Why You Should Let Financially Savvy Female Employees Guide Your Company’s Benefits

Perks on the job are usually a nice bonus to have, and can actually help boost performance, as a recent report on offering frontline workers food and work-sponsored outings shows. Other perks hit the headlines for different, sometimes quirky reasons, like the current trend for of Silicon Valley startups letting people go shoeless in the office. Now a new report focuses on how some benefits have a more direct appeal to working women. Its findings could make a difference at your company.

The most significant finding in the new data shows that women with a high degree of financial literacy are the least satisfied with their company’s benefits programs.

The data, from Oregon-based insurance and investments provider The Standard, show that three-quarters of women who identify themselves as highly financially aware said employers really need to consider benefits more carefully, including offering caregiving benefits, according to HRDive. More than half of the survey respondents said they should also have different benefits from other members of their household so that their overall needs are met. We can interpret this as meaning that one partner’s job has benefits like flexible hours that line up with the school run, while the other partner’s work offers perks that, for example, offers an end-of-year bonus that will help during the holiday season.

The report also notes that as women’s wages rise, their confidence in their own financial acumen rises, and this confidence leads to dissatisfaction with company benefits. Higher wages also correlate with “women feeling more limited in their choices for family and career,” the report says. Data, for example, show that for women earning over $200,000, 35 percent admitted to wanting more children but felt they couldn’t afford to expand their families, compared to just 29 percent of women earning under $50,000. Meanwhile, 42 percent of women in the top pay bracket said they’d like to shift their careers, compared to 35 percent of lower-paid women, suggesting that the top earners definitely feel more stuck. 

Anecdotally, this makes sense: higher wages can be perceived as “golden handcuffs,” and taking time off to have children may impact working women’s household earnings (especially if an employer doesn’t offer family-centric perks). 

The data also show that women report less confidence in understanding benefits and matters like insurance. That’s important, because two-thirds of women are the primary providers of household-related benefits, and this figure is 72 percent for women making less than $50,000 — the group that also reports the lowest level of financial confidence.

The report quotes The Standard’s senior vice president for External Affairs, Marketing and Communications, Justin Delany, who outlined why the data is important for companies considering tweaks to their staff benefits packages. “To be most effective at retaining and engaging employees, workplace benefits need to meet the unique needs of different employee populations,” Delaney said, adding that the data show “employers have a significant gap — and opportunity — in meeting the needs of women employees with tailored employee benefits and financial education.”

The report also points out that tailoring benefits packages for women, as well as benefits education programs to help them better understand what’s on offer, could help people choose their best options. Offering flexible benefits packages, tailored to women workers’ needs, could be key to recruiting and then retaining female staff.

In March this year, for example, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser landed her company’s benefits system in the spotlight because, unusually among Wall Street firms, she decided to make a concerted effort to support working mothers. While many other industry giants are pushing for strict return-to-office rules, citing vague team-building notions to explain the mandates, Fraser told her staff they’re sticking to the hybrid working model that evolved during the pandemic, allowing most workers to be remote at least two days a week. As well as being what she thinks is truly a “new way of working,” the policy is also extremely family-friendly, and may specifically appeal to working mothers who (as The Standard’s data underlines) typically have more family duties than male workers. 

What can you take away from this for your company?

First, if your company offers flexible benefits packages, then you may want to offer, repeat or maybe even rejig an in-house educationaa program explaining the benefits to your staff, particularly since The Standard’s data show women have less confidence in their understanding of these topics.

Secondly, you have an opportunity to carefully tailor your benefits packages to appeal to female staff — particularly your higher-paid workers. Offering suitable benefits could act as a competitive advantage in the job market, and you could attract talented workers who’d perhaps balk at rival firms’ less-promising benefits packages. It may even help you retain your most valuable female workers for the long term.