In this episode of Friends with Benefits, Deirdre O'Neil, co-founder and Chief Commercial and Legal Officer at Hertility, argues that most companies have the fertility benefit backwards.

They'll pay for the expensive, difficult treatment, but not the cheap screening that could have prevented someone needing it in the first place.

Deirdre joins Carl and David to unpack why women's health still gets treated as a niche benefit category, despite covering half the workforce and, by extension, most of their families too.

Private medical insurance was built around a male physiology and a model of treating acute injury, which means most of women's health gets excluded as ”chronic” or ”pre-existing” before it's even considered.

They also get into:

• Why funding IVF without funding fertility screening is like paying for chemotherapy but refusing to pay for a cancer screen
• The reproductive impact calculator Hertility built to turn empathy into a cost-of-inaction business case
• Why absenteeism and turnover numbers are too soft for some CFOs, and what metric actually lands instead
• The real story behind a routine fertility test that caught a 13cm ovarian cyst in an asymptomatic 28-year-old
• Why the men in the room often say they learned the most from a women's health education session
• Deirdre's hot take: prevention is cheaper than treatment, and most benefits strategy is still built the other way round

Friends with Benefits is the podcast for senior Reward and Benefits leaders. Hosted by Carl, VP of Benefit Strategy and Partnerships at Ben, and David, Co-Founder and COO at Ben.