How employers can support women’s mental health across their working lives

Supreet’s experience isn’t unique. Across Canadian workplaces, as return-to-office mandates collide with caregiving pressures, hormonal transitions and shifting mental-health needs, many women are discovering the supports that once made work sustainable are more fragile than they realized.

Read: Scotiabank corporate employees returning to office four days per week

The question now is whether benefits design, workplace flexibility, leadership capability and organizational culture can support women across the full arc of their working lives?

Women’s mental-health curve

From both a clinical and workplace perspective, women’s mental-health needs rarely follow a straight line. They tend to intensify at key transition points, with direct implications for benefits plan design.

The fertility years, which often coincide with early career-building, are frequently marked by anxiety, self-doubt and emotional strain. Fertility challenges and pregnancy loss are often treated as medical events rather than psychological ones, leaving many women to manage emotional fallout privately while maintaining professional momentum.

“These experiences don’t happen in isolation from work,” says Mandeep Lalli, a registered psychotherapist and head of employee assistance program solutions at mental-health platform Leena. “Employer support often assumes they do and that disconnect matters.”

Read: Menopause symptoms driving women out of the workforce, costing employers billions: report

That period frequently overlaps with perimenopause or menopause. A 2020 report by the Menopause Foundation of Canada found hormonal changes affect sleep, mood, concentration and stress tolerance, often during peak leadership years. The report also noted menopause remains one of the least understood and least addressed workplace health issues and that, in some cases, these transitions begin earlier than expected, compounding strain at a time when career demands are highest.

For employers, this means women in senior roles — those with deep institutional knowledge — may be navigating significant health changes with little formal acknowledgement or support. “Effective support can’t exist in isolation,” says Lalli. “It must reflect what’s happening across someone’s life, not just at work.”

Where EAPs help, fall short

EAPs often serve as a first point of contact for workplace mental-health support.

At Staples Canada, the EAP provides confidential counselling and coaching, with services addressing childcare and elder-care stress, burnout, relationship and family concerns, neurodivergence-related challenges and hormonal health. Its broader benefits plan includes coverage for psychologists, therapists and social workers, as well as hormone replacement therapy, birth control and fertility-related care.

Read: How employers can leverage mental-health champions, EAPs to provide support on Blue Monday and beyond

“The EAP is designed to provide fast, low-barrier access to support when [employees] or their families need help right away,” says Adrian Lang, chief legal and privacy officer and interim chief human resources and communications officer. “It allows people to seek confidential support early, while the benefits plan supports ongoing or more specialized care when required.”

For employees, the ease of access and short-term counselling offered through EAPs can be effective for acute stress or situational challenges, but for women managing layered and ongoing mental- health needs — including caregiving strain, hormonal transitions or neurodivergence — EAPs often fall short, says Lalli. “Most EAPs offer just four to six sessions and provide little continuity of care.”

That lack of continuity can be especially challenging for racialized women, she adds, particularly when culturally aligned providers are difficult to access once EAP sessions end.

From a group benefits perspective, the issue is often less about whether coverage exists and more about the burden placed on employees to manage complex and fragmented systems, says Edward Kuo, senior director of group benefits at Eckler Ltd. “When support is disjointed, employees are effectively asked to coordinate their own care while already under strain.”

When neurodivergence enters the picture

In Canada, adult diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder are rising among women.

In 2022, women represented 47 per cent of adult ADHD diagnoses, compared to 40 per cent five years earlier, according to a report by Manulife. The shift reflects longstanding gaps in diagnosis and growing awareness of how ADHD presents differently in women.

Read: How employers can help employees with ADHD be engaged, productive

At health-care provider Serefin Health, those trends have influenced how its leaders think about everyday workplace practices. When Karie Evelyn joined the organization in 2022, several employees disclosed ADHD diagnoses, prompting reflection on communication and work styles.

According to Evelyn, a family support supervisor, leaders responded by exploring more inclusive communications practices, including optional forums where staff can share routines and communications preferences, an approach reinforced by the clinic’s work supporting families navigating neurodivergence and helping normalize those conversations internally.

From Evelyn’s experience on the family support team, communication is one of the most common workplace challenges for employees with ADHD, particularly when information needs to be absorbed quickly. To address this, leaders now share information using multiple formats, including verbal explanations, written follow ups and visuals.

