Mental Health Support for Women at Every Career Stage

When the return-to-office mandate landed at her bank, Supreet Singh, 39, didn’t fight it. After seven years of juggling full-time corporate communications work with caregiving for an ageing parent and two school-aged children, she resigned. The flexibility that had made her career possible disappeared overnight.

Her story isn’t unusual. Across Canadian workplaces, return-to-office mandates are colliding with caregiving demands, hormonal transitions, and shifting mental health needs. For many women, the supports that once held things together are proving more fragile than they realized.

The question for employers: do your benefits, flexibility, leadership skills, and culture support women across the full arc of their careers?

A Curve, Not a Line

Women’s mental health needs rarely follow a straight path. They tend to intensify at key transition points, each with direct implications for plan design.

• Fertility yearsoften overlap with early career-building. Anxiety, self-doubt, and the emotional weight of fertility challenges or pregnancy loss are usually treated as medical events, not psychological ones.
• Perimenopause and menopauseaffect sleep, mood, focus, and stress tolerance, often during peak leadership years. The Menopause Foundation of Canada calls it one of the least understood workplace health issues.
• Caregiving yearscan stretch decades, with women often supporting children and ageing parents at the same time.

These life stages do not stop at the office door. As Mandeep Lalli, registered psychotherapist and head of EAP solutions at Leena, puts it: “Employer support often assumes they do, and that disconnect matters.”

Where EAPs Help, and Where They Fall Short

EAPs are often the first stop for workplace mental health support. They work well for acute stress and short-term challenges. They struggle with layered, ongoing needs.

1. Most EAPs offer 4 to 6 sessions, with limited continuity of care
2. Racialized women face added barriers when culturally aligned providers are hard to find beyond EAP limits
3. The bigger issue is fragmentation. Employees end up coordinating their own care while already under strain

Edward Kuo, senior director of group benefits at Eckler Ltd., notes that coverage usually exists. The breakdown happens when the pieces don’t connect.

Caregiving: The Hidden Workload

Canadian caregivers provide an average of 4.5 hours of unpaid care per day, roughly 30 hours per week, according to the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence.

• 1 in 4caregivers rate their mental health as fair or poor
• 44%feel worried or anxious
• 37%feel overwhelmed
• 44%miss 8 to 9 workdays per year
• $1.3 billion: estimated annual productivity loss from caregiving

“Flexibility isn’t a perk,” says Christa Haanstra, working caregiver initiative lead at the CCCE. “It functions as a mental health intervention.”

The most effective approaches are no-explanation policies. Care days, compassionate hours, and flexible schedules that don’t require justification reduce stigma and let people get support before they hit burnout.

Designing Benefits for Real Lives

Leading employers are moving away from one-size-fits-all benefits and toward lifecycle support. The pattern looks like this:

• Integrated coverage: caregiving, menopause, mental health, and fertility supports designed to work together, not in silos
• Manager capability: leaders trained to spot strain and connect people to resources, without acting as clinicians
• Targeted programs: examples include Staples Canada’s employee resource groups for women’s leadership and caregiving, and BGO’s coaching program that bridges parental leave and return to work

At BGO, 86% of employees believe their manager cares about them as a person, and 89% feel accepted by colleagues. Genevieve Monteiro, director of talent development and inclusion, says the motherhood leadership program addresses what is often the real gap: “It was about confidence, visibility, and to a degree, change management.”

Key Takeaways

1. Women’s mental health needs are cumulative. They intensify through caregiving and menopause years.
2. Flexibility functions as a mental health intervention, especially for caregivers.
3. Benefits only work when leaders do. Manager capability decides whether supports are used or ignored.

What Plan Sponsors Can Do Next

• Audit your benefits plan against life stages, not just diagnoses
• Add no-explanation flexibility policies (care days, compassionate hours)
• Invest in manager training on caregiving, menopause, and mental health conversations
• Coordinate EAPs, paramedical coverage, and specialized programs so employees don’t have to navigate alone
• Consider targeted supports for parental leave transitions, menopause, fertility, and neurodivergence

Mental health isn’t an acute issue. It’s a lifecycle issue. Benefits, flexibility, and leadership need to evolve at the same pace as the women they are meant to support.

Source: Benefits Canada, “How employers can support women’s mental health across their working lives.”