When Rebecca Feinglos decided to get divorced, it was the latest in a series of personal tragedies. “My entire life has been rooted in grief and loss, but I didn’t even know it,” Feinglos says. Her mother had passed away when she was a child, and after that experience, she had channeled her grief into chasing professional success.
But in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Feinglos also lost her father—and a year later, her marriage had fallen apart. “That ultimately led me to reevaluate so much in my life,” she says. “It made me say, ‘How am I actually supporting myself through all of these losses?’”
Feinglos decided to step away from work for a year to give herself space to truly grieve her parents and the end of her marriage. Along the way, she started a blog that eventually turned into an online community called Grieve Leave, which now boasts 30,000 members. Since then, Feinglos has been hosting talks and trainings about grief for all kinds of employers, in which she also touches on grieving other kinds of losses—including divorce. “[It’s de facto that] our workplaces . . . are the front lines of grief support in America, whether they’re ready for that responsibility or not,” she says.
The stigma of divorce at work
And yet, in doing this work, Feinglos has found that many employers are still not ready to talk about divorce. Over the past decade, companies have started offering plenty of workplace benefits that delve into the personal lives of their employees, from fertility treatments to mental health support to, more recently, menopause-related care.
But many are still uncomfortable with the idea of helping their workforce navigate divorce. “Regardless of what kind of company I’m working with,” Feinglos says, “the most pushback I get in trainings is whether divorce is an appropriate thing to talk about at work, period.”
Research shows that people going through a divorce can struggle to focus at work and report lower job performance. When Feinglos decided she was going to get a divorce, one of the first people she told was her boss. “I knew immediately that my work was going to be impacted by divorce proceedings,” she says. “I was blocking off so much time for lawyer meetings and mediation. I could either just block off that time . . . or I [could choose] to disclose what was going on in my life.”
Even as the stigma persists, Feinglos and others are urging employers to acknowledge the wide-ranging impact of divorce and embrace the idea of divorce-related workplace benefits. In recent years, a handful of services have cropped up that cater to workers who are ending a marriage or trying to manage life after a divorce. Companies, in turn, are slowly starting to come around, as they start to recognize divorce is a major life event that can bleed into all areas of an employee’s life—particularly the workplace.
“Divorce grief absolutely shows up at work, like any kind of grief shows up at work,” Feinglos says. “We can either pretend like it’s not happening and spend a lot of mental energy and a lot of dollars on trying to work around that grief, or we can build a workplace culture that embraces the fact that, well, our employees are people, and they’re going to show up as their whole selves at work.”
Helping workers navigate the process
When Erin Levine started Hello Divorce after 15 years of practicing family law, her goal was to make it easier—and more affordable—for people to get a divorce. Hello Divorce initially launched as a direct-to-consumer product, and Levine didn’t have plans to start approaching employers until 2025, in part due to the pushback she had already received.
“We were getting a ton of resistance, especially pre-COVID, around anything that helps facilitate divorce,” she says, noting that even the name of her company elicited negative reactions at the time. “It just takes a tremendous amount of education for people to understand. Divorce is awful. It’s terrible, and it is a massive deal. But you are doing no one a service by making it harder and more frustrating and more expensive.”
More recently, however, Levine has seen an influx of interest not just from employers but also benefits brokers, employee assistance programs (EAPs), and legal insurance companies. Some larger corporations and university systems already offer subsidized legal services for employees getting a divorce, typically as an add-on through their legal insurance plans. (The University of Michigan, for example, will be providing divorce-related legal support through its legal insurance plan as of 2025.)
But that coverage is usually limited to a few hours of legal counsel—a fraction of what is typically required for divorce proceedings. Levine says some employers are actually interested in expanding their coverage of legal services because they’ve seen high utilization and increased demand from employees, but it can be expensive to do so through traditional legal plans.
Enter Hello Divorce, which is designed to manage the bulk of the financial and legal logistics of divorce proceedings. “In every state there are at least 30 forms, if not more, that have to get filed at the correct intervals,” Levine says. “It’s very procedural. You have to serve your spouse in a way that is legally correct, but not incite more anger and fear and overwhelm and shame. So the first thing we do is make that aspect of divorce a lot easier.”
Spouses can work asynchronously using Hello Divorce’s platform. The company also brings in a host of experts who can assist with issues that come up over the course of a divorce, from real estate dealings to financial planning. (Those experts also happen to be cheaper to hire than lawyers, enabling Hello Divorce to reduce costs.)
That makes Hello Divorce an appealing option for employers who want to offer more generous benefits without incurring significant costs. In response to increased demand, Hello Divorce recently soft-launched a workplace divorce benefit. Levine is currently in talks with a number of large employers, as well as legal insurance companies and boutique benefits brokers who are interested in packaging divorce benefits with other wellness offerings for midsize companies.
