Why You Should Care About Women’s Health, Finances, and Careers
You know what I look forward to every May, besides that one Justin Timberlake meme that refuses to die??
Something WAY more important. National Women’s Health Month. AKA the time of year when our LinkedIn feeds get a fresh coat of pink, someone in #general drops a reminder to schedule your mammogram, and a wellness newsletter shows up in your inbox preaching the gospel of sleep hygiene and ✨hydration✨.
And listen… drink your water. Get your sleep. I am not anti-electrolyte. (I’m literally sipping on some as I type this.)
BUT!!
If we’re being real, wrapping women’s health in a pink bow for 31 days and calling it a movement is… not it.
Because here’s what nobody wants to say out loud at the all-hands: women’s health isn’t just a health issue. It’s a money issue. It’s a career issue. It’s a “why am I making $0.83 on the dollar AND paying out-of-pocket for fertility treatments AND being passed over for the promotion because I took maternity leave” issue.
It’s the trifecta. And not in a fun way.
So today we’re skipping the wellness platitudes and getting into the stuff that actually matters like how women’s health, finances, and careers are tangled up in ways most companies are STILL pretending not to notice.
📢 Here’s what we’re dealing with in good old 2026:*
🌊 Women are leaving the workforce in waves. Only 54% of women say flexibility at work is actually usable vs. 70% of men. Even in the “good” workplaces, 31% of women still feel unsafe asking for it vs 23% of men. And when flexible work is “difficult to use”? 81% of women avoid it entirely vs 65% of men.
This data would suggest women perceive a greater career penalty for flexibility… That’s not just about policy, it’s about things like your culture or manager behaviors. What are folks in your org quietly (or apparently loudly) telling women about their careers??
💰Women are retiring with significantly less than their male counterparts. Women emerge with significantly lower financial confidence than men. On a 10-point scale, women’s average self-rating for financial security is 5.3 vs men’s 6.2, and for retirement readiness 4.9 vs 6.5. Twice as many women as men fell into the lowest confidence category (e.g., 33% of women vs 15% of men are not at all confident about retirement).
Lower financial confidence is both a cause and effect of the other gaps: if women step back or avoid advancement due to care or burnout, their long-term earning and wealth-building suffer, feeding back into lower confidence. It’s a cycle!
🤝🏽 Women are shouldering the invisible weight of caregiving and the consequences for careers are profound. 33% of employees (38% of women) have turned down a promotion or new role due to personal or caregiving responsibilities. This means nearly four in ten women have literally stepped away from career growth opportunities because the system did not accommodate their life circumstances!!!! Sorry not me getting heated, but wait there is more…
Moreover, over 40% of women have considered “stepping back” from career advancement in the past three years (vs ~21% of men), and 22% of women have actually done so (vs 11% men). These gaps point to a persistent structural penalty for caregivers, disproportionately borne by women.
Even more telling is the type of care management: 1 in 4 employees care for an elderly family member. Women in particular are ~60% more likely than men to be providing elder care (26% vs 17%), which often brings unpredictable, time-sensitive demands. The so-called “sandwich generation” challenge, balancing work, young children, and aging parents, is squarely on the shoulders of many mid-career women.
❤️ Women are navigating a healthcare system where, TBH, most of the clinical research wasn’t even designed with female bodies in mind. The research found that women report even higher levels of mental and physical health challenges than men across almost every metric.
Some examples: 64% of women reported burnout in the past year vs 42% of men, and 76% of women vs 61% of men reported stress. Women also experienced more fatigue (+19 percentage points vs men) and anxiety (+17pp). Something interesting to think about, men were 10X more likely to report no health issues (15% men vs just 1% women) reflecting how few women are free from these strains! My goodness!!!
Don’t even get me started on how women are managing symptoms of perimenopause with no understanding from others or accommodations from their employer!
🚨 This is a workforce crisis that’s already happening inside your org right now 🚨
I know you probably don’t really need convincing around any of this, since you’re in HR too and you may see this daily.
