Why Women Leave Workplaces, And What Companies Keep Getting Wrong

An exploration of how life-stage health, exclusion, and insufficient support contribute to the loss of experienced female talent, and the practical steps organisations can take to improve retention and leadership progression.

More than 455,000 women left the US workforce between January and August 2025. In a Catalyst survey of women who had left the workforce since January 1, 58% described their exit as voluntary, while 42% said they had been let go (Catalyst, 2026). This attrition sits alongside a broader pattern of global stagnation: women represent just 31% of leadership roles worldwide, despite making up 43% of the overall workforce, and progress has essentially flatlined since 2022. (Williams, 2025)

Leadership teams often read these figures as two separate problems: a retention issue over here, a leadership-pipeline issue over there. Yet they are part of the same story. When health-related transitions and chronic conditions collide with rigid work design, uneven management, and limited support, women can be pushed away from the very roles, and the very career years, in which their experience is most valuable.

The pattern hiding in plain sight

Across a career, women’s working lives intersect with a series of biologically driven health stages and transitions: menstrual health, fertility, pregnancy and pregnancy loss, and eventually perimenopause and menopause. These experiences often intersect with significant workplace moments, including the return from parental leave, when the right support can shape whether an employee feels able to continue and progress. Layered on top are chronic conditions such as endometriosis, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS; formerly known as polycystic ovary syndrome [PCOS]), and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). These experiences do not arrive on a corporate timetable. They overlap with promotion cycles, leadership responsibilities, caregiving, travel, and the pressure to appear unaffected.

Individually, each transition looks like a private medical matter. Collectively, they form a recurring workforce pattern, one that becomes visible only when organisations look at health, retention, and leadership progression as interconnected issues. Here is what the evidence shows, life stage by life stage.

Menstrual health and PMDD. PMDD is the most severe form of PMS; it can disrupt daily functioning and affects up to 5% of women of childbearing age (NCBI, 2023). Where policy is silent, employees and managers are left to improvise around predictable but sometimes disabling symptoms.

Fertility. WHO estimates that 17.5% of adults globally (roughly one in six) experience infertility in their lifetime (WHO, 2023). In Carrot Fertility's Global Fertility at Work survey, 65% of respondents said they would change jobs for better fertility benefits, and 55% of employees trying to start or grow a family said fertility challenges had already harmed their performance at work (Carrot Fertility, 2022).

Pregnancy loss and the return to work. Between 10% and 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage (March of Dimes, 2024). A pregnancy loss can bring a form of grief for which many workplaces still have no language. And the return from parental leave, which should be a retention moment, frequently becomes an unplanned exit ramp when there is no structured support to ease back in.

Chronic gynaecological conditions. For those living with endometriosis, the path from first symptoms to diagnosis can take 4 to 11 years (Frontiers in Global Women's Health, 2022). In England, an Office for National Statistics analysis found that, four to five years after an endometriosis diagnosis, the probability of being a paid employee had fallen by 2.7 percentage points; among those still in paid work, average monthly pay was £56 lower than before diagnosis (Office for National Statistics, 2025). PMOS, meanwhile, affects an estimated 8–13% of women of reproductive age, and up to 70% of those affected may be undiagnosed worldwide (WHO, 2026).

Menopause. The CIPD's 2023 research found that women who felt unsupported at work were around five times more likely to have left the workforce entirely because of menopause symptoms than those who felt supported. Among unsupported employees, 84% said their symptoms had a mostly negative effect on their work (CIPD, 2023). A 2026 survey of working women aged 40–65 found 28% had considered resigning over menopause symptoms, and 7% had already done so (Allwork.Space, 2026).

These are not isolated experiences. Together, they show how common health transitions can affect attendance, progression, and retention when the right support is not in place.

Where companies get it wrong

The mistake is usually not a lack of goodwill. It's the absence of a system.

First, companies treat each transition as an isolated, private issue rather than part of a recurring workforce pattern. Support becomes reactive and depends too heavily on whether an employee discloses what they are experiencing.

Second, support is often built around a single moment, typically parental leave, and stops there. Fertility, pregnancy loss, menopause, and chronic conditions are left to individual managers to navigate, if they are addressed at all.

Third, managers are rarely trained to recognise or respond to these transitions. Silence becomes the default and women can leave without the real reason ever appearing in an exit interview.

Finally, few companies connect engagement, absence, progression, and attrition data through a life-stage lens. The pattern remains invisible until it appears as an unexplained retention problem.

The cost of that blind spot is not abstract; it’s real. Gallup estimates that replacing a frontline employee costs approximately 40% of yearly salary; the estimate rises to 80% for a technical professional and around 200% for a manager or leader (Gallup, 2026). These figures are estimates rather than universal rules, but the direction is clear: avoidable turnover is expensive, and the cost increases with seniority and specialisation.

On the upside, McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum estimate that closing the global women's health gap could add up to $1 trillion in annual GDP by 2040 (McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum, 2024). McKinsey’s research suggests that the relationship between executive-team gender diversity and financial performance has strengthened over time. Its 2019 analysis found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability than those in the fourth quartile; by 2023, that figure had risen to 39% compared with bottom-quartile peers. While these findings show association rather than causation, they reinforce the business case for retaining and advancing diverse leadership (McKinsey, 2020; McKinsey, 2023).

Women's health support is therefore not simply a benefits issue. It is a retention, leadership, and business-performance issue.

What to do differently

A small number of structural shifts can change the picture without requiring a company to rebuild its entire benefits programme.

Treat life-stage health as a retention and leadership-pipeline issue. Position it within talent strategy, workforce planning, and inclusion, not only within wellness.

Equip managers. Provide practical training, conversation guides, referral paths, and clear boundaries. Often, what employees need most is not a new benefit, but a manager who can respond calmly, confidentially, and without judgement.

Design for continuity across the career. Connect fertility, pregnancy loss, parental leave, chronic-condition, and menopause support so employees do not have to navigate a new system at every transition. Flexible work, temporary workload adjustments, phased returns, and clear leave options should operate as a coordinated framework.

Measure responsibly. Review engagement, absence, progression, and attrition patterns using aggregated data and appropriate privacy safeguards, so risks become visible before they result in resignation.

And normalise access to support. The single biggest shift available to most organisations costs nothing: making these topics discussable at work, rather than something employees manage alone and in silence. Make policies and support programs visible, create safe routes for requesting adjustments, and reassure employees that using available support will not quietly damage their career prospects.

Companies that treat women's health as a structural, career-long workforce issue will be better positioned to retain experienced talent and strengthen their leadership pipeline. Those that do not will keep missing the pattern, and may recognise the cost only after another highly capable woman has already left.

About the Author

Veroniek Vermeulen is the Founder and CEO of Silatha and Silatha Journey, an evidence-based women’s health platform supporting organisations with workplace programmes focused on women’s health, engagement and wellbeing. An engineer by training with 20 years of global experience in marketing and innovation at Fortune 100 companies, she is also an ICF-certified coach and TEDx speaker. Based between the Netherlands and Qatar, she works with enterprises and governments to advance women’s wellbeing, leadership and workplace performance.