The Cost of Not Supporting Women's Health at Work

Women are leaving at every level. But the effect is significantly more pronounced at senior ones.

The cost of losing a single senior leader is more than offset by the right programme covering your entire organisation. More importantly, the hidden cost is the years of lower productivity where 72% of women never share the symptoms they are going through day to day, leading to both absenteeism and presenteeism.

Where Women Are Leaving

Why are women leaving at every level, especially by the time they reach VP? Employers end up losing the talent they have built over decades.

McKinsey and LeanIn have tracked this data every year for a decade, publishing their Women in the Workplace report. The 2024 edition, the tenth, tracks representation across corporate levels:

McKinsey / LeanIn, Women in the Workplace 2024

Every one of these women has been invested in. They are highly competitive. They did not suddenly become less competitive. The system has not kept up with their unique needs as the demands on them have increased.

The Broken Rung

For every 100 men promoted, only 81 women are promoted and make the same move. McKinsey calls this the broken rung. It has barely shifted in a decade.

The Great Breakup

As McKinsey documented in their 2023 report: for every woman at director level who gets promoted, two women directors leave the company entirely.

They are leaving by choice. And in most cases, they do not share the complex reasons during their exit interview. Those reasons often include burnout, health issues, and an inability to cope with increasing demands.

The challenge is that the environment has not been created to have a conversation around what she is going through, to be able to support her in time.

The Earnings Impact

In March 2025, researchers at Stanford University and the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a study using large-scale administrative data. They tracked what happens to women's earnings after a menopause diagnosis and found that women earn 10% less in the four years following diagnosis.

We have seen this pattern before. Women fought to be part of the workforce. Then to have maternity and postpartum benefits included. Now the challenge is for women aged thirty through to fifty-five, where the overall system is not built to support the health changes that interfere with work productivity.

The Hidden Cost: Presenteeism

The women who do stay are working at 75% capacity. Most employers track sick leave and absenteeism because it is obvious and visible. But the larger cost is when women are showing up while unable to be fully productive. Concentration, output, decision-making, and the ability to manage complex stakeholder situations with ease. All compromised.

A 2023 study published in the Menopause journal measured work impairment using the validated WPAI scale across 367 postmenopausal women. The results break down by symptom severity: a woman with severe symptoms is operating at 75% capacity every day she is at work.

The national WARM study found even higher impairment: 30.2% overall work productivity lost and 35.7% daily activity impairment from vasomotor symptoms alone.

Imagine a woman trying to be fully productive while her ears ring with tinnitus, she feels a tingling sensation and deep pain in her shoulder, and tingling in her arms and legs. These are not hypothetical symptoms. They are reported daily by women in their thirties, forties, and fifties across every industry.

The Menstrual Health Data

A BMJ Open study of 32,748 women in the Netherlands found that 80.7% of menstruating women experience presenteeism, with an average of 23.2 reduced-productivity days per year. That is equivalent to 8.9 fully lost working days per woman per year.

Only 20% told their employer the real reason.

This is striking. Despite all effort from employers to create open, inclusive cultures, four out of five women are not disclosing the health issues affecting their work. The environment for that conversation does not yet exist in most organisations.

Presenteeism vs Absenteeism: The 10x Gap

Research published by EHS Today, based on a Global Corporate Challenge study validated against the WHO Health and Productivity Questionnaire, found that presenteeism costs employers roughly 10 times more than absenteeism. Employees are on average absent for 4 days per year, but unproductive while physically present for close to 57.5 days per year.

Most of the symptoms women face are psychosomatic in nature. They do not just affect the body or the mind in isolation. They are deeply interconnected. Sleep disruption affects cognition. Gut health affects mood. Hormonal shifts affect stress tolerance. When these are treated in silos, nothing changes.

The Singapore Data

The NUS Business School and Asia Centre for Productive Longevity and Equality partnered with HeyVenus to survey 1,741 working women across five Asia-Pacific countries. They found that 67% of women report symptoms disrupting both their professional and personal lives, and that among those affected, over 50% hold mid-to-senior leadership roles.

This Is Not a Cliff at Fifty

This is not something that suddenly goes wrong at fifty. This is a perpetual, time-intensified issue. If women have the right system to support them in their thirties and forties, they will not be falling off a cliff in their fifties.

These are women who are leaders. They are running teams, managing client portfolios, identifying talent. They are trained and deeply embedded in the organisation. When talent like this leaves, it impacts the entire business.

The Maths

A $5 to $15 per employee per month benefit programme targeting women's health across your organisation. For 200 employees, that is $12,000 to $36,000 annually. Retaining one senior woman pays for the entire programme multiple times over.

The Case for Change

The impact of not supporting women's health at work compounds over a career. It starts in the late twenties and early thirties. It intensifies through the forties. It results in lower productivity, higher attrition, and the loss of senior leaders the organisation has spent decades building.

The question is not whether to act. It is how quickly you can close the gap before the next senior woman walks out the door.