How to build women's health benefits that work across every stage of a career

Women's History Month is a good time to ask a hard question: why do so many women's health conversations at work still begin and end with maternity leave?

For decades, "supporting women in the workplace" meant checking one box: parental leave policy. That matters, but it only addresses one moment in time. Women's health is not a moment. It's a career-long conversation covering hormonal health, chronic conditions, reproductive choices, mental wellbeing, and aging.

The good news: benefit packages are starting to catch up — slowly, but with some genuinely creative exceptions.

Why the "maternity-first" model falls short

When fertility and parental leave are the only lenses through which companies think about women's health, the majority of women's lived experience gets left out.

Consider who isn't served:

• The 24-year-old managing endometriosis, losing two days a month to pain she's been told to "push through"
• The 38-year-old with PCOS who isn't planning to have children, but whose hormonal health affects her energy and long-term cardiovascular risk
• The 51-year-old senior leader navigating brain fog, disrupted sleep, and temperature dysregulation, while trying not to let any of it show

None of these experiences fit a parental leave framework. All of them are affecting performance, retention, and wellbeing right now.

The financial picture makes it worse. Women and men largely pay the same insurance premiums, but women consistently get less coverage per dollar spent. They use healthcare more, encounter services that exceed typical deductibles more often, and reach out-of-pocket maximums more frequently. The result is a hidden cost burden that compounds across an entire career, not just during a pregnancy.

$15.4 billion: the additional amount employed women spend on out-of-pocket healthcare costs compared to employed men each year, even excluding maternity expenses

The employers closing that gap are thinking beyond the birth announcement.

What holistic women's health benefits actually look like

The most forward-thinking companies aren't organizing benefits around life stages, which can feel prescriptive and exclusionary. They're building coverage around health needs — chronic conditions, hormonal health, reproductive choices, and aging — and letting employees opt into what's relevant to them.

Here's what that looks like across six areas that most benefit packages still underserve.

Menstrual and cycle health

Period pain isn't just uncomfortable. For the roughly 10% of women with endometriosis, and many more managing PCOS, fibroids, or severe dysmenorrhea, menstruation can be genuinely debilitating.

9 days: the average annual productivity loss per menstruating employee due to working through pain, not staying home

What leading companies are doing:

• CHANI offers unlimited menstrual leave with no cap or rigid approval process. Since launching the policy, the company has seen higher profitability and lower employee turnover. Their framing: "We recognize this pain and don't expect you to work through it."
• Nuvento introduced 12 days of annual period leave in 2022. A digital content manager told the Washington Post that employees "feel heard, and more comfortable" since the policy launched.
• CD Projekt Red lists menstrual leave in its benefits, a signal that this benefit is moving well beyond wellness-first startups.

A lower-lift starting point: Free menstrual products in workplace bathrooms. Period Positive Workplace, a certification launched in 2023, found that 87% of participating workplace leaders noticed improved employee satisfaction after implementation. The cost is minimal. The signal it sends is not.

Fertility support beyond IVF cycles

Fertility benefits have become table stakes in tech and finance, but the conversation has matured well beyond "we cover IVF." The best packages today stand out for their breadth, their dollar amounts, and, most critically, their inclusivity.

Coverage that goes the distance:

• Bain & Company: Covers assisted reproductive services, fertility preservation, adoption, and surrogacy through Progyny's care management platform
• BP: Up to £15,000 toward fertility treatment, plus manager training and career coaching for employees returning from leave

What separates the leaders: Removing the requirement for an infertility diagnosis before benefits activate. That requirement has historically excluded LGBTQ+ employees and single people pursuing parenthood by choice. As fertility preservation becomes part of proactive healthcare planning, coverage that gatekeeps by diagnosis is increasingly out of step.

Chronic conditions that get overlooked

Endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, and autoimmune disorders are disproportionately common in women and disproportionately under-resourced in standard health plans. Many require years to diagnose and ongoing management throughout a career.

What meaningful support looks like:

• Reviewing life and disability policies to ensure benefits are payable for menstruation-related conditions, closing a gap that has left many women with no income protection during serious flare-ups.
• Partnering with digital health platforms like Midi Health and Elektra Health, which specialize in conditions affecting women across the hormonal lifespan.
• Subsidized access to pelvic floor physical therapy, which is effective for postpartum recovery, chronic pain, and urinary incontinence, yet barely touched by most standard plans.
• Treating conditions like PCOS and endometriosis with the same seriousness as fertility treatment, rather than siloing them into a separate, lower-priority tier of care.

Companies already doing this:

Lululemon covers PCOS and endometriosis support alongside its fertility and reproductive health benefits — one of the few employers to explicitly name these conditions in its benefits package.

