Some of the Most Successful Women You Know May Be Experiencing Abuse at Home

Some of the most successful women you work with may be going home to men who punish them for that success.

And we need to talk about this more.

We have a cultural image of a woman experiencing domestic abuse that often doesn't look like the executive sitting next to us in a leadership team meeting. We associate vulnerability with financial dependence. We imagine someone without the resources to leave, without a career to fall back on, or without enough financial independence to support herself and her children.

So, when we encounter a woman with a successful career, a strong professional identity, an advanced degree, an impressive title, and enough money to support herself, we assume she has options. We assume that whatever is happening in her personal life, she has the resources to handle it.

But financial success does not make women immune from abuse. In some heterosexual relationships, it may actually increase the risk.

A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Population Economics examined the relationship between heterosexual partners' relative incomes and domestic abuse. Researchers found that when women earned more than their male partners, they experienced a 33% increase in partner violence and a 20% increase in emotional abuse compared with mean levels. The researchers found that the relationship was best explained not by a gradual increase in risk as women's incomes rose, but by crossing a particular threshold: the woman becoming the breadwinner.

That distinction matters.

The researchers suggest that gender norms may help explain what is happening. In other words, for some men, having a female partner who outearns them may challenge deeply embedded expectations about masculinity, breadwinning, and power within heterosexual relationships.

And even without clear examples of abuse, here's something else we don't talk about enough: women's success at work does not necessarily buy them more support at home. In fact, sometimes quite the opposite happens.

When She Earns More, He CONTRIBUTES LESS AT HOME

There is an entire body of sociological research examining what happens to household labor when women violate the traditional male-breadwinner model.

One theory researchers have studied is called "gender deviance neutralization." The basic idea is that when a heterosexual couple departs from traditional gender expectations in one area, particularly when the woman becomes the primary breadwinner, men often try to compensate by forcing the marriage to become more traditionally gendered somewhere else.

And that somewhere else is often the home.

Researchers have documented patterns in which economically dependent men perform less domestic labor, while breadwinner wives perform more, effectively reasserting traditional gender roles inside the home even as the woman has disrupted them economically outside of it. Research from the United States and Australia has found situations in which men perform the least domestic labor when women are the primary breadwinners.

Pew Research Center's analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and American Time Use Survey data found that women who are the primary earners in their marriages spend about 42 hours per week in paid work, compared with 40.4 hours for their husbands. And then they end their workday and go do more at home, too.

The disparity is much larger than a few extra hours of chores each week. A 2025 study of more than 2,100 heterosexual, partnered U.S. parents found that mothers performed 22 more hours of primary childcare and 10 more hours of housework every week than fathers. Mothers also carried 68% more of the cognitive labor of running a family, from scheduling and childcare logistics to food, cleaning, social obligations, and everything else someone has to remember before it ever becomes a physical task.

Government time-use data tell a similar story. In households where both parents work full-time and have a child under six, mothers still spend about 16 hours a week actively caring for children, compared with about 11 hours for fathers. And those numbers only count childcare as a primary activity. They don't capture all the time spent supervising children while doing something else, arranging doctor's appointments, remembering school deadlines, buying clothes, coordinating childcare, figuring out dinner, managing activities, or carrying the thousand invisible details required to keep a family functioning.

So even when a woman is succeeding professionally, even when she's earning as much as or more than her husband, she may still be doing dramatically more of the work required to sustain the household that makes both careers possible.

That matters.

Because the story we tell women is that professional success creates independence and bargaining power. But the research shows that women can become more powerful at work but may become less supported at home.

Think about the absurdity of that.

When men become breadwinners, women have historically taken on more of the unpaid labor necessary to support their careers. But when women become breadwinners, they don't necessarily receive the same support in return.

A woman's increasing economic power does not automatically translate into increasing power, freedom, or support inside her home.

Sometimes she just gets another shift.

And Sometimes It Goes Far Beyond an Unequal Marriage

An unequal division of household labor is not, by itself, domestic abuse.

That distinction is important.

But when you put the research on household labor alongside the evidence that female breadwinners experience higher rates of emotional and physical abuse, a darker picture begins to emerge about what professional success can mean inside some heterosexual relationships.

Sometimes abuse is physical. Sometimes it's financial or emotional. Sometimes it's coercive control. And sometimes it includes a sustained pattern of making it as difficult as possible for a woman to maintain the independence her career provides.

This isn't hypothetical. The National Domestic Violence Hotline specifically identifies interfering with someone's employment as abusive behavior. Examples include preventing a partner from working or attending school, harassing them at work, or deliberately keeping them awake so they perform poorly at their job.

