HR Thinks Women Take the Caregiving Leave. 71% of Men Surveyed Say They Did

Ask most HR teams who takes time off to care for a sick parent or partner, and the answer comes back fast: women. New research says that answer is close to backwards. The Standard's Leave Perception by Gender report, released October 14, ran nearly identical surveys of HR decision-makers and employees and found that HR's mental picture of who uses leave, and why, diverges sharply from what workers say they actually do. The biggest miss is caregiving, where HR estimates that 6% of men take leave to care for a loved one's physical health. Seventy-one percent of men surveyed say they have.

That gap matters well beyond a survey headline. Leave policy, benefits communication, manager training, and return-to-work planning are all built on assumptions about who needs them. When the assumptions are wrong, the programs are aimed at the wrong people.

Where HR's Picture Breaks Down

The Standard's research drew on two third-party surveys: 509 HR decision-makers, fielded January 5 to 23, 2026, and 501 employees. The pattern across leave types is consistent. HR overestimates how often women take leave and underestimates how often men do.

On leave for an employee's own physical health, HR estimates 34% of women and 14% of men take it. Employees report 23% and 27%. On caregiving for a loved one's physical health, HR estimates 60% of women and 6% of men, against reported rates of 48% and 71%. On mental health leave, HR believes 44% of women take it, compared with 5% of women who say they did. Insurance Business notes that the estimate for women is nearly nine times the reported figure. For men, HR's 9% estimate sits much closer to the 13% men report.

Parental leave shows the same skew. HR estimates 88% of women and 1% of men take leave for pregnancy or bonding with a new child. Employees report 33% and 22%. That is a 55-point overstatement for women and a 21-point understatement for men. Insurance Business also reports that Gen Z employees take family physical health leave at higher rates than HR estimates and than other generations.

"The story on leave for men and women isn't what HR professionals think it is." – Brad Yoder, Assistant Vice President of Life, Supplemental and Disability Claims, The Standard

Two caveats belong next to these numbers. The employee survey is self-reported and the sample is relatively small, so the figures are best read as directional rather than precise. And The Standard sells group disability, paid family leave, and absence management services, so it has a commercial interest in employers paying closer attention to leave. Neither point changes the direction of the finding, which is large and consistent across every leave type measured.

Why the Data Hides Men's Caregiving

Part of the explanation is plumbing. HCAMag's coverage of the report points out that caregiving leave is harder to track than medical leave because it draws on FMLA, state programs, PTO, and employer leave, and is often filed under broad codes. Leave for an employee's own health tends to run through disability claims, which leave cleaner records. A man who uses a week of PTO to drive his father to chemotherapy may never appear in any report as a caregiver.

Part of it is behavior. Insurance Business reports that some white-collar employees who worry about their year-end bonuses quietly opt out of parental leave rather than raise the issue. When people route caregiving through vacation days or skip formal leave entirely, HR's systems see less of it, and the stereotype goes unchallenged.

The volume is not small, either. Both outlets cite Sparrow's 2026 State of Employee Leave Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than three million leave days and found caregiver leave usage up 150% since 2020, with median caregiver leave length nearly quadrupling from 12.5 days to 49.5 days. Those figures come from Sparrow's own customers, but they describe a category of leave that is growing quickly while HR's mental model of who uses it lags behind.

What the Misread Costs

The first cost is communication. If HR assumes caregiving is a women's benefit, the messaging, the examples, and the open enrollment materials tend to say so, and men who need the leave either do not see themselves in it or improvise with PTO. HCAMag also cites a Nayya review of 6.7 million medical claims finding that one in four enrolled employees leave supplemental benefits unclaimed, a reminder that a benefit people do not understand is a benefit they do not use.

The second cost is the manager conversation. Most leave requests start with a direct supervisor, not the benefits team. HCAMag points to a lawsuit against TD Bank alleging that a manager rejected a worker's mental health leave request and that the worker was later fired over FMLA leave. Those claims have not been tested in court, but they show where a misread at the manager level turns into legal exposure. The third cost is retention. Yoder argues that minimizing inaccurate perceptions about leave and other benefits "is an important step in improving retention."

For HR and benefits leaders heading into 2027 planning, the response is mostly about replacing assumptions with evidence:

• Pull real leave data by type and gender. Before redesigning anything, report who actually took each kind of leave last year, including caregiving routed through PTO where you can identify it.
• Recode caregiving so it shows up. If caregiving lands in broad catch-all codes, add a category. A leave type you cannot see is a leave type you will keep misjudging.
• Rewrite benefits communication for everyone. Use examples that include fathers, sons, and partners who care for family, and present leave as available to every employee rather than a women's benefit.
• Brief managers before the request arrives. Give supervisors a short script for leave conversations and a clear rule that requests go to HR, not to a judgment call in a one-on-one meeting.
• Check whether pay incentives discourage leave. If employees skip parental leave to protect a bonus, review how leave interacts with bonus eligibility and performance timing.
• Survey your own people. A two-question pulse on whether employees have needed caregiving leave, and whether they used it, will tell you more than any national benchmark.

The Standard's numbers will not settle every question, and a 501-person employee sample is a starting point rather than a census. But the direction is hard to dismiss. If HR believes men almost never take caregiving leave and most men surveyed say they already have, then the policies, the messages, and the manager training built on that belief are serving a workforce that no longer exists.