Breastfeeding support deserves a place in every workplace wellbeing strategy

Ask most HR leaders to list their women’s health priorities and you’ll hear menopause, fertility and maybe pregnancy loss. Ask about breastfeeding support and the conversation tends to stall.

It’s assumed to be a personal matter, something a new mother will sort out for herself, rather than a workplace issue with real consequences for retention and performance. That assumption is costing businesses talent they’ve spent years developing.

An overlooked piece of the women’s health puzzle

Breastfeeding support sits in an odd blind spot. It falls between maternity policy, which usually ends at the point of return, and general wellbeing provision, which rarely accounts for it at all. Many organisations have no policy covering expressing at work, no guidance for line managers and no consistent standard for what “support” should look like. Where arrangements exist, they’re frequently improvised on the spot – a spare meeting room booked reactively, a fridge shared with everyone’s lunch, a manager left to work out the right approach without any guidance from HR.

This gap is easy to miss because it doesn’t show up as a single dramatic failure. It shows up as a slow erosion, a series of small frictions that accumulate until a capable employee decides the easiest option is to step back or leave.

The retention and experience cost

The return to work after parental leave is already a fragile period. Add the physical and logistical demands of expressing milk on a schedule, often every three to four hours, without adequate facilities or understanding from colleagues and that fragility tips into attrition risk. Employees describe skipping sessions because there’s nowhere appropriate to go, which affects both their health and their supply, or feeling they have to justify frequent breaks to sceptical managers.

None of this tends to show up cleanly in exit data. Women rarely cite “lack of breastfeeding support” as their reason for leaving – more often it gets folded into vaguer categories like “work-life balance” or “personal reasons.” But speak to working mothers directly, as we do regularly through AllBright’s Motherhood Works campaign and the pattern is unmistakable. Poor support at this stage doesn’t just cause short-term stress, it shapes how women judge whether an organisation truly values them and that judgement influences engagement, progression decisions and ultimately, whether they stay.