Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Gallup and Pivotal find 42 percent of women reporting health damage to their careers
A new Gallup and Pivotal survey measures how women's healthcare experiences carry into work, family and civic life. The work figure is the one benefits teams will reach for, though the survey put its questions to women only.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- A Gallup and Pivotal survey found 51 percent of US women reporting a negative healthcare experience in the past five years, against 39 percent of men.
- About one in three women said a doctor did not take them seriously when they reported pain or other symptoms, compared with 21 percent of men.
- Forty-two percent of women said their health had led to a negative effect on their career or work.
- Twenty-eight percent of women said menopause had affected how much effort they could give at work, and 22 percent said it had left them less involved in their community.
- Thirty-two percent of women said they had skipped or delayed care in the past year because of cost, against 25 percent of men.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Because the questions went to women and not to employers, no one can convert the work findings into a cost per head or a retention delta from this data alone.
- decision Cost is the one barrier on this list an employer prices directly, so a benefits team can test deferral against its own cost-sharing tiers without waiting for national follow-up work.
- exposure The career effect concentrates by income, with lower-paid women more likely to report health-driven career struggles, so a company-wide average understates it in exactly the bands where turnover is cheapest to ignore.
- precedent A published figure attaching lost work effort to menopause gives employees a number to cite in accommodation requests and gives benefits vendors one to cite at renewal.
The comparison with men is what carries the workforce reading. Twelve points separate women and men on having had a negative healthcare experience in the past five years, and about twelve again on having a doctor dismiss reported pain or other symptoms [1][2]. On skipping or delaying care because of cost the gap is 7 points [3]. A third of women also said they were either misdiagnosed or never received a diagnosis [4].
The effects run past the workplace. Fifty-four percent of women reported at least one health-related impact on family life or relationships, and 32 percent said health had limited their ability to take part in civic life [8][10]. Black and Hispanic women were more likely to report being in poor or fair health [18]. Vox did not publish the sample size or the field dates, and the findings it reports are not broken out by insurance status [4].
Melinda French Gates, who founded Pivotal, told Vox in an email: "To see that half of women in the United States who sought care in the last five years came out feeling like they hadn't gotten the help or care they needed, that's frankly staggering" [1][6]. She added: "It says a lot about how little we've invested in women's health and how much we expect them to just push through pain or accept uncertainty" [7].
Asked which finding surprised her most, French Gates pointed to pregnancy. Fifty-four percent of women said they had experienced a mental health challenge during or after pregnancy, a figure she said "should stop us all in our tracks" [12]. She also said "the fact that less than one in three women who sought care found it helpful is really concerning" [13]. Across the survey, 48 percent of women said they had dealt with a mental health condition such as depression or anxiety [11].
The survey also documents how much of the information work falls to women themselves. Thirty-seven percent of women who have been through menopause said they first learned about it when their own symptoms started [17]. Fifty-six percent said they have to do their own research to make an informed decision about contraception, and 64 percent said that research turned up misleading or inaccurate information on social media [15][16]. "Too much of the burden is placed on women to get answers," French Gates said [20].
A survey of women's self-reported experience cannot tell any one employer whether its own plan is part of the problem. Gallup asked women about their own experience; it did not ask employers, and it did not measure attrition [5]. What it supplies is the shape of a question a benefits team can put to its own population, and there are two places to look: cost-driven deferral, which sits in claims data, and symptom management, which sits in exit interviews if anyone asked.
In my view the honest use of these numbers this quarter is diagnostic. A company can run Gallup's questions on its own population before anyone builds a business case on a national average.
What to watch
- Whether Gallup and Pivotal publish full methodology, including sample size, field dates, and breakdowns by insurance and employment status.
- Any employer that publishes claims or attrition data tied to menopause or maternal mental health coverage, which would attach a cost per head to the work findings.
- Whether Pivotal funds follow-on research that tracks the same women over time instead of a single cross-section.