The New Ambition

And Sometimes It All Goes Wrong: The Power of Community (& What It Means for the Future of Women In Tech)

• Jen Phillips • Season 2 • Episode 1

Share episode

Text The New Ambition

In the first episode recorded as The New Ambition, host Jen Phillips addresses the profound changes and challenges in the tech industry, sharing her personal journey from burnout to resilience. 

Jen discusses the critical role of community in overcoming adversity, as showcased by her own experience rebuilding a business after Hurricane Helene. 

There’s an urgent need for strategic community building, especially for women in tech who face higher rates of job loss and burnout. 

Jen highlights steps for growing supportive networks and advocates for the work required to achieve healthy and sustainable success in the tech industry. 

We can make healthy change happen. Together. 

Episode Resources

Like this episode? Subscribe to The New Ambition newsletter

The Very Important Bottom Line
The New Ambition does not provide medical or mental health advice. The information including but not limited to: recorded and live episodes, text, graphics, images, and any other material contained on the podcast are for your informational purposes only.

Nothing on The New Ambition is intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified provider. Never disregard professional medical or mental wellness advice or delay in seeking it because of something you've heard or content you've read or reviewed on this podcast.

And please, if you're under duress or considering suicide, reach out right this very minute to the Suicide and Crisis lifeline by dialing 988 in the United States.

Outside of the U.S., please reach out to helplines available to you in your country note: this link isn't owned by The New Ambition and should not be considered exhaustive or wholly accurate.

S2 E1 The New Ambition

[00:00:00] And sometimes it all goes wrong

The Real Jen: [00:00:00] Imagine standing at a trailhead looking into a forest where the paths that you used to know have been washed out by storms. The terrain shifted. The old trail markers are gone. Hell, the trails are gone and your trail map does not match what you're seeing ahead of you. It's where I found myself eight months ago, and honestly, it's exactly where a lot of us are standing right now.

 I am Jen Phillips, and this is The New Ambition. It's a podcast to help women in tech and our allies build successful careers that don't cost us everything. If you're not in tech, but you're interested in experiencing anti burnout, success, and advocating for healthy work, welcome. Today's podcast is inspired by what's happened in the eight months.

Since my last podcast, a podcast formerly known [00:01:00] as The Podgress Report.

It was a passion project that I had launched after I walked away from an executive role in the tech industry due to my own burnout. I started the podcast because I wanted to share everything that I was learning about burnout, and the research around healthy work that would help maybe, maybe help some other people who might have been experiencing what I had experienced alone, and I'd learned through my research.

That even though 66% of the workforce reports some level of burnout, 43% of us do not feel comfortable talking about it in the workplace because we believe it could negatively impact our career trajectory. I. And I myself hadn't talked openly about my own burnout until I made the decision to walk away from what was my dream job, a job I'd worked my entire life to achieve.

And only after I'd told my boss and given my notice, I released the last episode of that podcast [00:02:00] just before my hometown among others. Was decimated by the deadly and devastating effects of Hurricane Helene. And before we go forward into what's going on with the tech industry, I'm gonna share a related story, and I promise I'll tie it all together for you.

[00:02:15] When things changed

The Real Jen: In September of 2024, hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast United States and basically reset my entire world. While the focus of my career has been in the tech industry, I'm also a small local business owner here in the Asheville area. My husband and I own a non-alcoholic bottle shop here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It's called NOLO. And that bottle shop, along with so many other businesses, was destroyed by Hurricane Helene, not damaged, completely obliterated. And after the initial shock. Of losing the business after the initial cleanup began and the reality of losing every bit of inventory, every fixture, the [00:03:00] building itself, I realized that the storm was a decision point.

Do we continue or do we exit?

[00:03:09] Do we continue or do we exit? 

The Real Jen: Well, we did continue. We decided to reopen the bottle shop in a new location and made it happen just two months after the storm. I still don't fully understand how we pulled it off, but we did it and one thing that absolutely made it possible at that velocity, our communities.

[00:03:31] The ties that mend us

The Real Jen: The producers, we partner with the local community that helped us find the space, the incredible customer, community, and those communities, their support, their cheerleading, their willingness to jump in to help us. It sparked a refinement in my other work. It made me recognize that I was missing my tech community and using my considerable expertise to improve it.

