Hologic’s business focuses on women’s health and well-being. So, it’s no surprise many of its benefits focus on females who want or have kids.
The medical devices and products company, with a market cap of about $16 billion, offers fertility benefits, free nurse lactation consultation and breastmilk storage and delivery services, and $10,000 child adoption reimbursements to attract and retain female workers.
In San Diego, the company has landed on the Top Workplace list for two years running.
For the first time this year, Marlborough-based Hologic Inc., with 1,230 employees in San Diego County, is providing fertility benefits through Progyny, which covers more and requires less-out-of-pocket costs compared with conventional health insurance carriers.
A growing number of employers are offering fertility benefits. Progyny, for example, launched its fertility benefits in 2016 and has increased its client count to more than 390 across 40 industries, according to company data.
Progyny “brings together a whole ecosystem,” said Lisa Hellmann, senior vice president of human resources and corporate communications for Hologic. “It ensures better outcomes of impregnations. It’s also more ive of the employee’s journey.”
Hologic also helps employees who want to start or grow their families by another method. About three years ago, the firm started reimbursing employees up to $10,000 for a child adoption because it wants to “ the many ways our employees become parents,” Hellmann said.
The help continues after the baby arrives. Nurse lactation consulting is also free to Hologic employees.
The company wants “to make access to wellness as complete and easy as we can,” Hellmann said. “It’s not medically necessary but provides a broader sense of .”
Furthermore, it wants to make it easier for moms to return to work while still breastfeeding. Hologic pays for the full cost of Milk Stork, an overnight breast milk delivery service founded in 2015 that also provides on-the-go milk storage.
The company’s breastmilk services help address a problem among working moms. According to Motherly’s annual survey earlier this year of nearly 10,000 moms, 18 percent of mothers changed jobs or left the workforce in the past year.
Milk Stork is “an important way to get new mothers back into the workforce, especially if they have field-based jobs where they travel a lot,” Hellmann said. “We’re seeing the use of Milk Stork go up. Rather than waiting to finish breastfeeding, they are coming back sooner. They don’t have to choose.”
Hang Nguyen is a freelance writer.