But your exec team, on the other hand?
They might need a different kind of nudge…one that speaks their language.
💡 So let’s build that case together!
* Based on the data from Aon’s 2026 Sustaining Work Across Lives and Careers Survey. To be released in coming weeks.
Let’s start with something that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime, because I have ranted about this at length sooo many times!
Women have historically been underrepresented in clinical research.
Decades of studies built on male-default data, then applied to EVERYONE. It’s pretty wild when you see this type of thing across so many industries.
The downstream effects of that are still showing up in how women are diagnosed and treated today.
And of course, it shows up at work too! 😑
36.4% of women surveyed in Aon’s 2026 Sustaining Work Across Lives and Career study cited that Menopause was affecting them at work. With symptoms ranging from cognitive fog to sleep disruption to anxiety, there’s absolutely a disruption to your work day. But, how many benefits packages include menopause support that goes beyond a pamphlet?
👀 The realistic answer is VERY FEW.
Women are managing hot flashes during client meetings, and calling it a day because…what other choice do they have???
Then there’s the GLP-1 conversation, which has been a hot topic lately.
These medications are having a huge moment, and Aon’s workforce-focused GLP-1 research found meaningful differences in how women are using and responding to these drugs compared to men.
By the numbers: Aon observed a 47 percent reduction in hospitalizations for MACE when compared to the female control group. This represents a much larger reduction compared to the 26 percent reduction observed in male GLP-1 users when compared to the male control group.
Aon also observed that female GLP-1 users had an approximately 50 percent lower incidence rate for ovarian cancer and 14 percent lower incidence of breast cancer compared to matched female non-users. Furthermore, these women showed a 16 percent reduction in
incidence of osteoporosis alongside lower rates of several other chronic conditions such as
rheumatoid arthritis.
Female GLP-1 users were also less likely to be hospitalized for alcohol or drug abuse, bariatric surgery, and certain pancreatic disorders compared to female non-users, with this reduction being relatively greater than that observed among male users.
The cliff notes: Lower incidence of ovarian cancer (~50% reduction), breast cancer (14% reduction), osteoporosis (16% reduction) among women using GLP‑1s.
These differences have significant implications for how employers design their health benefits.
It’s all about recognizing that women-specific data leads to women-specific solutions. Radical concept, I know.
How to make the case to your exec team:
🚨 Frame it as a business risk, not a “nice to have.” Lead with the data they can’t ignore like the 36.4% of women who say menopause is hitting them at work, or how GLP-1s are impacting women. This isn’t wellness fluff, it’s retention, productivity, and healthcare spend ALL rolled into one.
💰 Show them the cost of doing nothing. Attrition is expensive. Burnout is expensive. Losing your senior women right when they hit peak earning years because your benefits stopped at maternity leave? EXPENSIVE. Put a number on what it costs to replace a VP and watch the room get very quiet.👀Make it embarrassingly easy to say yes. Don’t walk in asking for a full benefits overhaul on day one. Bring ONE specific ask backed by data like menopause support, GLP-1 coverage with women-specific guidance, or caregiver flexibility and a clear “here’s what good looks like.”
Is it me, or have we gotten pretty good at talking about mental health in the workplace lately?
EAPs. Therapy stipends. Mental health days. Meditation app subscriptions. It LOOKS like progress…
Aaaand then we completely fail to reckon with the specific mental health burdens that fall disproportionately on women. 😑
By the numbers:
- 64% of women report burnout vs 42% of men
- 73% report fatigue vs 54%
- 65% report anxiety vs 47%
- 76% report stress vs 61%
That last one still has me 🤯.
Women are navigating workplaces where they’re still being interrupted in meetings and passed over for promotions, then somehow ALSO expected to manage team morale as an unspoken part of their job description. (Funny how that “soft skill” never makes it into the comp band, isn’t it?)
And when we talk about women “leaving the workforce,” we love to frame it as a choice. 🙄
“She decided to focus on family.”
