Women @ Work 2025: Care, Health, and the Retention Crisis

Deloitte Global’s Women @ Work 2025 surveyed 7,500 women in 15 countries. It begins with a structural contradiction: women account for roughly half of the world’s working-age population but only 40% of total employment and 35.4% of management positions. Rather than explaining that gap as a shortage of ambition or a collection of private choices, the report connects workplace experience to health, domestic responsibility, access to care, and organizational culture. That connection matters to a feminist reading because a career never unfolds only inside an office; it depends on who has time, who performs social reproduction, and who can remain employed without sacrificing their body.

The health findings expose costs hidden by conventional ideas of professionalism. Only 51% of respondents described their mental health as good, and a quarter had taken time off in the previous year because of mental-health challenges. Most were uncomfortable disclosing those challenges at work and feared that managers would judge them negatively. Menstruation, menopause, and fertility-related conditions were also frequently endured without adequate leave or disclosure. Apparently neutral expectations around attendance, resilience, and consistency can therefore encode a worker with an unencumbered body and no care obligations as the norm.

Unpaid care is the report’s most structural concern. Women living with partners carried the greatest responsibility for cleaning, childcare, care for other adults, shopping, and household finances, including many who were their household’s primary earner. The lack of affordable care then converts a private burden into a collective loss: fewer than two in ten respondents with childcare responsibilities reported access to affordable care. Deloitte estimates that inadequate care access produces more than two million lost workdays each year across the surveyed countries, representing a potential economic opportunity of US$16.5 billion. The point is not to reduce care to productivity, but to show how employers depend on labor silently subsidized by households and women’s bodies.

Retention, safety, and accountability reinforce the same argument. Only 5% planned to remain with their current employer for more than five years; career development, work-life balance, flexible hours, and fair pay and benefits were central reasons to stay. At the same time, 34% had experienced non-inclusive behavior in the previous year, while only one in ten believed action would follow a report regardless of the perpetrator’s seniority. As a corporate cross-national survey, the report cannot substitute for deeper analysis of labor law, class, race, migration, or national context. It nevertheless makes a strong case that workplace equality requires redistributing care, recognizing embodied needs, building credible reporting systems, and treating flexibility as a right rather than a career penalty.