Forty-eight percent of women say they believe they’d be forced to resign due to health issues, with 36% specifically citing conditions related to menstruation, fertility, or menopause, according to a 2025 AXA Health and CEBR survey of 2,000 women. Separately, Deloitte’s 2025 Women @ Work report, surveying 7,500 women across 15 countries, found that 24% had experienced health challenges tied to menstruation, menopause, or fertility, and the default response for many was to push through pain without taking time off at all.
These aren’t niche concerns affecting a small subset of the workforce. In her lifetime, the average woman will menstruate more than 400 times and experience menopause symptoms for five to ten years, according to public health research from Columbia University. With roughly 56 million US women currently in or approaching the menopause transition alone, and two in three women worldwide currently navigating some stage of their natural hormonal cycle, this is a workforce-scale health reality that most corporate wellness programs still don’t address by name.
The Scale of What’s Being Missed
Menopause support remains almost entirely absent from formal benefits. Only 11% of women aged 35 to 54 in the workforce are even aware of formal HR benefits addressing menopause, and 64% of women in that group say their workplace offers no formal support at all, according to a 2025 OLLY and Carrot survey of 3,000 American women conducted with Ipsos. That gap is noticed: 23% of women said the lack of employer support reflects negatively on how they view their employer.
Symptoms are dismissed even when women do seek help. Of women who sought healthcare for menopause-related symptoms, three in five were acknowledged and offered options, but one in five were acknowledged and simply not taken seriously. Just 31% of women say they feel comfortable talking about menopause at work in the first place, and one in six supervisors admit they’re personally uncomfortable making accommodations for it, according to Society for Women’s Health Research data.
The career cost is already measurable. One in ten women leave jobs specifically due to unmanaged menopause symptoms, according to 2026 women’s health trend research. In the AXA Health and CEBR data, 22% of women reported having already missed a promotion and 20% had settled for lower pay specifically because of inadequate health-related support, real, quantifiable career damage tied directly to conditions the workplace has largely treated as invisible.
Fertility and reproductive health expectations are rising fast. Thirty-two percent of commercially insured women now expect infertility benefits from their employer, according to Evernorth Research Institute data, a meaningful jump in what’s considered a baseline expectation rather than a specialized perk.
Disclosure remains a significant barrier even when leave is taken. Among the women in Deloitte’s research who did take time off for a menstruation, menopause, or fertility-related health challenge, a large share did not feel comfortable disclosing the actual reason, meaning even the leave data available to employers likely understates the true scale of the issue.
Why This Has Become Urgent Now, Not Just Important
The workforce demographic reality has shifted. Women aged 50 and over now make up 26% of all women and girls globally, up from 22% a decade earlier, according to WHO data, and life expectancy gains mean women are spending more of their careers navigating menopause while still fully active in the workforce, not approaching retirement as menopause once implicitly assumed.
Awareness and willingness to discuss these issues openly have grown faster than workplace policy has kept pace. Younger employees in particular are increasingly vocal about wanting employers to address hormonal health directly rather than treating it as a private matter with no bearing on work accommodations, a shift research increasingly frames as central to how the next generation defines a genuinely supportive employer.
The research gap compounds the workplace gap. Public health researchers note that menopause remains woefully underresearched relative to its scale, with the majority of aging studies failing to even account for it. That scientific blind spot has quietly filtered into corporate wellness design too; when the underlying condition itself is under-studied, it’s unsurprising that workplace support built around it lags even further behind.
“In short, we’ve spent years building wellness programs around a default employee who was never actually the whole workforce. Hormonal health isn’t a niche request anymore, it’s a mainstream expectation, and companies that keep treating it as optional are going to keep losing exactly the experienced talent they can least afford to lose.” — Mr. Amit Kapoor, Founder of Balanz & Beonn
What Genuinely Inclusive Wellness Support Looks Like
Name the conditions explicitly, rather than folding them into general wellness language. Given how few employees are even aware formal menopause or menstrual health support exists where it’s actually offered, vague wellness messaging isn’t enough; benefits need to be named directly for women to know they’re available and to feel permission to use them.
Train managers specifically on these conversations. With a meaningful share of supervisors admitting discomfort making accommodations, generic manager training won’t close this gap. Direct, practical guidance on menopause, menstrual health, and fertility-related accommodations needs to be built into management development specifically, not assumed to be covered under broader wellbeing training.
Extend flexibility and accommodation policy explicitly to these conditions. Flexible scheduling, temperature control, private space access, and predictable accommodation processes address real, physical symptoms directly, rather than asking women to manage acute symptoms silently within a rigid, unaccommodating structure.
Build fertility and reproductive health support proactively, not reactively. With nearly a third of insured women already expecting infertility coverage, organizations waiting for this to become a widespread demand before acting are likely to find themselves catching up rather than leading on a benefit expectation that’s already shifting.
Reduce the disclosure burden. Since many women don’t feel comfortable stating the real reason for taking leave, building genuinely confidential, low-friction paths to request accommodation or time off, without requiring detailed medical disclosure to a manager, removes one of the most consistently cited barriers to actually using the support that exists.
This is exactly the kind of gap a specialized corporate wellness company is often better equipped to close than an internal team building policy from scratch, since designing genuinely inclusive hormonal health support requires clinical and structural expertise most HR departments haven’t needed to build until now. Corporate wellness events are increasingly being organised specifically around these themes too, menopause education sessions, fertility benefit workshops, and manager training days, rather than defaulting to generic wellbeing programming that quietly excludes a significant share of the workforce’s actual health reality. A genuinely comprehensive wellness strategy heading into 2026 treats women’s health as a core corporate wellness pillar, not an optional add-on considered only after physical fitness and general mental health programs are already in place.
The Bottom Line
Why can’t workplace wellness ignore women’s health anymore? Because the data makes clear this was never actually a niche concern, it was a widespread, quietly under-addressed reality affecting a substantial share of the workforce, with real, measurable costs in retention, promotion, and pay. Nearly half of women believe health issues could force them out of a job entirely, and the majority of those affected by menstrual, menopause, or fertility-related challenges say their employer offers no formal support at all. Organizations serious about retaining experienced talent, particularly the women in their most senior and highest-tenure roles, can no longer treat hormonal health as too private or too complicated to address directly. The evidence increasingly shows the opposite: silence is the more expensive choice, and it’s the one costing companies talent they’ve already invested years in developing.
The broader shift worth recognizing is that women’s health at work isn’t a single benefit line to add and check off. It spans an entire career arc, menstrual health in early career years, fertility support in the years many employees are also establishing themselves professionally, and menopause support arriving right as many women reach their most senior, highest-impact roles. Treating each stage as a disconnected, occasional request rather than a predictable, well-understood part of the workforce’s lived experience is exactly the pattern the current data shows organizations can no longer afford to repeat.
