Women in Work Summit 2023: 4 Powerful Takeaways From the Event

If you’re a woman in the workforce, you already know that there are specific challenges to having your health supported on the job — challenges that historically haven’t been addressed by corporations and corporate leaders at all.

Thankfully, that’s starting to change. Increasingly, business leaders are recognizing that supporting women’s health in the workplace has value that goes beyond just being the right thing to do — and that was evident at the inaugural Women in Work Summit. Held on Nov. 9 in New York City, the Summit gathered leading business executives to share the innovative solutions they’re bringing to the boardroom table when it comes to supporting women — and women’s health — at work throughout every life stage, from menstruation to pregnancy to menopause.

From case studies and statistics to personal stories, the thought leaders on stage, including actor, advocate, and Stripes founder Naomi Watts and Alex Mahon, CEO of the UK’s Channel 4, shared the inspiring ways they’re taking action to remove barriers for women in the workforce and advocate for women at work.

“We were delighted to welcome over 130 business leaders to the Women in Work Summit, a first-of-its-kind event, designed to shape the way that workplace decisions, policies, and cultures are transformed to attract, support, advance, and retain women,” said Melissa Ashley, Co-Founder, Intuitive Events, US and Women in Work Summit US.

“The inaugural Women in Work Summit was filled with compelling information, case studies, statistics, and personal stories focused on creating equitable workforces to drive business growth,” she continued, “[and it] had a clear focus: “to tackle the barriers for women in the workplace and to provide practical solutions for business leaders and HR practitioners to close the gender health gap in the workplace. And to reinforce that what is good for women is good for business.”

Let’s say that louder for the people in back: What’s good for women is good for business. Below, our favorite takeaways from the event back that up — and offer insight and inspiration on how we can all prioritize women’s health in the workplace and break the taboo of talking about topics like menopause.

Intention Needs Action

How can we create a culture where women’s health is imperative? That was the topic of one of the Summit’s panels, where the discussion focused on ways HR leaders, in particular, can help foster meaningful policies that truly make a difference in employees’ day-to-day work experiences. The upshot: There has to be action behind intention,” according to Carly Pierpoint, Managing Director, JP Morgan. Pierpoint shared her own story of nearly leaving a job when she discovered she was pregnant, but the company’s maternity leave policy wouldn’t apply to her because she was new to her job. Rather than risk losing a valued employee, the company ultimately changed its policy — and not just for Pierpoint, but for everyone. “They took intention and made it into action for every woman there,” she said, adding: “Someone has to speak out.”

Leaders Need to Lead by Example

It’s not enough to create policies that look good on paper or sound good in principle — employees need to feel comfortable taking advantage of them. That starts with leadership. In a discussion titled “The C-Suite Panel — How can the C-Suite hold the business (and themselves) to account,” Dee Poku, CEO of The Wie Suite, shared an anecdote of one top-level exec who saw that the mothers in her company were making up excuses to leave early for childcare responsibilities and realized she needed to model the family-friendly policies that were being espoused. Leaders need to show that it’s okay to go to your child’s school event rather than making up an off-site meeting or just putting a nebulous time block on your calendar.

It’s Time to Talk About Benefits

Anyone who’s tried to navigate their company’s open enrollment period knows that truly understanding — and taking advantage of — a company’s benefits can be confusing and overwhelming. (Psst: That goes for HR folks, too!) In the panel “One Size Does Not Fit All: How to implement a personalized benefits program in a complex organization” Natalie Walker, a benefits leader for Stitch Fix, stressed the importance of demystifying benefits. “It’s so critical that we break this down and make it easy,” she shared. At Stitch Fix, the benefits are laid out in an on-brand way for the online styling service company; a magazine with different “personas” explains the different life-stage offerings of the company.

If your company doesn’t have such a neat, easy-to-understand offering, keep in mind what Brooke Bartholomay Quinn, Chief Customer Officer at global fertility care platform Carrot Fertility, told the attendees: “We have an obligation to use our privilege and voice to remove stigma from these conversations.”

There’s Never Too Much Talk About Menopause

Menopause is having a moment, and it’s about damn time. In the Summit’s closing session, a panel called Menopause Mandate Champions, we heard Pilar Guzman, Editorial Director of Oprah Daily and Flow advisor, moderate a no-holds-barred discussion on the topic with Naomi Watts, Karen Duffy, Menopause Mandate Co-Founder Mariella Frostrup, and Dr. Sharon Malone.

Watts shared her story of going into early menopause, at age 36 — the journey that led her to found Stripes, while Dr. Malone, the Chief Medical Advisor to Alloy Women’s Health and a Washington, D.C.-based OB-GYN, Certified Menopause Practitioner, and menopause advocate, clarified what women need to know about menopause hormone therapy.

“If you can’t find someone that will prescribe [MHT] for you…then you need to find another avenue for accessing it, because we’ve been denied for too long and a generation of women has really suffered as a result,” she told the audience. “We have incorporated the language of suffering into the lexicon: we suffer from cramps, we suffer from migraines. We suffer from depression and somehow there is this notion that that is just a woman’s lot in life… But that’s the mindset that we’ve got a change. The mentality of suffering, powering through something that is affecting the quality of life. That’s unacceptable.”

And while menopause is a serious topic that deserves all the attention we can give it, Duffy shared a take we don’t often hear — one of humor and joy. “When one of my friends goes through menopause, they get a trophy that says ‘Congratulations, you’re finished! Period!’” she said. “I think it’s important to celebrate it because you know if this happened to men there’d be a parade and we’d be hearing cheers.”