What Deloitte and Zoom’s Recent Benefits Cuts Tell Women About Their Worth

Jul 7

Episode 550 | Author: Emilie Aries

Recent benefits rollbacks show the sneaky new ways some companies are sidelining women in their workforces.

An alarming pair of announcements dropped recently from two influential companies: Deloitte and Zoom shared significant changes to their employee benefits packages which amount to telling certain employees that they matter less than others.

Deloitte will be cutting benefits for employees in its “Center” model, which includes internal support staff such as IT, finance, admin, HR, and marketing. Benefits for client-serving roles will not change, but these “support” roles face the following rollbacks:

a reduction in paid family and medical leave from 16 to 8 weeks;
a 1 to 2-week reduction in annual paid time off;
elimination of the up to $50,000 family support stipend that currently covers initiatives like in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, and adoption.

Zoom is reducing paid leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents by as much as 38%. Let’s break down what all of this means for the future of women at work.

A dangerous precedent

Google’s former head of HR, Laszlo Bock, recently said in an interview that when big companies do things like this, it “legitimizes that action for everyone else.” We certainly saw this for initiatives like DEI cuts and return-to-office mandates: a few big companies got the ball rolling, and everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. If precedent holds, we’re poised to see massive cross-industry benefits rollbacks across in the coming months and years.

Gender scrubbing: these roles are mostly held by women

While benefits cuts are a big issue for any worker, especially in the only developed country without federally mandated paid parental leave, there’s a gendered slant to Deloitte’s cuts that highlights what leadership expert Susan Colantuono dubbed “gender scrubbing: using neutral language to hide a gender-averse impact.”

When you look at the stats, it’s crystal clear who holds the majority of the “support jobs” at Deloitte: women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 73% of HR managers and 86% of HR generalists in the U.S., as well as 70% of office and administrative workers, are women.

When the benefits cut are the ones that determine whether someone can start a family or care for a sick child without losing their job, and when those benefits are cut only in the sectors dominated by women, the language in the company announcement starts to look deliberately evasive. As one commenter wrote in response to Susan’s viral post, by using neutral language and erasing the word “women,” they also erase their accountability.

Two-tier benefit structures

In general, this tiered benefit design, where some workers in a company receive different benefits than others, isn’t new. Distinctions between full-time and part-time benefits are understandable: they are based on an objective measure of hours worked. And differences between exempt and non-exempt workers exist because of federal labor laws.

While there are problems with these versions of the two-tier structure as well, Deloitte’s recent change is undeniably more subjective, and it also feels sneakier. The cut is based not on your total hours, your tenure, or your performance; it’s strictly based on perceived value and a worker’s proximity to the generation of client revenue (ignoring the essential nature of behind-the-scenes work to the signing and retention of every client).

As Helen Sanderson, an expert in psychological safety, puts it, benefits aren't just compensation. They're one of the most visible ways an organization tells employees whether it sees them as whole people or as line items to be optimized. It’s a clear statement about whose humanity an organization considers worth investing in, and no amount of future PR claiming these firms value all their employees is going to undo this statement.

What we can do

This situation is fast becoming a pink collar benefits tax: the women disproportionately impacted by such changes will wind up paying more in lost benefits and security. Ultimately, in addition to the numerous other ways our country’s caregiving infrastructure is failing this demographic, these cuts make women all the more likely to be squeezed out of the workforce altogether.

Here are four impactful steps you can take to begin loudly naming these biased policy changes and do your part to address this glaring inequality.

Keep an eye on changes your company makes to benefits coverage. If they announce adjustments, go deeper than just reviewing the summary. If the fine print indicates changes that fall disproportionately on women, call it out.
Always know your market value and what your options are. This matters even if you’re not currently looking for a new job. When companies make blanket changes that impact a specific group, they often presume it’s safe to do because that group has nowhere else to go. Do what you can to make sure that’s not you.
Advocate for the benefits that matter. This year, KinderCare found that 85% of employees see childcare benefits as on par with healthcare and retirement benefits in terms of importance. In other words, this isn’t a luxury or a fortuitous add-on. It’s essential. Make sure your leadership understands this.

