Women executives are more stressed than ever. KPMG thinks AI will fix that.

• More than 90% of female execs feel a surge of stress in the workplace compared with three years ago.
• This is according to KPMG's 2023 Women's Leadership Summit report.

In the three years since the pandemic upended our lives, women executives are "experiencing stress in a different way" compared with men, a recent KPMG survey found.

Women executives continue to feel "heightened responsibilities around workplace stress and life stress. That is certainly at a peak now," Laura Newinski, KPMG's US deputy chair and chief operating officer, told Insider.

"We have a mental health epidemic in the United States, and employers absolutely are needing to pay attention in a different way to their employees' mental health," she said.

KPMG's 2023 Women's Leadership Summit report found 91% of executive women perceive an exponential surge of stress in the workplace compared with three years ago, with 70% attributing higher stress in the workplace to increased workloads and expectations. The results are based on a survey of more than 1,500 female executives in the US.

One cause of — and a possible way to alleviate — workplace stress is generative AI, Newinski said.

"Six months ago, people weren't talking about gen AI; they didn't have ChatGPT on their phones; they weren't hearing about their kids using it at school," she said. "They certainly weren't thinking about it at work."

Amid the barrage of news coverage about how AI can change our jobs, or even take jobs away, "it's creating stress in terms of the unknown," Newinski said.

Employers have an "opportunity to create a safe place with and take the stress level down" in terms of AI, Newinski said. Instead of thinking AI will take your job, it should be viewed as "a set of tools in your job we'd just like you to explore. We'd like you to innovate. We'd like you to work around it and share with each other what you're learning," she said.

"We truly believe that AI has a role to play in de-stressing the workplace in terms of what people are experiencing today as an overloaded workload. And that might take time," Newinski said.

She said it's important for employees to be able to turn to their boss as a trusted source to learn about AI, because it's going to be part of life.

Newinski said female executives tend to both internalize and personalize workplace stress, but they also "need to train and teach layers of management to manage differently — and get a lot of tools and a lot of training to midlevel managers to create that change that we needed."

While KPMG's survey found that almost eight in 10 female executives scheduled time for self-care, set boundaries, and focused on healthy habits, Newinski said employers need to be a leader in "helping to figure some of this out."

When managers demonstrate the notion of self-care, it allows taking such steps to become the norm, not the exception, and opens up the conversation for non-negotiables that "help to create awareness about the kinds of things that people need to respond to" while setting realistic boundaries, she said.

One female executive laid out the stakes, telling surveyors, "As my leadership roles have grown, I have found that I need to prioritize my wellness in order to perform at the level required to help my teams succeed."

Newinski said that "great employers are not doing annual search surveys, they're doing constant listening to their people."

KPMG expects its managers to be able to demonstrate an understanding of self-care, including knowledge of employee-support programs. After all, these programs can't be effective if managers aren't trained to use the toolsets and to encourage them to be used, Newinski said.

Leaders and executives should make it so engaging in self-care and employee-support programs isn't "something that people have to do in secret," she said, adding that holding managers accountable on whether teams are using the programs made available creates trust.

"You can't just say that you've got a program. You actually have to show that people are using it and it's making a difference," Newinski said.

In today's high-paced environment, the only constant is change, and "we're going to have stress inducers in that change, and we're going to need to continue to manage it because we are in a cycle of change that we're not at the end of yet," she said.