Employment sabotage is also recognized in the research literature as a form of intimate partner violence and economic abuse. It can include preventing a survivor from obtaining or maintaining employment, interfering with work, or harassing someone at their workplace.

And in real life, sabotage may not always announce itself as sabotage.

It can look like refusing to take on school drop-off or pickup, even when she has an important meeting and he has the time. It can look like her staying up until 1:00 a.m. cleaning and preparing for the next day while her husband plays video games or sits in his car, and her starting the next workday exhausted and in a brain fog. It can look like starting a screaming argument about something completely innocuous the morning of an interview, board meeting, or major presentation.

One incident might just look like a bad day. A few incidents might look like a bad marriage.

But a pattern can be something very different. It can be sabotage. It can be control. It can be an attempt to reassert a traditional power dynamic when a woman's professional success has disrupted it.

We Know These Women

We work with these women. We manage them. We hire them. They lead our organizations, sit on our boards, run companies, practice medicine, argue cases, teach students, manage teams, and run charities. We may even be them.

Some of these women may appear extraordinarily successful precisely because they have become extraordinarily good at functioning under impossible circumstances. And that’s something I think we need to understand professionally.

A 2025 survey of more than 2,000 survivors conducted by the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Futures Without Violence found that 79% said domestic violence made it harder for them to work.

More than half, 53%, said they did not disclose the abuse to their employers because they feared discrimination, losing their jobs, or retaliation at work.

So, statistically, some of the women struggling through abuse at home are sitting beside us at work and deliberately making sure we don't know.

That should change the way we interpret what we see.

When a woman who has always been exceptional at her job suddenly seems exhausted, distracted, late, overwhelmed, or unlike herself, don't immediately assume she's disengaged, disorganized, or failing to manage her responsibilities.

Don't assume that because someone has a title, an income, an education, an impressive résumé, or significant professional authority, she couldn't possibly be experiencing abuse at home.

She may be doing her job while simultaneously trying to survive circumstances no one at work can see.

"Why Doesn't She Just Leave?"

There is another assumption successful women face that may be even more dangerous.

If she makes good money, why doesn't she leave?

She can afford an attorney. She can support herself. She has a career. She isn't financially trapped in the way we traditionally imagine an abused woman to be trapped.

But having the financial resources to leave and being able to leave safely are entirely different things.

Research on intimate partner violence has repeatedly identified separation as a period of heightened danger. A National Institute of Justice risk-assessment study notes evidence that the risk of severe violence and homicide may increase when a victim attempts to end the relationship or separates from an abusive partner.

That makes sense when we understand abuse for what it is: power and control.

For an abusive partner, separation can represent the ultimate loss of that control.

So the moment when everyone around a successful woman thinks, "She has the money. She can finally leave," may actually be the moment when she needs the greatest amount of safety planning and support.

Financial independence is enormously important for survivors. But money alone does not create safety.

We Need to Understand This at Work

Employers cannot solve domestic violence.

But we can stop pretending it has nothing to do with the workplace.

The effects are already there.

They are there when someone needs unexpected time away. They're there when an abusive partner floods an employee's phone during the workday. They're there when someone can't concentrate after being awake half the night. They're there when a survivor needs flexibility for a court hearing, an attorney meeting, counseling, childcare, relocation, or safety planning.

And they're there when an extraordinarily capable woman begins struggling professionally because someone at home is actively making it harder for her to succeed.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline's workplace research found that survivors need workplaces that provide confidential ways to disclose abuse, flexible accommodations, information about employment protections, trauma-informed benefits, and connections to domestic violence organizations.

But before any policy can work, we have to recognize that this is happening to people we know.

Ask whether someone is okay.

Build workplaces where people can disclose what they're experiencing without jeopardizing their careers. Give people flexibility when they're navigating crises you may know nothing about. Train managers to understand that domestic violence, economic abuse, and coercive control do not always look the way we've been taught to imagine them.

And maybe we need to rethink what vulnerability looks like altogether.

The woman experiencing abuse isn't always financially dependent on her husband. She isn't always isolated from the workforce. She isn't always someone we would immediately recognize as vulnerable.

Sometimes she's the CEO. Sometimes she's the doctor. Sometimes she's the lawyer. Sometimes she's the woman sitting across from you in the leadership meeting who appears to have absolutely everything together.

Successful women are not protected from abuse by their success.

Sometimes their success is exactly what an abusive partner most wants to take from them.