Many effective accommodations are low-cost and non-clinical, she adds, noting flexible scheduling, opportunities for movement during the day and portable work setups, such as laptops, can make a meaningful difference. “Some team members may be walking, bouncing or fidgeting during meetings. That doesn’t mean they’re not engaged. Often, it’s the opposite.”

When flexibility is non- negotiable

Caregivers in Canada provide an average of 4.5 hours of unpaid care per day (roughly 30 hours per week), according to a May 2024 report from the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence.

The same report found one in four caregivers rated their mental health as fair or poor, while nearly half reported feeling tired. Forty-four per cent said they felt worried or anxious and 37 per cent said they felt overwhelmed by their caregiving responsibilities. Despite these pressures, many caregivers didn’t self-identify until they were already experiencing burnout, says Christa Haanstra, working caregiver initiative lead at the CCCE.

Read: Employers can support caregivers with enhanced benefits, inclusive conversations: experts

“Policies that require people to explain or justify their personal circumstances create barriers. A no-explanation approach is inclusive because it doesn’t require people to first see themselves as caregivers in order to access flexibility.”

Care days, compassionate care hours and flexible scheduling policies that don’t require disclosure can significantly reduce stress, stigma and anxiety, she adds, particularly for women navigating caregiving alongside grief or mental-health strain. These concerns were echoed in recent CCCE roundtable discussions, where participants described return-to-office mandates as a tipping point that made balancing paid work and caregiving untenable.

According to the centre’s data, 44 per cent of caregivers missed an average of eight to nine workdays per year and experienced higher rates of absenteeism and presenteeism. It estimated the collective productivity loss associated with caregiving was $1.3 billion annually. “Flexibility isn’t a perk,” says Haanstra. “It functions as a mental-health intervention.”

Designing benefits with women in mind

Some employers are beginning to move beyond reactive, one-size-fits-all approaches to women’s mental-health challenges towards lifecycle-based support.

From a benefits plan design standpoint, the most effective strategies move away from isolated offerings and towards integrated supports, says Kuo. “Plans tend to fall short when caregiving, menopause and mental-health supports are treated as separate issues rather than coordinated across benefits, programs and policies.”

Read: Employers can support caregivers with enhanced benefits, inclusive conversations: experts

Staples Canada’s mental-health benefits are designed with overlapping pressures in mind, says Lang. In addition to its EAP and extended benefits, the organization supports employees through employee resource groups focused on women’s leadership, caregiving and mental wellness. It also provides people leaders with guidance on how to recognize when caregiving strain, health transitions or mental-health pressures may be affecting performance.

“Managers don’t need to be clinicians, but they do need to know how to have supportive conversations and connect employees to resources.”

At real estate investment firm BGO, leadership development has played a central role in addressing similar challenges. Recent internal engagement data found 86 per cent of employees believe their manager cares about them as a person, while 89 per cent said they feel accepted by their immediate colleagues.

The firm introduced a motherhood leadership and coaching initiative designed as a bridge between parental leave and return to work.

The program provides personalized coaching to support women navigating that transition, with a focus on translating caregiving experience into leadership strengths, examining personal values and supporting longterm career growth and retention.

Read: Editorial: Is the world finally waking up to the woes of working women?

“The gap wasn’t about the work,” says Genevieve Monteiro, director of talent development and inclusion at BGO. “It was about confidence, visibility and, to a degree, change management.”

The relevance of that support became clear in 2025 during the program’s pilot phase, which coincided with Montiero’s own return from maternity leave. “I returned to work in August, just as we were exploring the opportunity to pilot the [program]. As we were designing it, the need for this kind of support felt both professional and personal.”

What happens when systems fail

Singh’s decision to resign from her job at the bank underscores what happens when benefits, flexibility and leadership capability don’t align.

She had benefits coverage and years of institutional knowledge, but she didn’t have the flexibility to use either without sacrificing her ability to care for her family. For too long, workplace mental-health strategies have focused on acute stress rather than cumulative load. As women’s careers span longer and more complex life stages, that approach no longer holds.

Employers must treat mental health as a lifecycle issue, supported by benefits that evolve with employees, flexibility that doesn’t require justification and workplace culture that recognizes transitions rather than penalizing them.

Sonya Singh is an associate editor at Benefits Canada and the Canadian Investment Review.