Women’s health and wellbeing in the workplace
Investing in women’s health not only benefits employees and surrounding communities, but can also have a positive social and economic effect on the private sector. ―Women’s Empowerment Principle
👥 Serves: No limit of people
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: Ongoing
🥣 Ingredients: Intersectionality, Partnerships, Commitment
💪 Nutritional values: Inclusion, Integration, Transformation, Empowerment, Structural change
Women’s health and wellbeing in the workplace
📝 Description
A set of principles to advance women’s health and wellbeing in the workplace.
Principle 3 of the Women’s Empowerment Principles encourages companies to ensure the health, including sexual and reproductive health, of all workers.
Good health of women and children has a universally acknowledged intrinsic value and is a basic human right. Healthy women and children also contribute to economic growth. For every dollar spent on key interventions for reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health, about USD20 in benefits could be generated.
Companies have the potential to improve the health of employees while benefiting both financially and socially. In ensuring that workers have safe working conditions and available health services, companies establish healthier staff, better relationships, and in many cases higher Return-On-Investment (ROI). Workers that utilise available health services are usually healthier and therefore able to be more productive. If workers lose less time on account of sickness, companies have the potential to gain more time in productivity.
By improving the health of employees, the private sector also has the ability to influence their reputation when it comes to the right to health. Investing in women’s health not only shows a commitment to the women within an organisation, but also to the women in communities affected by company operations who often serve as the consumer base. Additionally, by working on providing appropriate and adequate healthcare, companies can potentially cut their current, ineffective healthcare costs.
Finally, in addition to ensuring that corporate policies and practices respect women’s health, businesses can take action and contribute to the health of women workers and other stakeholders through core business operations, strategic social investments, innovative products and services, advocacy and public policy engagements, or partnerships and collective action.
How can businesses advance women’s health and wellbeing?
Strategies may differ depending on a company’s sector, region, size, number of employees, etc. However, some starting points are included in this recipe.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Aligning to the women’s human rights
Align human resources policies with principles of women’s human rights. Companies should have at all times respect and promote human rights, including reproductive rights.
Step 2 – Securing support and commitment
Secure support and a public commitment from the organisation’s leadership as well as encourage other businesses to do the same. Businesses can also support public policy dialogues while lending their brand and voice to advocacy efforts addressing women’s health.
Step 3 – Tracking existing initiatives
Track the effectiveness of existing health and safety policies and programmes by incorporating sex disaggregated data. Expand the reach of workplace programmes (e.g. trainings, seminars, emails, counselling) beyond employees to surrounding communities, to raise awareness about health issues and available services (including reproductive health, family planning, nutrition, hygiene).
Step 4 – Providing services
Provide on-site vaccinations, STI testing, and health screening programmes.
Step 5 – Developing family-friendly accommodations
Develop appropriate, family-friendly accommodations for workers before, during, and after maternity leave that allow women to remain in the workplace after having children, e.g. providing maternity leave, on-site lactation and nap rooms, on-site fitness centres, on-site or subsidised child-care, flexible working arrangements, home office, etc. Include family planning in medical coverage offered to employees.
Step 6 – Providing local information
Provide employees with a list of local trusted healthcare professionals that offer quality reproductive, sexual, maternal, newborn, and child health services. Providing such information can help ensure access to quality medicines and protect workers from contaminated and counterfeit medications or substandard health services.
Step 7 – Building partnerships
Partner with healthcare NGOs and public clinics to raise awareness and increase access to targeted health services to women workers. A healthy partnership might have multiple industries and sectors involved with a variety of activities, still using shared metrics, working towards a common agenda with continued communication.