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Women are no longer being siloed into secretary and back-room jobs; for decades, they’ve been breaking into male-dominated jobs they were once locked out of. Trading pencil skirts for scrubs and pilot uniforms, many women are making waves by taking up space in high-paying industries. 

Women have been steadily flocking to six-figure roles in traditionally male-dominated industries like healthcare and engineering, according to a new report from Resume Genius analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

The number one role with rising female representation is dentistry; in the early 2000s only around 25% of dentists were women, but today they represent nearly 40% of the field, one of the biggest increases over the past two decades. And with a median annual salary of $179,210, women are also stepping into cushy tax brackets. 

Surgeon roles, which pay 239,200 annually, have also become a bright spot for women in the rapidly growing healthcare industry, with their representation more than doubling in the past two decades. 

And the report notes that the profession’s shift to women actually stems from college; in 2019, women became the majority of U.S. medical school students for the first time ever. 

Women are stepping into six-figure STEM roles—and slowly taking over the C-suite

Aside from high-paying healthcare jobs, women are also funnelling into lucrative STEM careers. 

Women have steadily been increasing their headcounts in software developer jobs, which boasts an median annual salary of $131,450, as well as in mechanical engineer ($102,320) and industrial engineer ($101,140) roles. Their rise is a result of greater outreach to get women into these technical fields through scholarships, mentorships, and broader recruitment efforts. 

Other jobs like informational security analysts (124,910), architects ($96,690), and airline pilots ($198,100) have seen women gain ground over the last two decades. 

Women are also breaking into the C-suite; chief executives, who earn a median salary of $206,680, made the list of rising women’s representation. It comes as the number of women leading Fortune 500 companies hit a record of 55 in 2025; while they only account for 11% of executives on the list, this trend among others signals women’s growing presence in affluent jobs. 

“While no country has reached full gender parity across all industries, more women are entering a wider range of fields than ever before,” the report noted. 

Women are flocking to high-paying AI and recession-proof healthcare careers

Women have been dominating a fast-growing industry that can hold up against AI and recessionary headwinds: healthcare. They make up nearly 78% of all workers in the field, according to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but men still outnumber women in high-paying doctor roles. 

Even women who didn’t attend college are still taking advantage of the healthcare boom. Nursing, pediatric, and home health aids were among the hottest jobs for women without degrees, according to a 2025 report from Pew Research Center. Many roles in the profession don’t require a bachelor’s and can pay anywhere from $66,000 to $119,000 annually. These are all skills-based occupations, with no degree required—just a lot of patience, empathy, and mental fortitude.

And unlike other industries rocked by AI automation and sweeping layoffs, home health, doctor, and nursing job postings have hit a combined 162% growth since pre-pandemic, according to a 2025 report from Indeed. And it’s not expected to slow down anytime soon—the sector is resistant to AI jobs disruption and traditional economic downturns. 

“Healthcare is a classic recession-resistant industry because medical care is always in demand,” Priya Rathod, career expert at Indeed, told Fortune in 2025. “During the 2007–2009 Great Recession, healthcare employment continued to grow even as overall U.S. payrolls shrank.”

10 roles with rising female representation—and they come with big paychecks

Men may still dominate these high-paying professions, but women have been taking up space over time. Here are 10 roles in many traditionally male-dominated fields where women’s participation has steadily increased, according to Resume Genius.

1. Dentist ($179,210)
2. Surgeon ($239,200)
3. Software developer ($131,450)
4. Information security analyst ($124,910)
5. Architect ($96,690)
6. Airline pilot ($198,100)
7. Industrial engineer ($101,140)
8. Chief executive ($206,680)
9. Police and detective ($77,270)
10. Mechanical engineer ($102,320)

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Many entrepreneurs dream of that moment when they know they’ve really “made it.” That might look like turning a profit for the first time, or seeing how their product or service changes the lives of customers. It should feel like a moment of pride and celebration, but one multimillionaire serial entrepreneur admits it felt quite the opposite for her.

“The first time I made real money, I cried in a parking lot,” Emily Lyons wrote in a LinkedIn post in October. “Not because I was happy. Because I was terrified I’d lose it.”

Lyons, the founder and CEO of Femme Fatale Media Group and Lyons Elite, said this moment was so scary for her because she had grown up watching her parents fight about money. They had even been evicted from their home, and counted coins to take the subway. 

“That kind of stress doesn’t leave your body,” Lyons wrote. “It just waits.”

