to a report published Tuesday by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, a nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, burnout among senior-level women is the highest it has been in the past five years.

Around 60% of these women said they have frequently felt burned out at work in the past few months, compared with 50% of senior-level men, per numbers from the "Women in the Workplace" 2025 study.

Women who are newer to leadership roles are feeling the strain more acutely. Among senior-level women who have been at their companies for five years or less, 70% reported frequent burnout, and 81% said they are concerned about their job security.

"These high levels of concern align with research that shows women often face extra scrutiny when they're new to organizations and have to work harder to prove themselves," the report said, adding that Black women in leadership face exceptionally high burnout and job insecurity. "In contrast, when women and men in leadership have longer tenures, their levels of burnout and job security are quite similar."

The report, an annual study of women in corporate America, surveyed 9,500 employees across 124 companies between July and August. The study also includes interviews with 62 HR executives and company-reported data from 124 organizations that together employ about 3 million people.

LeanIn.org launched a study with McKinsey in 2015 to track how women progress through the corporate pipeline and where companies fall short. The group is named after Sandberg's 2013 book "Lean In," which sparked a national debate about women's ambition, leadership, and workplace equality.

This year's findings paint a bleak picture for women at the top. Senior-level women who are hesitant to advance their careers say they see a steeper path forward compared to their male counterparts. Eleven percent of senior women who don't want to advance say they don't see a realistic route to promotion, compared with 3% of senior men. And 21% say more senior-level people look burned out or unhappy, nearly double the share of men who say the same.

It's not because women are less committed — the report found that women and men are equally locked in. What differs is the desire to keep climbing, per the report.

The data shows a clear ambition gap: 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 86% of men. That gap is widest at the beginning and the top of the pipeline — 69% vs. 80% at the entry level, and 84% vs. 92% among senior leaders.

This is the first time in the report's 11-year history that women have shown lower interest in promotion than men, it said.

This gap in ambition to advance falls away "when women receive the same career support that men do," the report added. In other words, companies are responsible for creating the burnout problem for women.

"This is only happening in the companies that aren't doing the right thing when women get the full support and the same stretch opportunities. They're not leaning out at all," Sandberg said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg Television.

"What's happening is that women face more barriers at every level of the career," she added.

More companies are cutting back on DEI and support for women

Even as companies say they are committed to diversity and inclusion, at least one in six have reduced the teams or resources behind those efforts, the report said.

About 13% of employers have pulled back or eliminated women-focused career-development programs, and another 13% have cut formal sponsorship programs, which play a key role in helping employees advance, it added.

"Women overall are less likely to have sponsors — and this really matters. Employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without," the report said.

The report also found that companies are rolling back remote and flexible work options, which can hinder women's ability to stay and advance in their careers. One in four has scaled back remote or hybrid work arrangements, and 13% have reduced flexible working hours over the past year.

At the same time, the report said that women who work remotely most of the time are "less likely to have a sponsor and far less likely to have been promoted in the last two years than women who work mostly on-site." Meanwhile, men receive more similar levels of sponsorship and promotions regardless of their work arrangement.

At the entry level, a stage where advocacy and visibility are essential, women are also less likely than men to receive stretch assignments and other opportunities, the report added.

Last year, the "Women in the Workplace" study found that more women were advancing to senior leadership roles. By 2024, women held 29% of C-suite roles, up from 17% in 2015.

However, progress fades at the entry and management levels, per the report. "For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2018, 79 women were promoted. And this year, just 81 women were," it added.

• Rivian's CEO said the US needs a lot more affordable electric vehicles.
• He said there was a "shocking lack" of choices for EV buyers in the country, leading to low adoption.
• The carmaker is set to start production of the R2, a $45,000 SUV, which is its most affordable EV yet.

Rivian's CEO and founder, RJ Scaringe, said the US needs a lot more cheap electric vehicles.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Scaringe said a lack of choices was the reason for low EV penetration in the US.

He said that electric vehicle adoption in the US, at 8%, is significantly lower than in the rest of the world.

"I really think the constraint isn't the demand side, I think it's the supply side," Scaringe said. "I think there's a shocking lack of choice, that there are much better choices in Europe. And by far, there's the most choice in China."

He said that for consumers interested in EVs, there were "well under five great choices" at a price point close to the average price of a new car in the US.

He added that, within a price range of $50,000, there was only one compelling choice of EV: a Tesla. In October, Tesla unveiled its most affordable models to date: the $36,990 Model 3 Standard and the $39,990 Model Y Standard.

"And that's not a reflection of a healthy market with lots of choice," Scaringe said. "If you think of it as a consumer, you have 300 different internal combustion engine choices at that price or lower, and you have maybe one highly compelling EV choice."

Rivian is working to provide cheaper EV alternatives. It is gearing up to start production on its cheapest EV to date, the R2 model, a $45,000 SUV.

In the interview, Scaringe also said he agrees with the Trump administration's push to bring manufacturing back to the US.

"I think the push to industrialize in the United States is appropriate, and it's something we're very aligned with the administration on," he said.

