I recently came across an op-ed in the New York Times that caught my attention.

It was written by Corrine Lowe, an economist at Penn who studies gender in the workplace.

In this piece, she says the following.

This is the quote that really grabbed me.

She says, almost two-thirds of corporate

leaders who mandated return to office policies after the pandemic saw disproportionately

higher numbers of women leave their companies. Now, why is this happening? As low notes,

there's an obvious answer here.

You can blame the call to return to the office, right?

Maybe women came to count on the flexibility that was afforded by remote work. And given that women have much higher household labor and child care labor burdens than men, they would be the group

that you would expect to struggle most when you took some of this flexibility away.

But as Lowe goes on to argue, this is not the full story.

There is another major factor that disproportionately impacts women but is a real problem for all knowledge

workers, an issue with the knowledge sector that has been quietly making all of us miserable.

In today's episode, I want to talk about this mystery factor. I want to describe where it came

from and then using this knowledge suggests some concrete tactics that you or your employer can deploy

to help reduce it.

So if you felt exhausted or frustrated by aspects of your job and can't quite figure out why,

you need to listen to this episode.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

Today's episode, The X Factor, making us miserable at work.

All right, so I want to start by resolving this mystery of what drove women to

...