Lyons founded Femme Fatale, a leading North American event-staffing and marketing agency headquartered in Toronto in 2009. She started the company at age 23 with just $80, a cracked laptop, and a vision to revolutionize event staffing. The company has grown to become a multimillion-dollar agency with a network of more than 20,000 event professionals serving clients like L’Oréal, Red Bull, Sony, and Grey Goose as well as other Fortune 500 companies. She was also recently named Entrepreneur of the Year at the CanadianSME Small Business Awards.

“I didn’t have investors or a safety net,” Lyons said in a statement. “I had a dream, and I was stubborn enough to keep going.” 

Lyons also launched luxury dating service Lyons Elite, which was recognized three years in a row as the best matchmaking service in Canada by the Consumer Choice Awards. She also launched True Glue, a clean fake-lashes beauty brand in 2014, and founded the Julia Lyons Foundation, a charity supporting people with cystic fibrosis, inspired by the loss of her sister, Julia, to the disease. 

What is imposter syndrome in business?

Despite her success, Lyons said when her business finally took off and there were “commas in my bank account instead of panic, she “didn’t feel rich.”

“Money didn’t fix the fear,” she wrote. “It just exposed it.”

She references the old adage of “more money, more problems,” saying “wealth doesn’t erase your problems. It magnifies them.”

That anxiety encouraged Lyons to reframe her newfound wealth, though. She said she had to learn “earning it wasn’t a fluke,” and that she “deserved to keep” the money she had earned. 

She learned “success wasn’t something that would be taken away the second I stopped looking,” she wrote. 

This case study illustrates one of the innate challenges in being an entrepreneur or successful business person: imposter syndrome, or the psychological phenomenon of persistent self-doubt and the feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence and success.  

“Turns out you can have everything you ever wanted and still not feel like enough,” Lyons wrote. “That’s the part they don’t put in the success stories.”

A study by Cambridge International City Montessori School, Lucknow published in January 2025 provides evidence that especially women transitioning from traditional employment to entrepreneurship often face imposter syndrome, but that cognitive restructuring, mentorship, networking, and social support can help.

Many other successful female entrepreneurs have said they’ve experienced imposter syndrome. Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, said not having female role models growing up contributed to feelings of imposter syndrome despite her company’s $120 million IPO in 2017. Writer and researcher Ali Kriegsman argued, though, imposter syndrome doesn’t have to be a weakness for women business owners to solve on their own—but there are resources to help.

“Success doesn’t heal you,” Lyons wrote. “It just gives you the resources to finally start.”

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 8, 2025.

More on imposter syndrome:

• Scott Galloway says it’s actually good to have imposter syndrome: ‘If you’re not in rooms you don’t deserve to be in, you’re not trying that hard’
• How imposter syndrome sneaks up on high-performing people—and how to beat it
• Imposter syndrome isn’t exclusive to women. In fact, men are more likely to experience it at work

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

AI is making workers more productive than ever. In fact, it’s already quietly handing workers back chunks of their day—and instead of taking on more tasks, most are stepping away from their desks entirely.

New research from Zoom, conducted with Morning Consult across more than 1,000 knowledge workers, finds that among those already using AI tools, 76% say they’re saving at least 30 minutes a day, and 43% are saving an hour or more.

And they’re using that clawed-back time for a real break, not more work.

They’re sneaking in gym classes, running errands, and reclaiming the lunch break that corporate culture quietly killed off.

The always-on workday that killed the lunch break

The survey paints a bleak picture of a workforce quietly suffocating under the weight of its own schedule. Three-quarters of respondents say they eat lunch while working at their desk, 60% shorten it to squeeze between meetings. 

The irony? The majority acknowledge taking a real lunch break actually improves their stress levels and productivity. They know it helps. They just can’t stop. And they’re getting so burned out, experts are calling the crisis a “competence hangover.”

Enter AI. Among workers already using it, 80% say they’d use that time gained for a genuine break. In fact, 70% say AI is helping them step away from their screen. Remote workers are running errands and exercising. In-office workers are scrolling for a social reset or catching up with colleagues. Millennials and parents are leading the charge, with 70% more likely to reclaim that midday slot. 

And increasingly, workers see AI as the tool that makes it structurally possible: Two in three believe AI can help them block out a full lunch hour; 66% say they’d be open to skipping lunch meetings now; and 70% say it can help restore work-life balance altogether.

“What we’re seeing isn’t just that AI makes work faster, it’s that AI is starting to take away a lot of the busywork that fills the day,” Kimberly Storin, Zoom CMO, told Fortune. “Time saved doesn’t come from one big thing, but instead from all the small, constant tasks that usually happen after a conversation, like writing notes, figuring out next steps, chasing follow-ups, updating different systems… all of that work adds up.”

