Employers Expanded Women & Family Benefits. So Why Does Accessing Them Feel Like a Second Job?

Inside Maven Clinic’s 5th Annual State of Women’s & Family Health Benefits Report

For decades, women and families have asked for better.

Better maternity leave.

Better fertility coverage.

Better mental health support.

Better menopause care.

Better return-to-work pathways.

Employers listened.

According to Maven Clinic’s 5th Annual State of Women’s & Family Health Benefits Report, employers increased women’s and family health benefits by 39%. On paper, this is progress. But here’s the paradox, employee confidence that those benefits “support them very well” declined across nearly every category.

Employers are investing more. Employees are feeling less supported.The disconnect is Fragmented solutions—making benefits harder to access, coordinate, and rely on when they need them most.

The Hidden Cost of “Great Benefits”

I spent two decades working inside four Fortune 100 companies. I navigated four pregnancies during that time. I had what most would consider excellent benefits. And yet accessing them required project management skills I wasn’t trained for.

Multiple portals.

Separate vendors.

Disability paperwork.

Insurance verification calls.

Leave policy fine print.

Return-to-work negotiations.

Pregnancy was a full-time job layered on top of a full-time job. And I was not alone. Maven Clinic’s Report shows that 27% of women delayed or skipped routine healthcare last year. Not because coverage didn’t exist. Because appointment times didn’t work, wait times were too long, logistics were too complicated. In other words: because they did not have time.

Time Poverty Is the Real Care Gap

We talk often about financial barriers to care. We talk far less about time poverty.

Time poverty is what happens when accessing care requires more hours than a working parent has available. It is the invisible tax on working mothers.

Between work deadlines, trying to conceive, school pickups, caregiving for aging parents, navigating menopause, and the daily mechanics of running a household, there is very little margin left.

Yet our benefits systems are designed as if time is abundant. If accessing maternity support requires three logins, five forms, two phone calls, and weeks of waiting, then it feels less like a benefit.

This friction explains another striking finding from the report: 81% of employees are now using AI for health information, and a third have acted on it. Only 6% turn to employer resources first.

Employees are not abandoning employer systems out of distrust. They are routing around inefficiency. They are sprinting towards a much faster solution.

This gap isn’t about effort. It reflects the reality of a system under pressure from every side. Employees today are navigating work, parenting, menopause, family building, and complex health decisions in an environment of tighter access to care, rising costs, and an overwhelming volume of information. At the same time, HR and benefits leaders are balancing competing priorities, managing escalating healthcare spend, improving outcomes, and ensuring employees can actually locate, understand, and use the support available to them.

In this context, the distinction between offering benefits and delivering meaningful, accessible support becomes critical. Expanding coverage is important. Ensuring it works in real life is what ultimately makes the difference.

When institutional care is slow or fragmented, speed wins.

Fragmentation Is Expensive

Women do not experience their lives in categories. They move, often quickly, through fertility decisions, pregnancy, postpartum recovery, early parenting, caregiving for aging parents, and eventually perimenopause and menopause. Sometimes these stages overlap. Often they unfold while careers are accelerating. But workplace benefits are rarely designed to move with them. Fertility support lives in one place. Maternity benefits in another. Mental health on a separate platform. Return-to-work guidance buried inside HR policy. Menopause support, if offered at all, is disconnected from other healthcare offerings. Each life stage is treated as a discrete event. Women experience them as a continuum.

When support is fragmented, the burden of stitching it together falls on the employee. That stitching is labor. It is the time spent retelling medical histories to new providers. The hours deciphering which vendor handles which stage. The energy required to coordinate appointments across systems that do not communicate. The mental load of managing a high-risk pregnancy while planning maternity leave. The quiet negotiation of menopausal symptoms while maintaining executive performance. This invisible coordination work is rarely acknowledged, but it is constant, and it is costly.

Fragmentation creates work. And that work doesn’t show up in the next HR check-in. It shows up in delayed care. In disengagement. In quiet attrition. It also creates work for HR. Instead of overseeing a cohesive care strategy, HR teams are left managing vendor contracts, fielding employee confusion, and troubleshooting gaps between platforms that were never designed to integrate. Each additional vendor can mean another login, another eligibility rule, another handoff where employees fall through. Over time, that complexity becomes expensive.

More than half of benefits leaders report rising costs associated with high-risk pregnancies, yet only a small fraction of employees can correctly identify all high-risk pregnancy factors. That’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a continuity problem. When fertility care is disconnected from maternal health, when maternal health is disconnected from mental health, when postpartum recovery is disconnected from return-to-work planning, when menopause support is disconnected from performance and retention conversations, risk surfaces late, intervention comes too late, and costs rise. Only 32% of HR leaders say nearly all employees return after parental leave. That statistic alone should move this from a “benefits” conversation to a workforce strategy conversation. Care isn’t peripheral to business performance. It shapes who advances, who stays, and who quietly exits. When women are asked to coordinate their own care across life stages, employers are effectively outsourcing system integration to the very people with the least time to manage it. And that is expensive, for everyone.

Care Is Infrastructure

To help us restructure how we think about women and family care, menopause, maternity and family health benefits are not perks. They are infrastructure that enables families to work with confidence and resilience.

Just like transportation enables economic activity, care enables workforce participation, it drives productivity. When infrastructure works, it is invisible. When it fails, productivity slows.

If a road required employees to build half of it themselves before driving to work, we would call it broken.Yet that is effectively what we ask women and families to do with care benefits.

This report reminds us that families do not have the time to coordinate. As long as accessing support requires excessive time and coordination from the very people it is meant to help, the system will underperform.

The Next Evolution

The next phase of workplace care is not expansion. It’s integration.

Companies can design benefits as connected pathways rather than disconnected offerings. It provides continuity across fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, and caregiving, reducing friction so that care functions in real life, not just in policy documents.

Coordinated care reduces risk for families and employers, stabilizes cost, improves trust and strengthens retention. Women stay longer in the workforce because care is woven across various life stages from fertility, to pregnancy, to menopause and beyond.

Employers have demonstrated that they are willing to invest. The next test is whether they can design. Accessing care should feel supportive, intuitive, even relieving. It should not feel like another task to manage, another portal to log into, another item added to an already overloaded to-do list. Care is not an add-on to compensation. It is operational infrastructure.

And infrastructure, when designed well, is seamless. It works in the background. It reduces friction rather than creating it. It does not require the people it serves to assemble it themselves.

The organizations that close the gap between intention and lived experience will define the next generation of employee benefits. That means moving beyond expansion toward integration, delivering real outcomes, trusted guidance, and timely care without layering additional complexity onto already stretched HR teams.

---

Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.