I Quit My Six-Figure Tech Job to Become a Doula. Here's What Nobody Tells You About "Following Your Passion"

For three years, my LinkedIn said "Senior Software Engineer." Today, it says "Birth and Postpartum Doula." My income dropped by about 70%. My sense of purpose, weirdly, went up by roughly the same amount. This is not a "I found myself" story — or at least, it's not only that. It's also a story about how badly North America undervalues care work, and what it costs the people who do it anyway.

The decision wasn't romantic — it was a breaking point

I was working at a mid-sized fintech company in Toronto, the kind of job that looks great on paper: good salary, decent benefits, hybrid flexibility. I was also waking up at 4am with my heart racing, dreading Slack notifications, and crying in my car in the parking garage at least once a week. Burnout research from the past few years consistently shows tech and finance among the industries with the highest reported burnout rates, and women in those industries report it at notably higher levels than men — often linked to the invisible "extra" labor of being the one who notices when team morale is low, who mentors junior colleagues unofficially, who smooths over conflicts that aren't technically anyone's job.

I didn't quit because I hated coding. I quit because I was tired of being good at a job that was making me unwell, in an industry where saying so out loud felt like career suicide.

Becoming a doula: the math nobody warns you about

Doula work — supporting people through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum — is some of the most meaningful work I've ever done. It's also some of the most underpaid. In Canada, doula services are rarely covered by provincial health insurance, meaning clients pay out of pocket, which limits both how much doulas can charge and who can afford to hire one. The median income for full-time doulas in North America is, by most surveys, well below minimum wage when you calculate hourly rates including on-call time, prenatal visits, and the births themselves (which can run 12, 24, even 36 hours).

This is not a coincidence. Care work — doulas, nurses, childcare workers, eldercare aides — is overwhelmingly performed by women, and has been historically undervalued precisely because it's been coded as something women do "naturally," and therefore don't need to be paid properly for. Economists call this the "care penalty," and it shows up everywhere: nursing salaries that don't reflect the skill and stress involved, childcare workers who are paid less than parking lot attendants in many US cities, and doulas who often work for a fraction of what a single hour of their former corporate jobs paid.

"Do what you love" is a privilege, and I had it

I want to be honest about something: I could only make this jump because my partner's income covered our rent, and because I'd saved enough in my tech years to survive the income drop while I built a client base. Most people doing the work I now do don't have that cushion. Many doulas work multiple jobs. Some can't sustain the work long-term because it doesn't pay enough, regardless of how much they love it or how good they are at it.

So when people tell me I'm "brave" for leaving tech, I think: brave implies risk, and yes, there was risk. But there was also a safety net most people doing this work have never had. The actual bravery belongs to the doulas, nurses, and care workers who do this without a tech severance package behind them.

What would actually change this

If care work were paid in proportion to its actual difficulty and importance — rather than its historical association with unpaid female labor — a few things would happen. More men might enter these fields (currently a tiny minority of doulas and childcare workers are men, partly because the pay doesn't support a "primary earner" framing that's still expected of men in many households). Burnout and turnover in care professions, which is currently severe, would likely drop. And the broader "care economy," which props up the entire rest of the economy by allowing other people to go to work, would stop running on the unpaid or underpaid labor of mostly women.

Would I go back?

No. But I also recognize that "I found something more meaningful" isn't the full story — it's a story about a system where meaningful work and well-paid work are too often mutually exclusive, especially when that work involves caring for other people's bodies, babies, or wellbeing.

If care work paid what it's actually worth, how many more people — of any gender — might be doing it?

Sources referenced: Statistics Canada doula and care economy reports; burnout research from Deloitte and Gallup workplace studies; OECD "care economy" wage analyses.