By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group
Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 24
You stayed up until midnight to finish something because you’d already spent four hours on it. You kept going to that networking group for six months after it stopped producing results because you’d already paid for the year. And even when a deadline no longer mattered, you pushed through exhaustion to finish the project simply because you’d already started.
That pattern has a name. It is sunk cost bias.
For women leaders, it is expensive. Not just financially. Emotionally, socially, and it’s deeply conditioned.
In Episode 24 of Wake Up Women Leaders, Victoria Whitfield and I continued the conversation we started in Episode 23 about building a feminine model of productivity. Episode 23 made the case that the productivity system most women are following was never designed for them. This episode gets specific. Managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader is the key to getting out of the push-through model and into one that actually produces results.
What Sunk Cost Bias Actually Is
The economic definition is clean. A sunk cost is any investment of time, money, or energy you’ve already spent and cannot recover. The bias is the tendency to let that past investment influence future decisions – to keep going not because continuing will produce a better outcome, but because stopping feels like wasting what you’ve already invested.
The past investment is gone either way. The only question is what the next hour of your time will produce.
“Sunk cost bias is you’re constantly going and you refuse to withdraw going because of that initial consent or that initial investment of time, money, or commitment,” Victoria said.
Notice that last word. Commitment. Managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader is not primarily a financial problem. It is often not about money at all.
“That commitment can be your sunk cost,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be four hours of time, it doesn’t have to be $10,000. It could be that you made a commitment and that is your sunk cost, that now you’re unwilling to release this thing in the past to be able to move forward to what you’re trying to create in the future.”
You said yes in January. It is now September. The thing you said yes to stopped producing value in March. But you are still going, because you said you would.
That is sunk cost bias. For women, the mechanism that keeps it running isn’t stubbornness. It’s guilt.
Why It’s Harder For Women
Managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader requires understanding why women are disproportionately vulnerable to it in the first place. The answer is not individual weakness. It’s social conditioning.
“This affects women because we are socialized to be, the psychological term is, agreeable,” Victoria said.
Agreeableness is not a flaw. It’s a genuine social strength, and in many contexts it makes women exceptional leaders, collaborators, and community builders. The problem comes when agreeableness becomes the operating system for time and energy management, when saying yes is a reflex and saying no feels like a character failure.
“We will freely give away the time that we needed for our own fertility, our own productivity, our own health, wealth, love, freedom. We will freely give it away to be nice, not the mean girl,” Victoria said.
The networking meeting you keep attending because declining it feels unkind. The committee you stayed on because leaving would disappoint people. The project you keep working on until midnight because finishing it feels like proof that you’re responsible, committed, and reliable – even though no one will use the result.
These aren’t productivity decisions. They’re social management decisions that happen to look like productivity. And they’re draining the exact capacity that managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader requires to actually build something.
Victoria’s image for this is the Titanic. “Even if the ship is going down, it’s my Titanic and I have to stay on the Titanic as it’s going down,” she said. That’s a recipe for burnout. The most costly version of sunk cost bias can lead to burnout when you continue doing work that stopped being meaningful months ago, focusing on what you’ve invested rather than what the work produces.
The Demonization of Rest
Victoria identified a thought to watch out for: the demonization of rest.
“A big thing that is messing with our productivity as women is the demonization of rest,” she said. “Like, how dare you need to rest? Go produce. Suck it up, buttercup.”
The push-through model we challenged in Episode 23, the masculine, hunter-gatherer, grind-until-it’s-done model, treats rest as a gap between productive periods. Something to be minimized, excused, earned through sufficient output. For women operating in that model, needing rest becomes evidence of inadequacy rather than a normal part of the production cycle.
But rest isn’t the absence of productivity. It’s part of it.
Victoria drew on her powerlifting practice to make this concrete. In a powerlifting gym, the most capable people in the room are sitting down a lot of the time. They aren’t being lazy. They’re managing their recovery so that when it’s time to lift, they can lift at a level their body couldn’t sustain without it. The rest isn’t interrupting the training. It is the training.
Managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader means recognizing rest as an input that protects the quality of every output that follows – not a reward you have to earn by staying up until midnight.
What the Law of Diminishing Returns Has to Do With It
The law of diminishing returns says that beyond a certain point, additional input produces progressively less output. You get to a point where you’re getting less for every minute you put in. The work that took you an hour at 9am might take three hours at 9pm. And the quality of what’s produced at 9pm is lower than what would have been produced the next morning in a fraction of the time.