The US EV industry comprises Rivian, Tesla, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, BMW, and Kia, among others.

Brands like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla dominate the EV market in Europe. Chinese brands like BYD, NIO, and MG also sell on the continent.

Meanwhile, the EV industry in China is seeing fierce competition. BYD, Tesla's biggest global rival, saw its sales fall 12% in October compared to the same period a year earlier, as it faces a tough fight from local EV startups Xpeng, Nio, and Leapmotor.

Other players, such as smartphone manufacturer-turned EV maker Xiaomi, are also seeing success in the country with strong sales.

• Sequoia partners said they prioritize conviction over consensus in startup investment decisions.
• The firm uses a voting system to gauge conviction, valuing high variance in partner opinions.
• Sequoia trains junior investors to embrace risk to spot "outliers."

Sequoia's partners go into investment decision meetings to determine whether startups make the cut — and there's a system for striking gold, two partners said.

In an episode of the "Jack Altman" podcast released on Tuesday, Sequoia partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady shared how their team decides which startups get a cheque.

"We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now," Grady said. "Our internal data shows that consensus versus non-consensus does not matter at all."

He added: "Presence of conviction is what matters."

The storied venture capital firm, based in Menlo Park, has invested in companies including Apple, Nvidia, Reddit, and SpaceX. Its more recent investments include prediction markets company Kalshi, and the legal tech startup Harvey.

Grady, who has been with the firm for nearly 19 years, explained that before a startup gets a yes or no, everyone on the team votes on a scale of one to 10. A score above six is considered "positive," and a score of four or below is considered "negative."

"If everybody's a six, probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction," he said. "If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment because the presence of the nines is a much more powerful signal than the presence of the ones."

Lin, who has been with the firm since 2010, said they follow this strategy because the firm is in the business of risk-taking.

"We need that volatility because the truth is not somewhere in the middle where everybody agrees," he said.

The partners said that they train their junior investors, who are historically "A+" students, to build a risk appetite.

"A lot of the people that join our team haven't had much failure, and we have to help them get comfortable with it because otherwise we're not going to get the outlier wins," Grady said.

• UAVs are still dominating Ukraine's war, accounting for 60% of all strikes Kyiv's forces conducted.
• Ukraine's military chief said aerial drones conducted 304,000 missions in November.
• That's compared to just 2,000 missions run by ground drones, a rising technology in the war.

Ground drones are growing more popular on Ukraine's front lines, but they're still vastly overshadowed by the small aerial drones made famous in the war.

In November, uncrewed ground vehicles accounted for less than 0.66% of Ukraine's total drone missions.

Usage numbers were announced on Tuesday by Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander in chief of Ukraine's armed forces, as he gave a statement on the war situation this winter.

"At the current stage of the war, it is unmanned aerial vehicles that provide about 60% of all strikes on enemy targets," Syrskyi wrote.

The military chief said that in November alone, Ukrainian uncrewed aerial vehicles, or UAVs, carried out over 304,000 missions, striking or destroying roughly 81,500 targets.

"Over the past six months, this indicator has been constantly growing," Syrskyi added.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, carried out 2,000 missions in the same timeframe, he said.

The statistics underscore just how aerial drones continue to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine. UGVs, an emerging technology, are still finding their footing in the war as Kyiv moves to integrate them at a wider scale among its military units.

Amid the push, dozens of Ukrainian companies and units have been debuting their own UGVs, which can range from miniature buggies to full-size trucks mounted with remote machine gun turrets.

The ground drones are particularly useful because they can perform dangerous frontline missions that human soldiers would otherwise be required to carry out. Ukrainians are building them to serve a variety of purposes, from direct assaults and mine-clearing to monitoring roads and delivering frontline supplies.

Some units have begun using aerial and ground systems in tandem, such as troops in Pokrovsk who used a UGV to spot incoming Russian vehicles through fog and later attacked with exploding drones.

Russia's ramping FPV production

Russia has also been pioneering new drones, including UGVs for logistics and rocket artillery. On the aerial front, the Kremlin's forces were the first to introduce unjammable, fiber-optic drones that are now proliferating on the battlefield.

This year, Moscow has repeatedly been reported to be more readily integrating drone warfare into its ranks, scaling up mass production, forming official drone units, and creating new warfighting doctrine after observing Ukrainian tactics.

Syrskyi wrote that Russia had, at one point, reached a "period of a certain parity" with Ukraine in the use of first-person-view drones, or the small hobby drones souped up to fly explosives into targets.

"As reported by our intelligence bodies, the enemy seeks to reach monthly deliveries of up to half a million FPV drones to its troops," he wrote.

Now, however, Syrskyi claimed that Ukraine has recently surpassed Russia in first-person-view drone usage.

"The Ukrainian response must be asymmetric and effective: strengthening the fight against enemy drones and destroying the infrastructure of the enemy's unmanned forces units," he added.

Syrskyi's statement offered a grim recap of the war in recent months, saying that Ukraine's forces have "faced some of the most serious challenges since the beginning of the full-scale war."

