Compensation and Benefits Strategy for Women

How to Create a Women-Inclusive Compensation & Benefits Strategy

Every time you need to hire a new employee or promote one internally, you have to consider their compensation and benefits package.

Compensation and benefits packages aren’t made out of thin air. They’re part of and include your salary structure. They also need to factor in hierarchy and job requirements.

When building a company’s compensation and benefits packages and strategy, it’s important that you also identify your different employees’ needs.

Today, women work in almost all industries. Their workloads affect them personally and professionally.

Most business owners don’t consider that women have lives outside of work. These lives can include aging parents, ill siblings, children, or personal mental health.

And while men may struggle with these same, many often forget that the load is doubled for women.

Here are a few more tips and steps to include in your compensation and benefits strategy that make your business inclusive and considerate of women and their needs:

1) Ask women about their problems 

The first step is to look at women’s needs in your market and industry. Some industries may require women to travel long distances or work longer hours.

The best way to do this is to ask your current employees about their problems – at or with work. What can you as a company do better that would improve their performance?

Sometimes it can be as simple as letting women work from home or offering a hybrid work environment.

2) Women-specific days off 

It’s no surprise nor is there any shame in admitting, women struggle every month due to their time-of-the-month.

You can give women 2 or 3 days each month. Make it more appealing by not subtracting it from their annual leaves.

It can be considered as additional sick days or it could be divided into 1 day from their annual leave and 1 extra sick day each month.

3)   Child care leave 

Child care leave is the 1 hour women get after they give birth and finish their maternity leave.

In Egypt, the labor law offers women a 1-hour early leave every day for 2 years. Alternatively, they can come in 1 hour late.

In other words, their working hours are reduced to 7 hours each day so they can care for their children.

As a company, you can provide an additional benefit by increasing the number of child care leave hours, providing women with discounts to daycare centers or something else.

4) Extend your medical insurance to cover pregnancy and birth

One of the biggest problems working parents struggle with is getting healthcare insurance to cover a portion of women’s pregnancy and birth costs.

The costs of tests for mother and baby and for a Cesarean section (C-Section) are quite expensive in hospitals all over the world. Helping parents, especially women, by covering some or all the costs of these tests and this procedure can go a long way into making your company more desirable to work for.

As you can see some of these benefits can be offered to men so they can support their wives and families.

Why do you need a compensation and benefits strategy that's inclusive for women?

By having a women inclusive compensation and benefits strategy you will ensure equal pay as women as women face a lot of pressure in their daily life, unlike men.

And by having a compensation and benefits strategy for women you will keep your female talents, attract new talents, increase morale and engagement and build employer branding.

For further reading about how to create a compensation and benefits strategy, check following article