Written by Jennifer Elworthy, Career & Fertility Coach and Director of Engagement at Fertility Matters at Work
1 in 6 people globally are affected by infertility. Not 1 in 6 women, 1 in 6 people. Men represent 50% of all infertility cases, solo parenting has more than tripled in a decade, and 77% of LGBTQ+ people aged 18–35 are either parents or considering parenthood. These are not edge cases. These are your colleagues.
And yet many workplace fertility policies were written with heterosexual, cis female employees in mind, which means a significant proportion of the people who need support are quietly concluding it isn’t for them. Men taking annual leave for clinic appointments because no policy covers them, non-gestational partners managing the whole thing in silence, LGBTQ+ employees navigating surrogacy, donor conception or adoption with no expectation of recognition because nothing in the organisation has ever suggested they should expect it. We hear the same thing from men and non-carrying partners over and over: their colleagues ask how their partner is. Nobody asks how they are.
The gaps in most organisations aren’t intentional, but they do come at a cost. When fertility support lives solely in the Women’s ERG budget, it signals loudly and unintentionally that this is a women’s issue, which means men don’t raise their hand, LGBTQ+ employees wonder where they fit, and partners quietly absorb the message that silence is safer. We’ve worked with organisations who were initially reluctant to include men in fertility awareness sessions and while that’s understandable in some ways, excluding men limits the support both for them and the women in the business. The ones who did it anyway told us the impact was greater, for everyone, including the women.
The language in your policy matters more than you’d think. Does it refer to “women undergoing fertility treatment” or “employees undergoing fertility treatment”? Read yours now and be honest about what it covers and what it doesn’t, because that single word tells everyone who reads it whether this is for them.
Making the case for change means bringing three things together: the statistics, the stories, and the right supporters. The numbers help too. £217 million to UK businesses in annual costs, 38% of employees who’ve left or considered leaving because of poor support, 86% who’d be attracted to a role at an organisation that provided it. But numbers alone don’t move people, and real stories do. The right exec sponsor, particularly a male one, shifts something too, because when a senior man says “this matters to me too”, it reframes the whole conversation about whose issue this actually is. When one of those three elements is missing, the business case is harder to sell in and the culture change rarely sticks.
Fertility is still a women’s issue. It’s also so much more than that. It’s a people issue. And until organisations build their support around that reality, not the assumption, a significant proportion of their workforce will keep concluding that the help on offer simply isn’t for them.