But it isn’t all men who feel this way. HeyFlow’s research conducted in collaboration with BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) surveyed male leaders from over 100 organisations. The results found that 56% wanted to play a more active role in supporting women in their business. The problem is that many are stuck in the starting blocks and don’t know where to begin.

The first barrier to male allyship is perhaps the hardest to overcome: a majority of male leaders feel like the systems in place are working and 64% of male leaders feel like they are doing ‘enough to support women in the workplace’.

Of those, a majority have male-dominated leadership teams, and a small percentage have some form of strategy in place to fix that imbalance.

We also found that almost exclusively, these organisations on some level hadn’t addressed one of the key hidden barriers to women’s progression, retention and career growth: female reproductive health.

Female reproductive health issues directly correlate with the persistent gender pay gap and a lack of women in senior positions. Remember earlier when we mentioned women between ages 30-39 having a particularly high gender pay gap spike? That’s because it’s linked to ‘The Motherhood Penalty’, and last year Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics for building its case.

For those that are unfamiliar, ‘The Motherhood Penalty’ is the phenomenon that working mothers encounter disadvantages in pay, perceived competence, and benefits relative to childless women and fathers. But there are also two further spikes in the gender pay gap - one around perimenopausal age, and another again at menopausal age where women feel unsupported by management, which leads to further attrition.

On top of all of that, in 2023, YouGov found that a quarter of menstruators regularly experience period pains that affect their ability to work. But if we consider HeyFlow’s growing pool of data, this unfortunately may be a conservative estimate as they only looked at pain rather than the roughly 150 menstrual symptoms that could affect an employee at work. When you consider those, this rises to roughly 3 in 4 menstruators.

You see the picture that we’re building. And the problem is a lot of leaders don’t know the picture is there, because they aren’t asking, and some aren’t listening.

Mostly because leaders think employees will speak up (when they won’t)

There is a general notion that because managers & leaders feel comfortable talking about reproductive health, they feel like their teams will feel comfortable raising issues. Unfortunately, that is unlikely.

If you take menstrual symptoms that have affected an employee’s work for example, in wider HeyFlow data only 16% have spoken about their challenges with their manager. The reasons are complex and varied but it’s often due to a feeling of needing to ‘get on with it’ and not wanting to use sick leave so that it can be used during times they are ill.

So how do we encourage people to talk? It’s easier to continue a conversation rather than start one, so creating an environment that has reproductive health as a specific focus rather than buried within other health policies is a great way to start.

For instance, in wider HeyFlow research, 57% of premenopausal people who don’t feel confident that they would speak about menopausal symptoms feel like a policy would make them feel confident to do so.

But a good policy is only a good starting point.

With HeyFlow we measure (and close) something we call the ‘policy-experience gap’, which is the difference between progressive policy and the experience that employees are receiving. Too often initiatives are put in place without further education on how they can be used both for employees themselves and how managers can implement them effectively.

And when it comes to reproductive health the stats speak for themselves. Our research shows:

• 10% of male managers feel confident supporting an employee through menstrual-related challenges
• 41% of male managers feel confident planning a return to work for an employee returning from maternity leave
• 23% of male managers feel confident supporting an employee with menopause-related challenges

It’s important to note that this isn’t a gender issue. Confidence levels around the above points among managers don’t increase by much, regardless of gender.

One thing is clear, it needs to be understood that women’s rights and female reproductive health aren’t women’s issues. Especially in male-dominated industries, if the labour of creating a gender-fair environment falls purely on women, then there are simply not enough people to create change if there aren’t a significant number of allies to push the needle in the right direction.

* Internal reproductive health is the more accurate and inclusive term, but for the sake of accessibility of language, we have used the term ‘female’ in this article. These issues are not exclusive to just women and not all women’s reproductive health is the same which is why we analyse based on lived experience rather than gender.