Jessica DePhillips, who runs a consulting firm and benefits broker called Ascending 360°, was drawn to Hello Divorce because she saw it as both a “niche benefit” and an important service that could be invaluable for workers who were staring down a divorce. Her firm focuses on packaging benefits that “really meet the employee where they are at and help them to live the longest, healthiest, happiest life possible,” DePhillips says.
Divorce-related services might seem like an unusual fit alongside traditional wellness benefits, but she sees them as a way to help alleviate the mental and financial toll of divorce. DePhillips has been educating employers, as well as other brokers and legal insurance plans, on the value of divorce benefits. “Not only does it have a home in the benefits world and in the benefits package for employees, but I think it’s a really critical, crucial benefit to offer, even just to get the word out there,” she says.
Other support services
As Levine points out, legal assistance alone doesn’t account for the full range of life changes people can experience during and after a divorce. It also isn’t the only path to finding a resolution when two people decide to end their marriage. Divorce coaching company Fairwell—formerly known as Divorce Right—offers employers access to hundreds of coaches and mediators who can help workers navigate divorce outside of the family court system.
Vicky Townsend, founder and president of Fairwell, says the company takes into account the exact circumstances of a divorce, whether it involves a queer couple or non-English speakers, for example, and provides targeted coaching based on those needs. The company also can provide assistance when domestic violence is a factor. (If or when a couple does need to go to family court, Fairwell can also help direct them and build the right team.)
Since launching Fairwell in 2022, Townsend has found more traction with first responders—from police officers to firefighters and EMTs—than with corporations, in part because the stressful nature of their jobs can drive up divorce rates. One person who found Fairwell through her company benefits plan was able to come to an agreement with her spouse for just a few thousand dollars. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said in a testimonial. “All I knew is that I was getting divorced and needed help in getting through it. Little did I know the kind of support and care I was going to get. I thought I would spend every dime we had saved, but they got us through for less than $5,000.”
The corporate space, Townsend argues, has proven more challenging to penetrate because divorce isn’t discussed as openly. “[Many] employees will not tell their employer that they’re going through a divorce, and the number-one reason is they’re afraid they’re going to be fired,” Townsend says. “It puts the spotlight on them. And it’s going to impact their productivity. It’s going to impact their performance. So why [wouldn’t they wait to] tell their employer until after it’s over?”
Beyond the stigma, however, Townsend contends that HR teams are overwhelmed by the number of workplace benefits available to them. “Right now, the hot one is menopause benefits,” she says. “Talk about something that’s personal—but it’s not so personal that we can’t talk about it.”
Addressing the long-term effects
Research indicates that the loss of productivity and emotional upheaval employees experience while ending a marriage can fade once a divorce is complete. But the effects of divorce can linger in other ways long after the proceedings are over. Divorced couples who have children, for example, have joint responsibilities as parents, from sharing custody to managing caregiving expenses.
That’s where services like SupportPay are trying to step in, with the intent of addressing some of the pain points of co-parenting. The platform allows parents—and families—to manage shared expenses like child support, childcare, and medical costs. Since entering the workplace benefits space, SupportPay has seen interest from major employers like media giant Hearst, along with a mix of other customers that include some of the largest U.S. companies by revenue. SupportPay founder and CEO Sheri Atwood says the company has another “19 deals active in the pipeline right now” across tech, media, and financial services. Atwood says she is also in talks with restaurants and retail companies. (Aside from Hearst, the employers who are currently using SupportPay or finalizing deals with the company declined to be named.)
As a seed-stage startup, SupportPay has focused on reaching employers who already seemed amenable to modern benefits, like coverage for fertility treatments and caregiving assistance. As demand for caregiving benefits, in particular, has grown, SupportPay has expanded its platform to include more robust caregiving support for families looking after elderly parents.
EAP services tend to get relatively low rates of utilization—usually hovering around 5%—but SupportPay was already seeing 13% utilization prior to rolling out its caregiving offering in 2023; since then, utilization has jumped up to 28% to 34%, Atwood says, noting, “Part of the reason that I fast-tracked our release of the caregiving expansion was to get into these employers because they’re willing to talk about caregivers—but they’re still unwilling to talk about single and divorced parents.”
Helping divorced caregivers
Even employers who use SupportPay can be wary of explicitly presenting it as a service for divorced parents, Atwood says, citing an example of a major company that saw a significant increase in utilization of SupportPay after she recommended changing the language from benefits for “co-parents” to include the terms single and divorced. When the company made that shift, multiple employees expressed gratitude for finally being recognized.
In her experience working with SupportPay customers, Atwood says she has found that employers often have little to no data on divorced parents in their workforce. “You’re tracking everything by age, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality,” she says of corporate HR departments. “But you’re not tracking this.”
Despite the growth of employee resource groups and efforts to promote inclusivity in the workplace, she argues that divorced parents are often left out of the conversation—something she hopes to change with the work she’s doing at SupportPay. “In the same way that women weren’t talking about fertility 10 years ago [and] nobody was talking about caregiving 5 years ago,” Atwood says, “we’re hoping this segment does not have to hide in silence.”