Menopause: The $1 trillion blind spot

Menopause is not a brief transition. For most women, it spans years, and the symptoms go well beyond the hot flashes most people picture. Brain fog, disrupted sleep, joint pain, anxiety, and mood shifts are common. So is the experience of navigating all of it at work without ever mentioning it, because there's no framework for that conversation.

The timing makes it worse. Perimenopause typically begins in a woman's mid-to-late 40s, right when she's often at the height of her earning power and leadership potential. The data reflects what's at stake when employers don't take this seriously:

• 1 in 10 women employed during menopause left work due to their symptoms
• 7 years: the average duration of symptoms, which often coincide with the height of a woman's career
• 1%: the share of biopharma pipeline assets directed at female-specific conditions beyond oncology

What good menopause support looks like:

• Dedicated benefits platforms. Companies including Rathbones, Rothesay, and BP have partnered with providers like Fertifa to give employees access to clinical support, HRT prescriptions, and ongoing menopause management, not just a hotline number buried in an EAP guide.
• Environment accommodations. Cooler workspaces, relaxed uniform policies, and remote work flexibility are low-cost adjustments that make a real difference for employees managing temperature dysregulation and fatigue.
• Manager training. Many women report the biggest barrier isn't the absence of formal policy, but not knowing whether they can bring it up. Companies training managers to have these conversations without judgment are creating the psychological safety that makes any benefit actually usable.
• Adjusted absence policies. Some employers are auditing whether attendance tracking inadvertently penalizes employees managing cyclical or hormonal symptoms, and building in flexibility that doesn't require a formal diagnosis to access.

Mental health with women-specific context

Standard EAP access and therapy coverage are meaningful, but generic. Women face specific mental health challenges that benefit from targeted support:

• Postpartum depression and anxiety
• Grief following pregnancy loss or fertility treatment
• Burnout at rates consistently higher than male peers
• The compounding weight of navigating healthcare systems that have historically not believed them

What leading employers are doing: Ensuring behavioral health solutions are staffed and trained for women's specific needs, including pregnancy loss, gender-affirming care, and menopause — not just general stress and anxiety. Some are adding coverage for specialized perinatal mental health providers and platforms like Maven Clinic, which integrates mental health support directly into reproductive and hormonal health care.

Benefits at the margins worth knowing about

A few that don't fit neatly into existing categories but are worth putting on your radar:

• Doula coverage: Some employers are reimbursing doula costs and covering out-of-hospital birth with midwives, recognizing that supported birth outcomes reduce complications and support faster recovery.
• NICU family support: Atlantic Health System has invested in benefits for parents with babies in intensive care, including phased return-to-work programs designed around the emotional reality of that experience.
• Breast milk shipping: American Express covers the logistics of shipping breast milk for employees traveling on business — a practical fix for a real barrier.
• Wearable health monitoring: Some employers are beginning to distribute monitoring devices for high-risk pregnancies as part of expanded maternity care, enabling earlier clinical intervention.

What HR and benefits leaders can do now

The through-line across all of these examples: benefits work best when they reflect the actual health experiences of the people they're meant to support.

Six starting points, regardless of budget:

1. Audit your current plan for functional gaps.

Does it cover endometriosis treatment? PCOS management? Pregnancy loss support? Many plans technically include these but with limits so low they're functionally inaccessible.

2. Make leave policies condition-inclusive.

Flexible and sick leave can often be extended to cyclical conditions, menopause symptoms, or chronic health management without a new policy — just explicit language making clear they apply.

3. Train managers, not just employees.

Benefits are only as good as the culture around them. If employees don't feel safe using a menopause benefit (or don't know it exists), it isn't doing anything.

4. Collect disaggregated data.

Running health and benefits utilization data through a gender lens surfaces gaps that aggregate data hides.

5. Remove diagnosis requirements where possible.

Gatekeeping fertility, mental health, and hormonal health benefits behind a formal diagnosis excludes the people with the most to gain from early support.

6. Start somewhere small.

Free menstrual products. A dedicated menopause resource page. A line in your benefits guide acknowledging these conditions exist. Not every employer can write $75,000 fertility benefit checks, but every employer can signal that women's health beyond maternity is something they take seriously.

The bottom line

Women's health is not a moment in the employee lifecycle. It's a continuous, evolving set of needs that show up in the work every single day — in focus, in energy, in the decision to stay or go.

The companies getting this right are treating these benefits as basic operational logic: if you want to attract, retain, and genuinely support the people who make your organization work, you build benefits that reflect their lives.

That's not a generous policy. That's a good one.

Looking to benchmark your women's health benefits? Our team of experts can help.