You can even frame it as a business case. Reviews of case studies show that when companies like Google and Accenture extended paid leave, resignation rates of young mothers decreased by up to 50%.
Last but never least, keep the bigger picture in mind. In whatever ways you can (and there are lots of ideas on the Bossed Up Take Action page), push for changes like paid leave policies at the local, state, and federal levels. Workers shouldn’t have to depend on the individual generosity of their company for these kinds of protections.

Notably, Deloitte has an in-house initiative called EmPowerful Women. According to the website, the initiative is dedicated to “supporting equal access to professional opportunities for women.” This is the same company that publishes the annual Women at Work report. They also partner with Catalyst, an organization that “accelerate[s] performance and progress through workplace inclusion—for women and everyone.”

Clearly the gap between what companies say about their support of women in the workforce and what they actually practice is widening. We must name it, and loudly, or it will keep getting worse.

What’s happening in your organization? If your company has been doing great things for workplace inequality, I want to hear about it! And if they seem to be following in Deloitte’s footsteps, we need to talk about that, too. The Courage Community on Facebook and our group on LinkedIn are excellent places to raise your voice and commune with like-minded women pushing back against inequity.

Related Links From Today’s Episode:

It’s past time to TAKE ACTION.
Find out how you can advocate for change.

[CONFIDENT RHYTHMIC DRIVING THEME MUSIC WITH DRUMS STARTS]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 550. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to talk about what two major companies, Deloitte and Zoom, have done in recent months to make significant changes to employee benefits.
[MUSIC FADES AND ENDS]
While there's been some media coverage of this already, I really don't feel like the press has come close to capturing just how alarming this change is, especially the precedent it sets for women and the roles that women tend to dominate. Because what's happening at Zoom and Deloitte isn't just about companies trimming a perk. This is about a new precedent being set. One where certain employees are told that they matter more than others. And the employees who are being told they matter less, well, they're disproportionately women.
So let's break down the facts. Starting in January of next year, Deloitte is cutting benefits for employees based in its center model, which tends to be internal support staff. We're talking about departments like IT, Finance, Administration, HR and Marketing. These employees will see their paid family and medical leave slashed from sixteen weeks to eight, so, so cut in half. Their annual PTO will drop by one to two weeks, and they'll lose access to a $50,000 stipend that currently supports family building efforts like IVF, surrogacy and adoption. Meanwhile, employees who are in client facing or client serving roles, their benefits will stay exactly the same.
Now, the company Zoom made a similar move recently. Birthing parents will now get 18 weeks of paid leave instead of 22 or 24. And non birthing parents see their benefits drop from 16 weeks to 10. Google's former head of HR, Laszlo Bach, was recently quoted as saying that when companies of this size and profile make such a move, it quote, “legitimizes that action for everybody else”. And that's what scares me the most here. It's not the end. This is just the beginning of a massive benefits rollback.
Now, here's what the media coverage is totally missing when you look at who actually occupies those Deloitte center based roles, the ones who are getting their benefits cut. Those are HR, Marketing, Administration and Finance support type roles. With the exception of it, which has historically been male dominated, these are all pink collar jobs, a term coined in the 1970s to describe roles disproportionately filled by women. Data shows that these are massively dominated by women.
According to the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 73% of HR managers in the US are women. And among HR generalists, the people actually administer your benefits and process your leave and handle your employee onboarding, that number actually jumps up to 86% women, according to a study from PayScale. In office and administrative support roles more broadly have almost always been filled by women. Women currently make up 70% of those roles. So those numbers aren't really close calls. Those are roles overwhelmingly dominated by women. And as we've discussed on this very podcast, those are the exact same pink collar jobs that are more and more exposed to AI automation. And now we're seeing those same roles become vulnerable to benefit rollbacks too.
Now, the benefits they're losing aren't just gym memberships or free lunches like these are major life altering benefits. Parental leave, IVF funding, PTO. These are life stage benefits, the ones that determine whether you can start a family, or recover from childbirth, or care for a sick child without losing your job. So when a company cuts parental leave and fertility support for roles that women are much more likely to occupy, that's a gendered impact, regardless of whether the policy talks about gender or not.