“Something that took you a minute before now takes you two minutes,” I said on the episode. “It could be three or four minutes. And if you literally just went to bed, you would get a much better result.”
Here’s where sunk cost bias and diminishing returns run into each other for women leaders: the sunk cost says keep going because I’ve already started. The diminishing returns say stopping now would save both time and quality. Neither of those things feels like permission to stop.
The emotional attachment to the past investment outweighs the evidence of the present output. Managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader is largely a matter of learning to read that evidence clearly and act on it, even when stopping feels like abandoning something you care about.
I noticed this in myself during the recording of this episode. During the conversation, I mentioned that I hadn’t been as productive that day and could feel myself getting hungry. The trap was clear in real time: the pull to push through anyway, to stay committed to what we had planned, because we had already started. The awareness is the first step. The decision to address it, to eat, to rest, to recalibrate, is the practice.
The Garden Metaphor
The clearest image I have for managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader comes from gardening.
Sometimes you plant something and it doesn’t grow. Wrong conditions, wrong timing, eaten by pests, whatever the reason. You could water that dead plant until you have no water left in the bucket. It won’t come back.
“The sunk cost would be trying to get those same plants to produce after they’re dead,” I said. “You could water them until you have no more water in your bucket. It won’t matter. They’re not coming back.”
The response to a dead plant isn’t to water it harder. It’s to redirect that water to something that’s growing, or to prepare the soil for the next planting.
This is what managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader looks like in practice: recognize when something isn’t coming back, release the energy you’ve been directing toward it, and redirect that energy toward what’s actually producing results.
“Maybe it wasn’t the plant that you thought was going to give you results,” I said. “But over in the corner, due to these rain conditions and this sunshine, it is going gangbusters. Put your energy to what’s working.”
The goal was never to save the dead plant. The goal was a productive garden. When you remember that, the decision to let something go becomes less about giving up and more about good resource management.
The Future-Focus Reframe
The most practical tool for managing sunk cost bias as a woman leader is also the simplest: stay future-focused.
Sunk cost bias is, at its core, an orientation toward the past. It says: I invested here, so I must stay here. The reframe is: my goal is over there, so I must assess whether what I’m doing right now is moving me toward it.
“Being future-focused can help substantially with dealing with sunk cost and letting things go when they’re no longer producing results,” I said.
When the networking group stops producing results, the question isn’t have I paid for the year. It’s does attending this meeting move me toward my goals for this year. When the project becomes irrelevant, the question isn’t how many hours have I put in. It’s does completing this serve what I’m building. When your body is telling you to stop, the question isn’t what did I plan to finish today. It’s what will produce the best result tomorrow morning when I’m rested.
Future-focus doesn’t mean abandoning commitments casually. It means evaluating commitments based on where they’re taking you, not where they came from. It means giving yourself permission to change direction when the evidence, in your body, in your results, in your calendar, is telling you that the current path isn’t the one.
“I can change my mind,” I said. “I do not have to stay committed to the wrong thing.”
Three Things to Do This Week
- Name one thing you’re currently doing because you already started it, not because it’s producing results. Write it down. Look honestly at whether continuing it serves your goals going forward.
- The next time you notice diminishing returns, the work taking twice as long, the quality declining, the focus gone, stop. Eat something. Sleep. Come back when the rate of production is high again. Track what happens to the output.
- When something is no longer producing results, give yourself a deadline for letting it go. Not an indefinite maybe. A date. After that date, the decision is made and you move your energy to what’s working.
What’s Coming Next
In Episode 25, Victoria and I are talking about future vision and how to reverse engineer it into an actionable plan. Victoria is also introducing a concept called proprioception, the body’s sense of its own position in space, and what it has to do with knowing where you’re headed as a leader. Join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET.
READY TO KEEP GROWING?
Explore how to create success systems that honor your unique journey and expertise.
Subscribe to The Weekly Reset, where I share research, ideas, and strategies for leaders navigating the complexities of sustained impact.
Join the Accountability Club — support designed for strategic planning, implementation, and growth with a monthly peer mastermind for meaningful connection and ongoing strategic support.
If you’re looking for a personalized partnership to create space, a plan, and focus in your leadership, let’s talk. I offer Private Executive Coaching for executives and entrepreneurs ready to move from overwhelmed to clear, from scattered to focused.
Send me a message, I’d love to explore how we can support your continued growth.
Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group · sapparigroup.com · © 2026
