HR professionals consistently believe women take more employee leave than men. New research from Portland, Oregon-based insurer The Standard finds the opposite is true in nearly every category that matters.
The October 2026 report, Leave Perception by Gender: What HR Isn’t Seeing About Absence for Women and Men, drew on parallel surveys of 509 HR decision-makers and 501 employees, conducted by two third-party research firms in early 2026. The employee survey is self-reported and the sample is relatively small, so the figures are best read as directional rather than statistically definitive at a population level. The gap it surfaces between what HR believes and what employees actually do is wide enough to shape how absence programs are built, communicated, and staffed, and wide enough to explain why some of those programs are missing the people they’re intended to reach.
The single most striking figure is in family caregiving. HR decision-makers believe 60% of women take leave to care for a loved one’s physical health, compared with just 6% of men. What employees report: 48% of women and 71% of men. The perception is not simply off. It is inverted by a significant margin.
The pattern holds elsewhere. HR estimates 34% of women and 14% of men take leave for their own physical health. Employees report 23% of women and 27% of men. On mental health leave, HR believes 44% of women take it versus 9% of men. Employees report 5% of women and 13% of men. In that last pairing, HR’s estimate for women is nearly nine times what women themselves report.
“The story on leave for men and women isn’t what HR professionals think it is,” said Brad Yoder, assistant vice president of life, supplemental and disability claims at The Standard. “Minimizing inaccurate perceptions related to leave and other benefits is an important step in improving retention.”
When employer assumptions about who takes family leave are this far from actual behavior, the practical effects compound. Staffing backup plans built around the assumption that women are the primary caregivers don’t account for 71% of men who report taking leave for a family member’s physical health. Benefits communications aimed at women as the primary audience for caregiving leave exclude a majority of the people actually using it.
The Standard’s report notes that caregiving leave data is inherently harder to track than medical leave. Personal health leave tied to a disability claim generates cleaner administrative records. Caregiving leave often draws from multiple programs and gets coded in broad categories. That data gap likely reinforces the misperception: HR is, to some degree, working from incomplete information as well as outdated assumptions.
Caregiver leave claims have also grown substantially. Sparrow’s 2026 State of Employee Leave Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than three million days of leave, found caregiver leave usage has risen 150% since 2020, with the median duration of those leaves nearly quadrupling from 12.5 days to 49.5 days. Employers building leave programs around an older picture of the workforce are increasingly misaligned with the employees actually filing claims.
The parental leave findings show the same pattern in sharper relief. HR believes 88% of women take leave for pregnancy or to bond with a new child, and just 1% of men. Employees report 33% of women and 22% of men. HR overstates women’s parental leave by 55 percentage points while undercounting men’s by 21.
The report points to a downstream risk. Benefits communications, policies, and staffing plans oriented toward mothers leave fathers and non-birthing parents without clear guidance, or the impression that the benefit applies to them. White-collar employees concerned about losing a year-end bonus while on leave may quietly opt out rather than raise the issue, particularly when messaging doesn’t speak to their situation. The result is underutilization that employers don’t see coming because they weren’t planning for those employees to take the leave in the first place.
There is also a generational wrinkle. HR assumes Gen Z and millennials are the predominant users of parental leave because of life stage. What Gen Z employees actually report taking leave for at higher rates than HR estimates and other generations is physical health care for a family member.
The cumulative picture the report presents is of benefits programs navigating a workforce they don’t fully see. Closing that gap requires something that many HR teams currently lack. Reliable, live absence data broken down in enough detail to show who is taking which leave, and when.
The benefits perception gap between employer intent and employee experience is not primarily a product problem. It is a communication and alignment problem. Leave is one of the places where that misalignment is most consequential, because the stakes involve who gets covered when they need it and whether the people managing the business are prepared for who will actually be out.
Cleaner absence data changes what employers can see, and what they communicate to the employees who actually need these benefits. Research on how the employer-employee perception gap in benefits persists consistently points to the same underlying problem: employers are making decisions about a workforce they don’t fully know.
