Your organisation plans for open enrolment. It plans for year end. It plans for the holiday slowdown.
It does not plan for the last week of August, and that is the two-week stretch when a meaningful share of your workforce is operating at reduced capacity while performing normally.
Nobody files anything. Nothing appears in a dashboard. It simply happens, every year, and it lands overwhelmingly on women.
What is actually happening in those two weeks
Summer care ends before school-year care begins, and the gap is rarely clean. Supply lists, forms, physicals, first-day logistics. Autumn activity registration, which closes early and requires decisions now. A college drop-off that consumes a weekend and produces a grief nobody warns you about. The household calendar being rebuilt from scratch in a single week.
In most households, one person absorbs all of that. In most households, that person is a woman. And she is also on your nine o’clock call, prepared, camera on, because she has been trained her entire career not to let this show.
Why it matters to you and not only to her
It is not that she performs badly. It is that she performs at full standard using reserves she does not have, and she does it every August, and then again in December, and again at spring break.
That is not a wellbeing issue. That is a retention issue with a long lag.
The women you lose in March are frequently the women who were quietly running on empty the previous September and never said so, because the culture never gave them a way to say it that did not sound like an excuse.
Why your ERG programming probably misses it
Most women’s ERG programming clusters in March, around Women’s History Month. March is a good month for celebration and visibility. It is not the month of maximum pressure.
And most of that programming addresses her as a professional. Leadership presence. Negotiation. Sponsorship. All valuable, and all aimed at the version of her that is on the org chart.
The version of her that is struggling in late August is not on the org chart. She is the woman holding the whole thing together, and your programming has never once acknowledged that she exists.
Four things that actually help
Move one event. Take one piece of your annual women’s programming out of March and put it in late August or early September. Same budget. It will land differently because it will land during, not after.
Name it from leadership. Not from the ERG. From a senior leader. “We know the next two weeks are heavy for a lot of you, and we know it is not distributed evenly.” That sentence costs nothing and women remember it for years.
Look at what your culture actually rewards. If the women who get promoted are the ones who never appear affected, you have taught every woman watching that capacity must be performed. Boundary workshops will not undo that. Only promotion decisions will.
Bring in someone who will talk about the whole woman. Not work-life balance, which most women now hear as a polite fiction. The actual load, named out loud, by someone who is not their manager.
What changes
Rooms shift when the invisible gets named. Not because a speaker solved anything, but because a group of women who each believed they were uniquely failing find out they were all carrying the same thing.
That is the moment the room changes. And your women remember which employer gave it to them.
Where to start
Canetha Amour-Porter speaks to corporate teams and employee resource groups about the high-capacity woman who is holding the department, the household and the group chat together. The Amour Method™ covers five pillars of holistic wealth: mental, physical, spiritual, relational and financial.
If you are planning autumn programming, Women’s History Month, or a leadership series, see what a keynote looks like.