“She wanted something more flexibility.”
WRONG. A lot of these women are being pushed out by inflexible policies and a complete lack of accommodation for caregiving realities. Too many workplaces in 2026 are simply not designed with women in mind, and it shows.
That includes professions that are predominantly female and currently being actively delegitimized in the public conversation. Women are watching careers they’ve built their entire lives around get undermined in real time, and that takes a toll. Of course it does.
The mental health conversation for women can no longer stop at “here’s a meditation app.” It has to include psychological safety, equitable workloads, representation in leadership, and benefits that don’t require women to shrink their lives to fit the job.
And speaking of representation, when women aren’t in the workforce, they’re not in the room where decisions get made. Which means every policy, every product, every benefits package keeps getting built without them. Compounding. Forever.
How to make the case to your exec team:
🚨 Bring it back to attrition again. Execs don’t always move on “women are stressed.” They DO move on “we’re losing senior women at 2x the rate of men and replacement cost is $200K a pop.” Same problem, language that actually resonates with them.
👀 Bring ONE specific gap, not every single issue. Walk in with the data point that’s most relevant to YOUR workforce (caregiving flexibility, manager training, workload audits, pick one) and a clear ask.
This is the part where we get to make the case to your CFO! 🤞Woof.
Let’s start with the obvious by acknowledging that women earn less than men on average.
That’s been documented to death, so I won’t belabor the point.
What doesn’t get talked about enough is the downstream impact of that gap.
When you earn less, you contribute less to retirement savings.
When you take time out of the workforce for caregiving, you lose years of compounding returns.
When your career advancement stalls because the pay gap and the representation gap are all related, you retire with fundamentally less financial security than your male counterpart who started at the same company on the same day!
This is a personal finance issue for individual women, but it’s also very much your org’s problem.
Aon’s research on closing the gender savings gap identifies concrete ways that retirement plan design can actively work against this disparity with things like:
- Auto-enrollment features
- Employer contribution structures
- Financial education that’s actually built with women’s career realities in mind
These planning architecture decisions can meaningfully change outcomes!
Want the business case in plain terms?
When your female employees are financially precarious, that stress comes to work with them every single day.
And if you need to make this pitch to leadership, the cost of replacing an employee is estimated at roughly half to double their annual salary.
Women are leaving, and the ones who do stay are often stretched thin and underinvested in.
At some point, the math on not fixing this gets worse than the cost of fixing it! 🤷♀️
Women’s health has been treated as a niche benefit category for way too long.
It ends up being a little reproductive health coverage here, and a generic wellness stipend there.
Meanwhile, women are navigating physical, mental, and financial health challenges that show up at work every single day, and unfortunately, most benefits packages weren’t designed with that full picture in mind.
The attrition data is already alarming, and it should be on your leadership team’s mind!
The retirement readiness gap is already baked in for an entire generation of working women, not to mention we’re also operating in a moment where there are barriers for women to get access to the care they need.
Women didn’t sign up for this!
They’re adapting to it, though…often in silence and at a high personal cost. 😔
When women leave the workforce at scale, everyone loses access to their perspective and the economic contribution they would have made.
If your org isn’t taking a hard look at how your policies and your culture serve women across EVERY stage of their careers, then you’re already behind.
But don’t worry, Aon has been doing the work of reimagining what women’s health looks like when it’s treated as an integrated, strategic priority for a while now, and they can help!
Here’s what meaningful change looks like:
- Connecting physical health data to benefits design
- Building retirement plans that account for the actual careers women have, rather than some hypothetical linear one
- Workforce analytics that surface where women are falling through the gaps before the exit interview
Their approach looks at the full ecosystem, including healthcare, financial well-being, and workforce strategy, because those things aren’t separate!
A woman who’s working in a culture that doesn’t see her isn’t going to stay.
And hey, if she does stay, she’s certainly not going to thrive.
That’s not good for her, and it’s not good for your company.
You have the data and the urgency, so what you need now is a partner who can help you finally build something that works.