Susan Colantuano, who's a leadership expert, recently coined a term for exactly this kind of a corporate double speak. She talks about it in a piece that she published in April on her substack newsletter, Be Business Savvy. That kind of went viral. The term she coined is “gender scrubbing”. Using neutral language to hide a gender adverse impact, and in doing so, you escape accountability for the harm that's being caused. I'll link to her piece in the show notes because it's essential reading. Both companies, Deloitte and Zoom here, frame the impact of these cuts as falling on support roles, which is technically accurate and still reprehensible in my book.
But when you know that those caregivers and support roles are overwhelmingly held by women, that neutral language starts to feel like erasure. Susan's piece went viral on LinkedIn with hundreds of comments from HR professionals and working women. And one commenter wrote something I have not been able to get out of my head. They wrote, quote, “when corporations erase the word women from the conversation, they erase their accountability for the disproportionate harm they're causing”.
I want to spend a minute on this whole concept of a two tier benefit structure too, because that's part of what makes this a super dangerous precedent that corporate America is now setting. To be fair, you know, two tier benefit systems have existed before among full time, let's say, versus part time employees or exempt versus non-exempt workers. They have different benefits packages often, and that's just how business works, which I understand. But there's a difference between those existing models and what Deloitte just did. And I think it's really important to call that out.
The full time versus part time distinction is based on hours worked. You work fewer hours, you get a proportionately different package. It's imperfect and it has its own fair share of equity problems. But the logic is at least tied to a measurable, consistent input. Exempt versus non-exempt employees, those are legal classifications established under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And the benefits differences that flow from that distinction are really established by labor law, federal law. But what Deloitte just did is totally different and much more subjective and a little sneaky if you ask me. They created their own tier based system based on the role alone, specifically based on how close your job is to generating client revenue.
So if you're client facing, you keep your full benefits. And if you're in a support function, you don't. Same company, same salaried full time employment status, potentially the same hours, the same tenure, the same performance rating. The only difference is your proximity to revenue generation. And that's what makes this such a dangerous precedent. It's not tiering by hours or by legal classification. It's a new two tier system based on perceived value to the business. And perceived value, as we all know, is never neutral. It's shaped by the same biases that have undervalued pink collar work for decades.
Helen Sanderson, an expert in psychological safety, put it this way, quote, “benefits aren't just compensation. They're one of the most visible ways an organization tells employees, whether it sees them as whole people or as line items to be optimized”. So when you remove parental leave and IVF funding from a particular group, one that's overwhelmingly women, you're making a public statement about who's wholeness, whose humanity the organization is willing to invest in. What's shocking to me about this is how overt this distinction is, how shameless this benefits cut is and how livid I would be if I were working for one of these companies. Because even though we know pay gaps are real, like pay gaps are at least insidious because they're often unknown and secret. You often don't know who's making more than others at your company. But a two tier benefit structure, everyone knows about it. It's policy, it's public, it's on paper, it sends a very clear message that no amount of “oh, we value all of our employees” kind of double speak can undo. They're basically saying on paper that if you are client facing you are more important and we care about keeping you more.
And if you're in a support function or an organization overhead role, we fundamentally don't care if you, you know, like us or not, if you want to stay or not. If you know, we have to replace you, so be it. And that is just such an overtly disrespectful and frank, it feels to me discriminatory claim based on perceived value. Like whose job is more important, the person in facilities who's cleaning the office and allowing, enabling the rest of the team to do what they do every day. Or the person who's on the phone talking to a client and whining and dining the client at ah, over l. You know, it is just a wild, wild thing where they're really saying the quiet part out loud nowadays, aren't they?
Now the other context we gotta keep in mind for this whole discussion is that the global picture kind of makes this even more outrageous. As a reminder, the United States is the only developed nation without a national paid parental leave policy. The only federal protection we have is the FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of job protection while giving you unpaid leave, which doesn't do anybody, most anybody, any good. And that only even applies to you if your employer has 50 or more employees. So almost half of American workers don't even qualify for FMLA.
So when Deloitte and Zoom cut paid parental leave benefits, they're not just trimming the excess on top of a strong social safety net, right? There is no safety net for American workers. We're almost entirely at the mercy of our employers for coverage. And now employers feel like they have the ability in a labor market that is benefiting employers and is in employers favor, they can pull back on, um, the golden era of perks and benefits.
