María Reyes, who did not want to use her real name, is a 26-year-old category manager in a retail chain in Colombia. When she started as a trainee she felt the corporate culture clashed with her expectations and beliefs. “The company does not care about people at all”, she says. But she stuck with the job. She even signed a two-years exclusivity contract in exchange for an expensive training course abroad – which would have to be repaid if she left the firm.

Eventually she was promoted to her current position, where her internal conflict deepened. Her job is liaising with providers and “trying to make money at all cost, without any regard for the other party”. She does not like to hustle for every penny, especially at the expense of smaller companies that depend heavily on her decisions. “I believe both sides should win in a business, not only one of them,” she says.

But the problem is she’s relatively senior for someone so young. If she were to apply for a similar job elsewhere, she doesn’t think she would be successful. She doubts she would even get an interview and says there are not a lot of job openings in her field – making changing jobs unwise.

It gets even worse when millennials start to grow up, have kids and take on mortgages. Marcela Cardona, who did not want to use her real name, began her career in pharmaceuticals hoping to help people through her work, but soon felt overwhelmed by the many ethical dilemmas and questionable situations she says she witnessed. “This is a business and its goal is to make money, not to help people,” she says. She soon started a masters in bioethics, pursuing a bigger sense of the human implications of what she did — and perhaps a new career.

But when she became pregnant things changed. With a daughter to support, she could no longer afford to change track. She switched jobs hoping things would improve, but she encountered the same issues everywhere she worked. She remains very unhappy with her job, “but you have to be practical”, she says.