Flexible Work

The Opportunity

Flexibility is one of the highest-return, lowest-cost levers available to employers. Organizations that build genuine flexibility into how work is structured, not just where it happens, retain caregivers, reduce absenteeism, and compete more effectively for experienced talent. This pillar is not about remote work. It is about whether the structure of work fits the reality of people's lives.

The Business Case

Hybrid working improves retention without damaging performance, according to a 2024 study published in Nature.⁵ Forty-seven percent of workers report staying in a job specifically because of a flexible work arrangement.⁶ Flexible scheduling is the second-highest driver of attracting top talent according to Bank of America's 2025 Workplace Benefits Report.⁷

In 2025, roughly half a million women exited the U.S. workforce. Forty-two percent cited caregiving responsibilities as the primary reason. Thirty-seven percent said their employer did not offer flexible scheduling.³ These are not women who chose to leave. These are women whose work structure made staying impossible.

What the Research Shows

Six in ten employees are caregivers.⁴

Caregiving is not a niche circumstance. It is the dominant reality of the workforce. Women are significantly more likely than men to be the primary caregiver for both children and aging adults.¹ Among parents with children under 13, 36 percent of women are not working for pay compared to 17 percent of men.² The gap is not explained by preference. It is explained by a work structure that was designed around someone who has someone else managing their home.

Caregiving is one reason women need flexibility. It is not the only one. A Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll conducted in October 2024 found that more than half of all U.S. employees, 58 percent, report having a chronic physical health condition.⁹ More than one third of employees with chronic conditions, 36 percent, say they have skipped medical appointments or delayed getting care in the past year to avoid interfering with work.⁹ Women are disproportionately affected by chronic conditions including autoimmune disorders, endometriosis, PCOS, and Long COVID, all of which involve unpredictable symptoms that do not fit a rigid schedule. Workers who received workplace accommodations for health conditions were 18.5 percent more likely to remain employed four years later compared to those who were not accommodated.¹⁰ Flexibility is not just a caregiving benefit. It is a chronic illness accommodation that most employers have not yet named as such.

The same logic applies to medical appointments. Women's preventive care, hormonal health, mental health treatment, and specialist visits for conditions that are underdiagnosed and undertreated require time away from work at frequencies that do not fit neatly into a single annual sick day. A flexible work structure that treats medical appointments as a routine and unremarkable use of flexibility, rather than a disruption to be managed, signals something important about how an organization views its employees' health.

Women without caregiving responsibilities need flexibility too, and flexibility policies that implicitly treat only parents as legitimate users create their own inequity. In 2024, 85 percent of women ages 20 to 24 did not have children, and 63 percent of women ages 25 to 29 were childless.¹¹ Research on childfree and childless employees shows that many report unfair treatment, heavier workloads, and the assumption that their time is more available than that of colleagues with families.¹² A flexibility standard that is genuinely universal, not implicitly reserved for parents, is both more equitable and more defensible. Flexibility should not require a child to justify it.

Flexibility that exists on paper but cannot be used without damaging a career is not flexibility. The Institute for Women's Policy Research found no evidence that flexible or remote work reduces productivity, and substantial evidence of positive impacts on wellbeing and retention.⁸

What Good Looks Like

Good represents accessible baseline practices. Better reflects more intentional investment. Best describes what the most forward-thinking companies are doing right now.

Questions Worth Asking

• Can an employee leave for a school emergency without it becoming a performance conversation?
• Do our managers model flexibility themselves or quietly signal that using it is a risk?
• Are flexible arrangements available to employees at all levels or primarily to senior staff?
• Do we have any mandatory meeting windows that make caregiving structurally difficult?
• Has anyone reviewed whether our flexibility policies are actually being used, and by whom?
• Can an employee attend a medical appointment, including a mental health appointment or specialist visit, without using a personal day or explaining the nature of the appointment?
• If an employee has a chronic health condition that affects their schedule unpredictably, do they know how to access flexibility without going through a formal disability accommodation process?
• Are employees without caregiving responsibilities being assigned heavier workloads under the assumption that their time is more available?