5 Healthcare Lessons for Organizations Working to Attract and Retain Top Female Talent

Over the past year, my company, Maven, has spoken with hundreds of executives from Fortune 500s. We’ve asked each of them what is and isn’t working in their efforts to win the war for female talent, and particularly in their approach to maternity benefits.

Their responses are both reassuring and surprising. They are reassuring in their near-universal commitment to making organizations more female-friendly, not as a nice thing to do but as a business imperative. But what’s equally clear is that benefits departments often don’t know where to start.

Organizations are right to be focused on maternity benefits. The Peterson Institute recently published a study finding that companies with 30% more female executives rake in as much as six percentage points more in profits. McKinsey led a research effort showing that $2.1 trillion could be added to U.S. GDP by 2025 through very achievable steps to increase women’s participation in the workforce.

So if a business leader wants to capture part of this pie, where should they start? Our experience at Maven, outlined in greater detail in a recent white paper, reveals five key lessons for benefits executives.

1. Organizations are just beginning to take a data-driven approach to determining gender differences in benefits needs/requirements. According to recent research from Mercer, a consulting firm, one out of two organizations they surveyed agree that supporting a woman’s unique relationship to healthcare is important in attracting talent. Yet only 22% of these organizations conduct analyses to identify gender-specific health needs.

2. Healthcare, and particularly maternal health, remains front and center for female employees. Women have different health needs at the prime of their careers than men. Whether it’s trying to get pregnant, having a child, or managing their family’s health, the physical and emotional work of starting a family is largely on women. What’s more, women control 80% of consumer healthcare purchases and sit in the driver’s seat when it comes to their children’s healthcare.

3. Unfortunately, most corporate health policies are like legacy infrastructure – a status-quo designed for a different time. It’s only in the last few years that companies have started to make it a priority to have a family-friendly work environment. This includes changing decades-old maternity leave policies that give women six weeks off—often at reduced pay—and no paternity leave, as these policies are no longer competitive.  

4. Sticking too closely to off-the-shelf insurance offerings around maternity care often misses the point. At Maven, we’ve found that most companies only offer low-utilized health insurance programs to support women who are pregnant or have just had a child. Our product tackles issues that fall under the radar, but can seriously impact a woman’s ability to return to work: mental health support around perinatal and postpartum depression, pelvic floor rehabilitation via telemedicine appointments with women’s health physical therapists, on-demand lactation consultants and infant care specialists, and coaches who help women successfully transition back to work.   

5. Providing health benefits that move the needle for women doesn’t need to be expensive—and, in fact, often yields overall cost savings. Indeed, pregnancy often emerges as the single largest healthcare spend for large self-insured companies. And, remarkably, mitigating cost and improving the health of mother and child often go hand in hand. For instance, providing basic telemedicine-based birth planning and education about C-sections has been shown to reduce unnecessary instances of this procedure—a non-trivial matter in the U.S., which has the highest C-section rates in the developed world. Monitoring high risk pregnancies via telemedicine has also been shown to reduce NICU costs. And in both instances, mother and baby alike benefit.

I believe we’re at an exciting inflection point, but there are still challenges. Despite the business imperative to retain top female talent, much of the wage and gender gap at work begins when women are in their thirties, the decade when most women start a family. The data on current talent flows into organizations at the mid-to-senior level says women will yield virtually no gain in representation at the professional level and above over the next decade. At Mercer’s recent “When Women Thrive, Business Thrives” conference, the most poignant questions posed to business leaders like Candy Crowley, CNN’s former chief political correspondent, or Denise Young Smith, VP of Human Resources at Apple, were from thirty-something women who asked how not to fall behind. Both Crowley and Smith had the same answer: just be twice as good as everyone around you. If this is the case, better benefits for women can add that extra layer of support and attract the best women, particularly around the time they start a family.

I’m optimistic, though, that being twice as good won’t always have to be the answer. For female employees, business and life often intersect in a very different way than they do for male employees. This difference is entirely natural. And based on what we at Maven are seeing from our own clients, benefits professionals at many of the world’s most innovative companies are starting to wise up to this reality —particularly around bottom-line benefits of rethinking their health systems in a way that is more cognizant of gender.