Both civilians and soldiers in the country must soon grapple with another brutal winter, as temperatures are expected to consistently drop below freezing in January and February. Russia has been targeting local energy grids, disrupting Ukraine's access to reliable heating.

• Rivian wants its cars to do more than drive themselves.
• CEO RJ Scaringe said he wants them to be able to coordinate servicing so their owners don't have to.
• The company is gearing up to start production of the R2, a $45,000 SUV, which is its cheapest EV to date.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe wants his EVs to be able to service themselves.

In an interview with Fortune released on Tuesday, the host asked Scaringe what AI should and shouldn't do in a car. Scaringe, who is also the automobile company's founder, replied that self-driving capabilities have been talked about for years in the EV industry, but he wants his cars to go beyond that.

Scaringe said he was "very bullish" on his cars being self-driving in the next couple of years, such that "you can own a car, but it can drop you at the airport, it can pick your kids up from school, it can go get things from the store for you."

But beyond driving, he said the car can help with a lot of things that people don't want to be doing, like handling service appointments.

"So if the vehicle has an issue, it's actually not a positive part of the customer experience to have to coordinate a service activity or to coordinate parts, deliver any of those things."

"We want all that to happen behind the scenes and all that to be powered through AI," he said.

Scaringe's comments echo those of Rivian's software chief, Wassym Bensaid, from last year.

"We are not necessarily chasing full self-driving, we're not chasing robotaxis," Bensaid said to Business Insider. "Our goal is incremental improvements to the safety and convenience for customers."

The carmaker does not currently have fully autonomous cars. But its Gen 2 models come with the Rivian Autonomy Platform features, which can automatically steer, brake, and accelerate on select highways, among other capabilities.

The company is now gearing up to start production on its cheapest EV to date, the R2 model, which will be a $45,000 SUV.

Rivian, which is headquartered in Irvine, California, has seen its stock price rise by 33% since the start of the year. However, the company has endured multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, with the most recent — a 4% cut in its workforce — announced in October.

In November, Rivian doubled Scaringe's pay package from $1 million to $2 million, along with performance-based stock options that could be worth up to $4.6 billion, per an SEC filing.

• President Donald Trump launched an economic tour, defending his tariff policies and record.
• The rising cost of living and affordability are key issues ahead of the midterm elections.
• Trump has rolled back some tariffs, especially on food, amid ongoing inflation concerns.

President Donald Trump is standing by his tariffs, at least in theory.

Under the banner "Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks," Trump kicked off the first of a series of speeches to promote his economic message in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, as polls indicate the country is increasingly concerned about the rising cost of living.

"They always have a hoax," Trump told the crowd, referring to criticism from Democrats that his policies drove up prices. "The new word is 'affordability.'"

"Democrats are like, 'prices are too high.' Yeah, they're too high because they cause them to be too high," Trump added. "But now they're coming down."

Later, he said, "I can't say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high. So I can't go to call it a hoax because they'll misconstrue that."

Trump, during the 90-minute speech, also reiterated that his favorite word is "tariff" and credited his policies for bringing in "hundreds of billions of dollars," presumably for the government in tariff revenue.

"You can give up certain products," Trump said at one point. "You could give up pencils. Because under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know. They don't need that many."

Despite standing by his tariff policies, Trump has, in reality, rolled back many of his earlier tariffs, especially ones enacted on April 2.

Tariffs are still higher than they have been in many decades, but the original 25% tariff on every import from Mexico and Canada was walked back to exclude all items covered in the USMCA trade agreement, which includes most imports from the two neighbors. Tariffs on imports from China, once more than 100%, have been reduced to a baseline tariff of 10%, which applies to all other countries.

On top of that, in an attempt to address the price of groceries, Trump also modified and removed tariffs on a range of food products in November, such as beef, coffee, bananas, and tomatoes.

Of the remaining tariffs, evidence points to an impact on the price of consumer goods.

"Our analysis suggests that tariff measures are already exerting measurable upward pressure on consumer prices," according to a report published in October by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis that looked at data from January to August of this year. "The rise in prices beginning in early 2025 coincides closely with tariff developments, and our model-based regressions confirm that these effects are statistically and economically significant."

"At the same time, the pass-through remains partial; only a portion of the model-predicted effect has materialized so far," the report added. "This could reflect delays in price adjustments, competitive pressure limiting firms' ability to raise prices, or expectations that the tariffs may prove temporary."

Trump's speech comes as consumer sentiment remains low. According to the University of Michigan's survey of consumers, sentiment dropped to 51 points in November, which is the second-lowest score the index has ever recorded since 1952, narrowly topped by a score of 50 in June 2022.

Earlier on Monday, in an interview with Politico, Trump said that he would give his economy a grade of "A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus."

Some Democrats have centered their pre-2026 midterm messaging on affordability, and several have explicitly blamed rising costs on Trump's tariff and trade policies. Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor-elect, with whom Trump had a meeting, also won while running primarily on making the city more affordable.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.