What Nearly 85% of HR Leaders Identified as the Greatest Risk to Retaining Women at Work

When asked to prioritize among five common retention risks, respondents overwhelmingly selected two closely connected pressures. The results point to one thing employers must get right: Treat care as a workforce issue.

Many factors can influence whether women remain in the workforce, from pay equity and women’s health support to how employees are treated when they return from leave.

But when attendees at a recent Cariloop webinar were asked to choose the single greatest retention risk, the results weren’t close. Nearly 85% selected caregiving or burnout and mental load. 

Together, those responses point to one thing employers must get right: Treat care as a workforce issue.

In the poll, caregiving and mental load were separate answers, but in daily life they’re often related. Caregiving is finding childcare, taking a parent to an appointment, or staying home when care falls through. The mental load is everything that goes on behind those tasks: researching options, juggling schedules, anticipating what could go wrong, and keeping track of what comes next.

The poll finding is bigger than “caregiving ranked first.” Employers can’t meaningfully address women’s retention without recognizing how caregiving responsibilities affect the work they’re asking women to do.

Why caregiving becomes a retention risk

Caregiving has its own schedule: Dad’s doctor calls in the middle of a meeting, daycare falls through on a Tuesday, a work trip conflicts with an appointment no one else can cover. When the disruptions keep coming, cutting back hours or turning down the next opportunity can start to feel like the only way to make life work.

Lisa Leighton, Chief Commercial Officer at Cariloop, described three challenges that follow working caregivers across nearly every care journey: finding care, affording care, and navigating its complexity.

She said for women, who make up three in five family caregivers, those challenges are often heavier because more of the mental load and invisible labor of keeping a family running still falls to them. “While men and women leave the workforce at similar rates because of caregiving, the day-to-day burden is not shared equally,” Leighton said.

Leighton pointed to research showing that, for the first time, women are less likely than men to want a promotion. Her interpretation: “It’s not about women stepping back. It’s about the systems around them falling short.”

Strong workforce numbers can hide where women are leaving

The labor-market story looks reassuring at first. Matthew Nestler, PhD, a senior economist at KPMG whose research focuses on the care economy, told webinar attendees that workforce participation among women ages 25 to 54 had recently reached an all-time high.

However, he identified two groups employers should be watching:

• Mothers of young children. He described the previous two and a half years as a “historically bad labor market” for this group, with more women leaving the labor force altogether.
• Women ages 55 to 64. Participation is also down among women in an age range when elder-care responsibilities often increase, sometimes alongside care for children or grandchildren.

When women in these groups leave, employers lose experienced managers and directors, along with institutional knowledge and team continuity that are hard to replace. Women lose income and career opportunities, and may return to a labor market where available jobs no longer match their skills and experience.

Nestler called the effect of demographic change on employers a “when,” not an “if,” adding that it is coming “much sooner than I think many leaders may appreciate.”

Care is already affecting workforce performance

Caregiving appears in workforce data under many names: lost work hours, unplanned absences, distraction, reduced workloads, declined opportunities, burnout, or turnover attributed to personal reasons. When those signals live in different places, employers may never see care as the common thread.

Employees may not identify themselves as caregivers, either. “A lot of people, women in particular, might not want to disclose that they are caregivers out of fear of discrimination, or that they’re not ambitious,” Nestler said.

That leaves employers building workforce policies with an incomplete picture and employees wondering whether it’s safe to ask for help. “You have to understand what your employees’ caregiving responsibilities are,” Nestler said. “It can’t be a black box.”

Anonymous surveys, employee feedback, and workforce data can help employers see where caregiving is getting in the way of work, without asking employees to share private details.

Nestler offered a useful place to start. Ask: “Do you know how many work hours right now are lost due to your employees’ caregiving responsibilities today?” Not knowing doesn’t mean the hours aren’t being lost.

Treat care as workforce infrastructure, not a perk

Care affects much more than the occasional difficult day. It’s an ongoing responsibility that can’t be solved with a day off or a list of resources. 

“Treat caregiving and treat women’s needs as infrastructure,” Leighton said. “It’s not a perk. If care falls apart, work falls apart.”

Sarah Moore, Vice President of Consulting Relations at Progyny, made a similar point during the webinar, calling caregiving a “foundational element,” not a “niche benefit” or “niche topic.”

Across the discussion, the panelists pointed to three ways employers can begin treating care as a workforce issue:

• Start with the employee experience. Moore urged employers to consider whether people understand their benefits, know where to go for support, and have flexibility when care gets complicated.
• Connect help to moments that matter. Leighton recommended tying relevant benefits to major life events, including starting a job, taking leave, and returning to work.
• Make getting help easier. A caregiver with too much to do does not need another disconnected list of resources. Moore encouraged employers to connect benefits across the employee experience.

Benefits only work when employees can use them. As Nestler put it, “There’s a difference between a policy or benefit on paper versus actually being able to use it in practice.”

Cariloop helps close that gap. Employees have one place to bring caregiving needs across life stages, with personalized guidance from professional Coaches and tools to help families organize and manage care. Employers can turn the recognition that care is a workforce issue into support people can use before they reach the point of stepping back or leaving.

Women’s retention won’t be solved at the exit interview

By the time a woman says care has made her job unsustainable, an employer has missed many earlier opportunities to help. The opportunity comes while she is looking for childcare, coordinating appointments between meetings, helping a parent remain safely at home, returning from leave, or deciding whether her family can absorb the demands of a bigger role.

The Cariloop webinar poll shows that HR leaders already see caregiving and mental load as serious retention risks. The next step is to stop treating them as pressures employees should manage quietly on their own. Employers that plan for it can protect work hours, retain valuable experience, and give more women the support they need to stay, grow, and lead.

Watch The Rising Exit of Women from the Workforce: What Employers Can Do Now on demand.