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Most employers already offer some kind of wellbeing support. Far fewer offer anything that genuinely helps a woman going through menopause, a failed IVF cycle, or a return to work after a miscarriage. There's a big gap between having a benefit listed in the handbook and having something an employee will use when it matters, and that gap is where a lot of experienced women are quietly leaving the workforce.
About half of most workforces are women, and a large number of them will go through a health event that affects their work at some point: endometriosis, PMOS, fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause. These aren't rare, everyone will know someone going through at least one of these health challenges / life stages. They also tend to land in someone's thirties, forties and fifties, which is usually when they're most senior and hardest to replace.
When the support isn't there, many will cut their hours, turn down a promotion, or drop off sick and never quite come back to full capacity. None of that shows up cleanly in an exit interview. It shows up two or three years later as a leadership team that's lost most of its experienced women.
We know how important it is to support women at work. But the question is, what do you look for in a benefits provider? What do women really need?
Cover every age and circumstance, not just the obvious ones
It's tempting to pick a provider based on whichever issue feels most visible right now, menopause is usually the one that gets talked about most in HR circles. But women's health doesn't sit in one age bracket or one life stage. You'll have employees dealing with fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, endometriosis, PMOS, perimenopause and menopause, often at the same time, across every level of the business.
You also can't assume you know who's affected. A lot of women won't mention what they're going through, to a manager or to HR, even when it's affecting how they're working. Someone in their late twenties could be going through IVF. Someone you'd never guess is in her forties could be dealing with early menopause. If your support only really works for one age group or one situation, you're leaving a large part of your workforce with nothing, and you likely won't hear about it from them directly.
Choose a provider that covers the full range, not just the version of women's health that gets the most attention.
Ask whether it's actual clinical care, or just information
A lot of what's sold as women's health support is content: articles, webinars, a phone line to call. That's not nothing, but it's not care either, and employees notice the difference the first time they try to use it.
Ask providers a few direct questions. Are the practitioners actually specialists, certified in menopause care or fertility health, or are they generalist wellbeing coaches? Can they diagnose, prescribe or refer someone on, or does the conversation stop at advice? Will an employee see the same person more than once, or are they starting from scratch every time they call?
If the answer to any of that is no, you're paying for content with a health label on it.
Check what it does that your EAP and PMI don't
Most mid-sized and large employers already have an EAP and private medical insurance. Neither was built with specialist menopause, fertility or women's health care in mind, so there's usually a real gap there worth filling.
Before you sign up to anything new, work out exactly where your current cover stops. If a new provider mostly overlaps with what you're already paying for, you're paying twice for the same thing. A decent provider will be able to show you, specifically, where their service picks up from your existing benefits rather than sitting on top of them.
Confidentiality decides whether anyone uses it
Would you want to tell your line manager you're going through IVF, or that you've just had a miscarriage, before you could get help? Most people wouldn't. If that's the route into a service, take-up will be low no matter how good the clinical side is.
Ask exactly what data comes back to the business. It should be aggregated, not individual. Ask what a line manager sees, and press until you get a specific answer. A provider that goes vague on this hasn't thought it through properly, and it's worth walking away over.
Design for more than one kind of woman
It's easy for a women's health service to be built around one fairly narrow version of the employee: straight, cisgender, in a conventional family setup. Most workforces don't look like that.
Trans and non-binary employees have needs that don't map onto the standard categories. Someone going through fertility treatment as part of a same-sex relationship needs different support to a straight couple. Someone who has chosen not to have children still needs menopause and gynaecological care. Cultural and religious background changes how people approach reproductive health. Neurodivergent employees often experience conditions like PMDD or menopause differently and need that reflected in how they're supported, not treated as an edge case.
If a provider has only ever designed for one type of woman, ask what they've actually done to change that.
Know your legal position
There isn't a standalone menopause law in the UK, but menopause symptoms can already fall under the Equality Act 2010 as sex, age or disability discrimination depending on the case. Employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments where a health condition is affecting someone's ability to work, and the Employment Rights Act has tightened expectations around how health-related disclosures and requests are handled.
Putting proper support in place isn't only about doing right by your people, though that's reason enough. It also gives you something to point to if you're ever asked whether you took your duty of care seriously.
Six things worth checking before you sign
Does the support match what your own workforce data shows, rather than a generic topic list? Is it delivered by actual specialists who can do more than point someone to an article? Does it fill a real gap in your EAP and PMI rather than repeat them? Can the provider tell you specifically how employee data is protected? Has it been designed for the range of women in your business, not just one version of them? Would it hold up if you had to show you'd met your obligations under the Equality Act?
If a provider can answer all six with specifics, it's worth taking further.
The cost of leaving it too long
Every year this goes unaddressed, some of your most experienced women are working out, on their own, whether the job is still workable for them. Most won't tell you that directly. You'll find out later, when you look at who's actually left in senior roles and notice how few of them are women who joined ten years ago.
Support like this isn't a perk. It's one of the more direct ways to hold on to people the business has spent years developing, instead of losing them at the exact point they're most valuable.
Where Peppy fits in
This is exactly the gap Peppy's women's health support is built to close. Employees get direct access to menopausespecialists, fertility nurses and other qualified specialists, not a generalist coach or a content library, and they can come back to the same practitioner rather than repeating their history every time. Care covers the full range, from fertility and pregnancy through to perimenopause, menopause and gynaecological conditions like endometriosis and PMOS, so support isn't limited to whichever life stage gets the most attention.
It's designed to sit alongside your existing EAP and PMI rather than duplicate them, picking up the specialist care those services generally weren't built to provide. Access is confidential and direct, employees don't need to go through a line manager to use it, and employers only ever see anonymised, aggregated usage data. It's also built for the actual range of women in a workforce, not one default version of the employee.
If you want to see how it would work for your business, we'd be glad to talk it through.
Frequently asked questions
Why does workplace wellbeing support for women matter so much right now? Because without it, employers tend to lose experienced women quietly, through reduced hours or resignation rather than one clear trigger, right at the point in their careers when they're hardest to replace.
What's the difference between an EAP and dedicated women's health support? An EAP usually covers general counselling and signposting. Dedicated women's health support gives access to qualified specialists, such as menopause-certified practitioners or fertility nurses, who can diagnose, prescribe or refer, which most EAPs can't do.
Is menopause support a legal requirement for UK employers? Not as a standalone law, but menopause symptoms can already fall under the Equality Act 2010 as sex, age or disability discrimination, and employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments where symptoms affect someone's ability to work.
How do you keep women's health support confidential? Employees should be able to access it directly, without going through a line manager first, and the business should only ever see aggregated usage data, never anything that could identify an individual's health situation.