In Sweden, by contrast, parents get 480 days of shared parental leave paid in Canada up to 18 months. And in the U.S. zero. So when we talk about this rollback, we cannot forget that broader global context. We're not talking about companies going from generous to slightly generous benefit packages for their white collar workers, right? We're talking about companies chipping away at benefits that are for many employees the only thing standing between them and needing to go back to work days after giving birth.
Our country's complete lack of caregiving infrastructure was already failing women before Deloitte and Zoom decided to make it worse. And I am seriously worried about the ramifications this has for other companies who are just like salivating at the savings possible if they follow suit. I mean, the sad reality is that we've seen that kind of domino effect happen before. When major employers started rolling back all their DEI commitments, a lot of others failed. Followed when return to office mandates started at a few big tech companies, it became a wave.
So when employers like Zoom and Deloitte make these kinds of moves, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. And now we have two tier benefits based on their own judgment around whose job matters more. If that precedent holds, we are looking at a future where your access to parental leave, fertility support and PTO depends not on your loyalty or your tenure or even your performance, but how close you are perceived to be to the revenue line. And because women are concentrated in roles that care for the company, care for the team, that provide the overhead support that keeps the company operating and keeps the world turning like the company's now saying we don't value that work. And that is just another way in which this world is saying we don't value women.
This is becoming in actuality a pink collar benefits tax because women will pay more in lost benefits and lost security and will be further squeezed out of the paid workforce altogether despite doing the kinds of work that keep companies running.
So what can we actually do with this information? First, I would encourage you to pay attention to what's going on in your company, especially when it comes to your benefits trends that you're noticing from your HR department. So if your company announces benefits changes, don't just read the summary. Lean in and ask who's affected, which roles, which departments. Disaggregate that data by gender. Ask them if they know how many women at the company will be impacted versus other folks at the company. And if the impact falls disproportionately on women, name that. Don't let gender scrubbed language do the work of hiding it.
Secondly, know your market value always. And be ready, not just when you're job hunting. Because women who know exactly what they're worth outside of their current organization have more leverage inside it. Benefits rollbacks target the people who the company believes have nowhere else to go. So do everything you can to make sure that's not you. Third, let's advocate loudly for the benefits that matter. Paid parental leave, IVF support, PTO. These aren't perks. A KinderCare study found that 85% of employees view childcare benefits as being on par with healthcare and retirement benefits. These are foundational. And if your organization is considering cuts, make the business case as to why that's shortsighted.
And to help, one of my favorite think tanks in D.C., New America, compiled case studies showing when Google extended paid leave from 12 to 18 weeks, attrition among young mothers dropped by 50%. When Accenture went from 8 to 16 weeks, it dropped by 40%. So there is a strong business case because attrition is expensive at replacing, you know, people, especially tenured professionals who've been with you for a while is a very pricey proposition.
And finally, we all have to keep the bigger picture in view. We have to push for paid leave at every level, local, state and federal. And you can learn more about how to advocate for these kinds of things via our Take Action page at bossedup.org/takeaction because the fact that American workers are this dependent on individual employer generosity for something as basic as paid parental leave is a policy failure. And it's a policy failure that is squeezing women out of the workplace.
So here's what I want to leave you with. Deloitte has an entire in house initiative called Empowerful Women, dedicated to, and I'm reading this straight from their website, “supporting equal access to professional opportunities for women”, end quote. They publish an annual Women at Work report, they partner with Catalyst, and yet at the very same time they create a two tier benefit system that disproportionately strips parental leave and fertility support from the roles that women are most likely to hold. The gap between what companies say about women and what they do to women has never been wider. That is the story and until we name it, loudly, specifically and without letting gender neutral language give anyone cover, it's going to keep getting worse.
I would love to hear what's going on in your organization. How is your company doubling down on women, supporting women in the workplace? Please give me some hope or rolling back the very kinds of policies that made it possible to be a working woman and/or working parent in 2026. We gotta call it like we see it and I would love to hear from you.
[CONFIDENT RHYTHMIC DRIVING THEME MUSIC WITH DRUMS STARTS]
So let's keep the conversation going after the episode. As always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
[MUSIC FADES AND ENDS]