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17 Jun 2020
by Debi O'Donovan

REBA's Debi O'Donovan issues a rallying cry to close gender wellbeing gap

This week is Men’s Health Week, leading up to Father’s Day on Sunday 21 June. The aim is to heighten the awareness of preventable health problems and encourage early detection and treatment of disease among men and boys. In case you’re interested, National Women’s Health Week was 10-16 May 2020. Which passed me by this year, but I have noted it for the future. Both these weeks are a great idea – men and women are physiologically different so there are times that the focus needs to be different.

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But did you know we have a gender gap when it comes to focussing on men’s and women’s wellbeing in the workplace?

The REBA/AXA PPP healthcare Employee Wellbeing Research 2020(due to be published later in June) shows that just over half of respondents (53%) address men’s wellbeing, but less than half (42%) address women’s health.

Given that women’s wellbeing in the workplace appears to have had an enormous focus over the past year, you may think that the gap is likely to close rapidly over the next few years.

Sadly, REBA’s results do not indicate this. Certainly in 2020 more employers plan to launch women’s wellbeing initiatives (26%) for the first time compared to the proportion planning to launch men’s wellbeing initiatives (14%) for the first time. But over the next few years the focus swings back in favour of men with almost a quarter of employers (23%) planning to launch men’s wellbeing initiatives for the first time from 2021 onwards, compared to a fifth of employers (19%) doing inaugural launches for women’s wellbeing from 2021.

If this all goes to plan – and from years of experience of running research, I can tell you that the trends are indicative but initiatives always take longer than employers state surveys – in the few years’ time 90% of employers should have men-focussed wellbeing initiatives in place, versus 87% having women-focused wellbeing initiatives.

My rallying cries would be these two things:

  • Keep going with your plans for men’s health and wellbeing. If we can get to nine out of ten employers offering initiatives, services and strategies to improve men’s wellbeing that would be brilliant (not as brilliant as 100%, but let’s be realistic).
  • Focus even harder on women’s wellbeing and health, shout louder about it and show the positive impact it has on workforce talent, productivity and engagement. We also want to get to nine out of ten employers offering initiatives, services and strategies to improve women’s wellbeing

I sometimes hear people say, “we now have too much focus on women’s wellbeing, what about men’s wellbeing?”. 

The stats above speak for themselves. The group left behind does needs to shout louder simply to bring themselves in line with the leaders. It is not an Us versus Them, but rather vital need to address wellbeing at work for all so we all benefit. And currently one group is still experiencing a wellbeing gap.

The author is Debi O'Donovan, director and co-founder at REBA.