Alison Crawford is the Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Ripple, and she came to that work the long way: seven years building Yelp's West Coast and EMEA sales teams, three years running Diversity and Inclusion Partnerships and Communities at Uber, and a side life as a working EMT on a two-person ambulance crew in Alameda County. Since 2010 she has spent roughly twenty percent of her professional time advocating for women, parents, caregivers, the LGBTQ+ community, and Black and LatinX employees inside the organizations where she works.
On Reimagining Company Culture, Alison and host Claire Schmidt dug into a question that has quietly become one of the hardest in HR: what does it actually mean for a benefits package to be equitable? Not equal, equitable. The answer she gives is less about adding perks and more about auditing what your existing benefits assume about the people using them.
Why Equal Benefits Are Not Equitable Benefits
Most benefits packages were designed for a worker who no longer dominates the workforce: a married, hetero, full-time employee with a non-working spouse and biological children. When companies port that template into the present day, they end up with policies that nominally treat everyone the same, while quietly favoring some employees over others. A "ten days of bereavement leave" line item works very differently for a queer employee whose chosen family is not recognized by the policy than for one whose immediate relatives are. A fertility benefit that requires a medical diagnosis of infertility excludes single parents and same-sex couples by design.
According to McKinsey research on LGBTQ+ inclusion, 32 percent of trans employees frequently consider leaving their workplace compared to 21 percent of cisgender employees, and much of that gap traces back to benefits and policies that were never built with them in mind. Equity is the practice of asking which employees a benefit was designed for, then redesigning it so the answer is "all of them." Alison frames it as the difference between equity vs equality: equal access on paper rarely produces equal outcomes in practice.
The Caregiving Gap Most Companies Still Miss
Alison spends a long stretch of the conversation on caregivers, partly because she is one (her daughter Lucy is eight) and partly because the data has shifted dramatically. The Harvard Business Review reports that 73 percent of U.S. employees now have some form of caregiving responsibility, whether for children, aging parents, or disabled adult relatives. The same research shows that employees who receive meaningful caregiving support are 30 percent more likely to stay, and that flexible time and telecommuting policies return between $1.70 and $4.45 for every dollar invested.
What does benefits equity actually look like for caregivers?
It looks like parental leave that does not distinguish between birthing and non-birthing parents, dependent care benefits that include adult dependents, flexibility policies that managers are trained to offer rather than employees forced to ask for, and back-up care that does not require a six-week waiting list. Alison's working test: if a single dad of two and a married primary caregiver to her own aging mother both feel like the policy was written for someone else, the policy is not equitable yet.
How do companies measure whether their benefits are equitable?
Utilization data, broken out by demographic. If your fertility benefit is used by 12 percent of straight-married employees and zero LGBTQ+ employees, you do not have a popularity problem, you have a design problem. AllVoices' pulse surveys are one way teams ask the more honest follow-up question: do employees feel the benefit was built for them?
What Actually Works at Ripple
Alison is careful not to oversell her own playbook, but she does describe a few principles that have held up across Yelp, Uber, and Ripple.
Audit the assumptions, not just the line items
Before adding a new benefit, Ripple's team writes down which employees the existing version assumes. A "spouse and dependents" health plan assumes legal marriage; a "primary caregiver" leave assumes a single primary caregiver. Once the assumptions are visible, the redesign is usually straightforward: replace "spouse" with "partner," replace "primary caregiver" with "any new parent."
Make voluntary benefits actually voluntary
Many voluntary benefits are technically opt-in but practically inaccessible: enrollment windows are short, materials are jargon-heavy, and the people who would benefit most are often the people with the least time to wade through the paperwork. Alison's team rebuilt enrollment as a one-page guided flow with examples for several different family structures, then watched utilization climb.
Listen continuously, not annually
An annual engagement survey will tell you that something is wrong nine months after it became a problem. Ripple supplements its annual cycle with shorter, topic-specific listening: a benefits-only check-in twice a year, an open anonymous reporting tool for employees who want to flag a gap without putting their name on it, and quarterly office hours with the D&I team. The point is to shorten the distance between "I noticed something" and "someone fixed it."
Where Employee Relations Fits Into Benefits Equity
Benefits equity is not just a comp and benefits problem. The moment an employee asks why their partner is not covered, why their leave was denied, or why a manager treated their accommodation request as optional, the conversation moves into employee relations territory. That handoff is where most equity efforts quietly stall: HR fixes the policy, but the case-by-case requests pile up in someone's inbox and never get tracked.
Why ER tooling matters for equitable benefits
If you cannot see the pattern of who is asking for which accommodations and what response they are getting, you cannot tell whether your "equitable" policy is being applied equitably. AllVoices' HR case management stack treats benefits-related questions and exceptions as cases, so an HR leader can run a quarterly report on, say, accommodation requests by department and identify the team where requests are being denied at twice the company rate. That same data feeds back into the next benefits redesign.
Frequently Asked Questions About Benefits Equity
What is the difference between benefits equality and benefits equity?
Equality means every employee has access to the same benefits on paper. Equity means the benefits actually work for the lives employees lead. A "ten days of paid leave" policy is equal but not equitable if it ignores chosen family, single-parent households, or employees caring for non-blood relatives.
How should HR audit an existing benefits package for equity?
Start with utilization data segmented by demographic, life stage, and family structure. Then map each benefit against the assumptions baked into it (legal marriage, biological children, full-time hours, English-language paperwork). Any benefit with low utilization in a population it should serve is a redesign candidate. Pay equity work uses a similar method, and the same playbook applies to benefits.
What benefits matter most to LGBTQ+ employees?
Family-building benefits without medical-infertility gatekeeping, gender-affirming care, mental health coverage with affirming providers in network, and bereavement and family leave that recognize chosen family. The SHRM and Stanford resources on LGBTQ+ benefits, plus the McKinsey research linked above, all point to the same shortlist.
How do caregiving benefits affect retention?
Substantially. The HBR research cited above shows a 30 percent retention lift for employees who feel supported in their caregiving responsibilities, and ROI of up to 4.45 dollars for every dollar spent on flexibility. Parental leave design (length, who qualifies, manager training on coverage) is one of the most powerful variables.
Are fringe benefits the same as benefits equity?
No. Fringe benefits are a category (perks beyond base pay and core insurance), while equity is a lens applied to the whole package. A company can have generous fringe benefits and still have an inequitable benefits program if those perks were designed for a narrow employee profile.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Alison's argument is not that companies need more benefits, it is that companies need to be more honest about who their existing benefits were designed for. The audit work is unglamorous: reading old plan documents, segmenting utilization data, sitting through conversations about how a "spouse" definition shows up in seven different policies. But it is the work that turns a benefits page from a recruiting prop into something employees actually feel.
For HR leaders inheriting a legacy benefits package, the move is to start small and start visible. Pick two policies that disproportionately affect underrepresented groups (parental leave and bereavement are common starting points), redesign them in the open, and report back on utilization a quarter later. Equity is a habit, not a launch.
If your team wants a closer look at how AllVoices supports the listening, case management, and reporting infrastructure behind equitable benefits, book a walkthrough with our team.
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