So I started delivering fractional advisory services to tech firms. [00:04:00] I recognized what supercharged my ability to reopen that small business was the fact that I had been spending months prioritizing my own burnout recovery in the lead up to Hurricane Helene. I was resilient AF and I wanted to keep encouraging people to build their own sustainables success.

So I gave my first speaking engagement on the topic of burnout and leading well, leading healthy. And because people continued to reach out behind the scenes to talk directly with me about their own burnout and workplace wellness journeys in a safe space, a judgment free zone, I recognized that my content was still helping people who needed it.

And so I launched the new Ambition newsletter and now this, this rebranded refocused podcast and the steel thread that ties all of that together is community. And here's what I learned in the months since the storm that changed and refined my journey's trajectory. The tech industry [00:05:00] itself isn't going through normal economic turbulence.

[00:05:03] What's happening to the tech industry? 

The Real Jen: It's in a storm, all of its own. What we're experiencing is something fundamentally different from other industries. While the overall US unemployment rate sits at 4.2% tech's unemployment has surged to 5.7% as of early 2025. That's 35% higher than the national average. We're not just facing routine layoffs in tech.

We're seeing an industry transformed in real time. Through June, 2025, over 62,000 workers have lost their jobs across 141 companies. Year to date, February saw 16,000 layoffs and April delivered a staggering 24,500 cuts. Those are the worst two months since 2023. 

[00:05:54] Women are facing systematic exclusion 

The Real Jen: but here's where it gets personal and why. I'm focusing specifically on women tech leaders and aspiring [00:06:00] leaders. We're not just impacted by the tech industry. Upheaval. We're facing systematic exclusion from tech. The data is stark on this front, and it is recent. Women in tech are 65% more likely this year than men to lose their jobs during layoffs, despite making up only 27% of the tech workforce.

And here's the part that keeps me up at night. Women in tech are experiencing burnout at a 28% higher rate than their male counterparts over the last year. And that increased rate is likely made worse by the fact that we continue to have greater share of responsibilities outside of work support for our households, for childcare, for parent care, for other responsibilities, even when we may be the primary breadwinner.

So half half of all women in tech leave the industry by age 35. That's 45% higher than the departure rate for men. So whether [00:07:00] you are debugging code or in ux or in product delivery or closing enterprise deals and sales, if you're running marketing campaigns or managing operations, the challenge is to women's 

Ability to chart our own journey are similar. In tech, the bro culture is regaining momentum and gender equity gains that we worked hard to make are being eroded. We've been seeing great progress on gender equity gains. In 1970 women held only 8% of US STEM roles. Now we're about 27% of the tech workforce, but with accelerating reductions in force, impacting women more than men, with a higher percentage of women leaving tech for their own reasons, we need to work together as a community to drive healthy, change, healthy, both for us, the workers, and for the tech industry.

[00:07:51] Not built by us. Not built for us. 

The Real Jen: Here's why it matters. On a larger scale, tech permeates our world. It is ubiquitous, whether we are men or women. [00:08:00] When women aren't on the teams that are envisioning and building and delivering and selling and refining or innovating that tech, we are not experiencing the full benefit of that in innovation.

It is simply not built by us or for us. So my focus has christened, and I hope yours will too. It is not only about our individual resilience anymore, although that is non-negotiable. This is about recognizing that yesterday's career advice does not apply when you're navigating systematically biased to terrain.

Today, when that hurricane hit, I experienced something profound about community that applies directly to what we're facing in tech right now. In the aftermath, it wasn't individual heroes alone, although there were plenty of them who rebuilt our area. Recovery was accelerated by the networks that existed.

The small business owners who knew each other, the neighbors who [00:09:00] had each other's phone numbers, the nonprofits who showed up big time, the larger local businesses helping the smaller local businesses and community groups that have been operating. Before the crisis hit, the people who struggled most were those who were not actively helpable, who had something so monumental happen to their house or their family or their business, but who didn't connect with others to help their own recovery.

[00:09:29] We're better working together

The Real Jen: And that is exactly what will limit us as women in tech. Research shows us that women with strong professional networks are five times more likely to reach leadership positions and three times more likely to successfully navigate it when they've got career transitions, whether they make them themselves or they are foisted upon them, but we're still approaching community building as if it was optional.

When we have the time, we'll do it. The [00:10:00] bandwidth, the perfect scenario when it slows down at work, well, that's not going to work for us. It's not working for us. The storm taught me that community isn't something that you build after the crisis hits. Being an active member of supportive communities is a required component right now in our sustainable success toolkit, and by the way, the crisis is here in tech.

