There are two reasons an employer ends up on this page. Both are the right reason.

Legal exposure and compliance. Something has surfaced — a state law, an executive order, a question from your board — and you need to know where you actually stand.

Engagement and retention. Nothing has surfaced. You just already believe your most experienced women deserve better than what they’re getting, and you’re aware there’s a gap between what you say you value and what they’re living.

Whichever door you came through, the gap underneath is the same one.

The women in your organization who are struggling aren’t going to tell you.

They’ve already done the math on what visibility costs them professionally. So they manage it quietly, perform as well as they can, and start looking at their options.

You won’t see a complaint coming. You’ll notice your best people are leaving.

And you already knew that.

That’s the part I’d guess is actually frustrating. You’ve probably had some version of this thought already. It landed on a list with forty other things that matter, and it’s been sliding down that list ever since — not because you don’t care, but because nothing forced it up.

I know what it feels like to have one more thing land on your plate that you know matters and can’t get to.

Nothing about this arrives as a crisis.

There’s no incident, no filing, no date on a calendar. Which is exactly why it stays at the bottom of the list — until the third resignation in eighteen months, and someone finally asks out loud whether they were connected.

By then you’re not solving a workforce problem. You’re replacing people who knew things nobody wrote down.

What you actually want isn’t a better accommodation process.

If you’ve started looking into this, you’ve probably been pointed toward policy first. Write the accommodation language, train the managers, document the requests, keep the file clean.

You will need some of that. But look closely at what it means when that system is working perfectly: a woman is unwell enough at work that she has to file paperwork about it, and your process handles the paperwork well.

That isn’t the outcome you want. The outcome you want is that she never got that unwell at work in the first place — that she got care early, kept doing the work she’s brilliant at, and never had to have the conversation at all.

That’s upstream of where most of this gets solved, and it’s where everything I build is aimed. Fewer symptomatic employees means fewer accommodation requests, less manager burden, less exposure, and the people who know the most staying in the building.

You also end up with a documented record that your organization moved proactively — before any complaint, before any law required it. That record is the difference between an organization that was blindsided and one that was prepared.

Staci West
Owner