Workers aren’t waiting for their bosses to give them a shorter workday: They’re quietly taking their time back

For a long time, any efficiency gain in the workplace came with a catch: more output expected in return. 

Plus, in a tougher job market where promotions are stalling and AI is quietly threatening whole categories of white-collar work, many high performers feel they have no choice but to over-deliver just to stay safe. 

But Storin says something different is happening now.

“We’re starting to see people use that time to step away, even briefly, and reset, and leaders have a choice in how they respond to that,” she says.

Mark Cuban also made headlines this week, predicting the smartest companies will officially cut the workday by a full hour, with no change to salaries. But not everyone is convinced bosses will be so generous. 

Mark Dixon, CEO of IWG, the world’s largest flexible workspace provider, told Fortune flatly a shorter workweek (or shorter work days, in this case) isn’t coming “any time soon.” His reasoning: Companies are under too much cost pressure to hand back time for nothing.

“Everyone’s having to control their labor costs because all costs have gone up so much, and you can’t get any more money from customers, so therefore you have to get more out of people,” he said.

But whether or not bosses officially shorten the day, workers aren’t waiting for permission. For now, they’re carving out 30-minute pockets of freedom and taking back the minutes the modern workplace took away. 

“You can fill the space with more activity, or you can recognize that better work doesn’t always come from more hours,” Storin says. 

“I do think giving people some of that time back matters, not necessarily as a perk, but as a reflection of how work should function,” she adds. “If the system is working, people shouldn’t have to grind through every minute of the day to keep up. “

“AI shouldn’t just help us do more,” she continues. “It should help work feel more manageable, and ultimately more human.” 

And ultimately, many workers are already doing it—letting the AI handle the follow-up email while they finally step outside.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT, pledged Tuesday to grant out $1 billion over the next year and to build up its capacity as a philanthropic funder.

The pledge represents a major development in OpenAI’s philanthropic activities and offers insight into how the company, which started as a nonprofit, plans to carry out its charitable mission to develop AI to benefit “all of humanity.”

“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives — while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement Tuesday.

The new funding will support life science and health research and will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, especially of children, the nonprofit said. It follows a commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes that OpenAI Foundation made in October, though without providing a time frame.

OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking, it said.

Ups and downs in OpenAI’s nonprofit activities

OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but has sought to escape that structure over the past several years as it built out its commercial technologies like ChatGPT and its for-profit subsidiary, which is now one of the most highly valued startups in the world.

In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that left the nonprofit’s board in charge of its for-profit business but eased the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies. The deal also clarified the nonprofit’s ownership stake in the company, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced nonprofits in the country.

Since the incorporation of its for-profit business in 2019, OpenAI’s nonprofit significantly scaled back its activities, going from listing $51 million in expenses in 2018 to $3.3 million the following year, according to its public tax filings. In 2024, the most recent year that the nonprofit reported its activities to the Internal Revenue Service, OpenAI’s nonprofit received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.

Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting and public affairs at The Ohio State University who specializes in nonprofits, cautioned that the tax forms were not well suited to capture OpenAI’s activities and the extent to which they were focused on achieving its charitable mission.

“People tend to focus on the financial part of that,” said Mittendorf in an email. “Is the immense value creation being used to further a charitable objective? But an equally important piece is whether the product they are developing is serving humanity as they envisioned.”

It’s a question that Elon Musk, an early financial backer of OpenAI, has also raised. Musk sued the company, claiming that CEO Sam Altman and others betrayed the nonprofit’s mission in pursuit of profit in a case that will go to trial in California.

Recent revision to nonprofit’s role

In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business.

The advisory board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grant making.

The nonprofit announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity.

OpenAI’s new vision for its charitable grantmaking comes at the same time that communities around the country worry about data centers increasing electricity costs, lawsuits accuse AI chatbots of exacerbating mental health crises, and companies and advocates question the fitness of new AI technologies to be used in war.

In addition to hiring a new director, OpenAI Foundation said Wojciech Zaremba, one of a handful of OpenAI co-founders still working for the company, will become the foundation’s head of AI resilience, which is focused on the “new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI.”

Additionally, the nonprofit has brought on Jacob Trefethen to lead its life sciences and health grantmaking. Trefethen led a similar portfolio at the philanthropic organization, Coefficient Giving, which is a major funder of the effective altruism community that has sometimes clashed with OpenAI’s vision for artificial intelligence.

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com