So here's what strategic community building looks like in practice. Whether you are a software engineer or a sales director, a data scientist, or a marketing manager, firstly, find and become active in the communities that match your reality. That might be a broad support group. It might be uber targeted.

It might be a community to help you hone in on a new direction. It might be a community to help others that you can bring your value to your superpowers to, for me, for example, it is all over the place and it is all [00:11:00] valuable. I'm in an incredible state. Speakers, community, maybe the best in the country. I am in a Slack channel in a cohort of non-alcoholic bottle shop owners around the world.

I'm in the local Asheville area business owner community, and I'm building a community around the new ambition with active partners, advocates, and supporters of the new ambition, supporting women tech leaders in building success. That doesn't burn us down or out. And yes, it doesn't stop there. Find your function specific communities too.

Women in sales for revenue teams, society of women engineers, women in product for strategy roles. Find your people and get active. Shutting down and going it alone on any trail is dangerous. Lean heavily into active support of others across all tech functions. The data shows we're all facing similar systematic challenges, [00:12:00] regardless of whether we're coding or closing deals.

So leaning on each other and polling us up together. Helps all of us. If there are formal mentorship programs in your company, participate in them. Encourage your team's participation. If not, consider joining employee resource groups inside the company if they exist. And when you do, let the members of the group know that you're interested in mentoring or reverse mentorship.

If ERG groups don't exist, consider spearheading some volunteering experiences. Bonus points of those experiences. Support groups like Black Girls Code or Girls Develop It. Nonprofits that are working to help young girls and women find their path into stem. Volunteering is a proven way that improves workplace cultureand focusing on helping to inspire the future of tech is what I call a win-win proposition.

Helps you in the now, helps your team in the now, and it helps [00:13:00] the future of tech. Finally. Put your influence to good work by actively sponsoring talented women. As you get involved in your communities, keep your eyes open for people who you believe in, someone who you would feel confident advocating for when she's not in the room, helping to make more visible, supporting their participation in stretch assignments.

Mentors help each other grow and sponsors advocate for their advancement. And it is going to take both. And we can, and we should be both for each other. By the way, I've added to the notes of the episode some resources that will help you get started on all of these action steps. So here we are.

[00:13:44] We're not lost. We're on a different path. 

The Real Jen: The old paths are gone. The terrain has shifted and continues to shift, and many of us are still relying on maps that absolutely do not match the path that we're seeing ahead of us. But here's what I know now that I didn't know eight months ago. We're not lost. [00:14:00] We're on a different trail than we expected.

Navigating it is something I truly believe will be more successful at if we work together in service of one another and in service of the health of the tech industry. I. That's why when people ask me why I am focusing on women in tech first, I feel confident in answering because we need to focus on it.

I stepped away from leading in the tech industry without understanding the bigger issue, and as a result, I'm part of the erosion of those equity gains. And now that I understand the bigger picture, I realize it is going to take all of us working together. It's going to take all of us talking about it and supporting each other, knowing the data.

And advocating for one another. 

 So, looking ahead.

[00:14:48] What to expect with The New Ambition

The Real Jen: This podcast will be back. It'll be monthly, not weekly. Each episode will feature conversations with women and men who are leading the way to healthy and sustainable [00:15:00] success, focusing on the tech industry, people who will inspire us, who have navigated similar terrain Leaders who have built success for their teams.

The researchers. Who understand what actually works for women in technology environments And if you know someone who would make an incredible guest, and that could be you, I'm finalizing the 2025 episodes now, and I would love to hear from you.

 Complete the linked form in the episode notes and let me know who you know. That would be an amazing and inspirational guest. The New Ambition Newsletter dives deeper into the types of information that we discuss on the podcast with actionable, snackable frameworks that you can get in your inbox free every single week.

If you haven't subscribed yet to the newsletter and think you might find it interesting, do that now too. And remember, community isn't something that happens to you. [00:16:00] It's something you actively build. Actively participate in one connection at a time before you need it the most.

Thank you so much for being here, and thanks to everybody who's encouraged me along the way, who's continued to give me feedback on the content. Your feedback matters. Thank you for choosing to build the future and to be the future of sustainable success. That's a future that does not cost us everything.

I'm Jen Phillips. This is the new Ambition, and I'll see you next month.

 

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jen Phillips

Host