For every woman who looks fine, but isn't.
Keynotes and workshops for benefits, HR, and people leaders on invisible illness, disclosure, and what concealment costs an organization.
Autoimmune conditions affect roughly 24 million Americans, about 80% of them women, and most of them are in the middle of their careers when it starts. Excess healthcare costs and lost work time run about $580,000 per 1,000 employees across five common autoimmune conditions. Short-term disability averages around 73 days per patient. Seventy percent of working women with a diagnosis say their career potential has suffered, and 39% have reduced their hours. None of that shows up in an engagement survey. It shows up as a high performer who quietly stops raising her hand.
Talk one: The Getting-Ready Ritual
For: all-staff, women's networks, ERGs, leadership offsites
Fifteen minutes penciling in eyebrows about two-thirds as thick as they should be, courtesy of an underactive thyroid, timed to finish exactly as she needed to be out the door. Paige Lavell did a version of that every working morning for years and never mentioned it to a colleague.
This talk starts at her own bathroom mirror and works outward. The disease is invisible. The coping is invisible. And concealing both was a skill she was rewarded for, by managers who had no idea there was anything to reward.
Audiences leave with language for something they have likely never named, in themselves or in someone they manage.
Talk Three: Four Diagnoses, One Employee
For: benefits, total rewards, health strategy, and the vendors who sell to them
Hashimoto's. Limited scleroderma. Fibroids. Factor V Leiden. Four diagnoses arriving across roughly two decades, sitting in four different systems: an OBGyn, an endocrinologist, a hematologist, and a carved-out fertility benefit with its own network and its own approvals. This is on top of primary care and any supportive therapies like acupuncture or talk therapy.
Not one of those clinicians had read the other charts. Paige Lavell did the reading. She did it herself, on lunch breaks or on breaks between Zoom calls, while leading at large tech organizations including Meta, Etsy, PayPal, and Block.
This talk is about what a benefits portfolio looks like from inside the employee holding it together, and why women's conditions cluster in ways a point-solution stack does not. It makes no promises about outcomes, which vary widely and are not the point. The point is who is doing the coordinating, and what it costs you when she runs out of capacity for it.
Talk Two: Why Invisible Illness Never Reaches Manager Training
For: HR, people leaders, learning and development, disability and accommodation teams
Over a decade leading in the payment space including at Etsy, Meta, Block, and PayPal taught Paige Lavell how a large organization actually builds a training deck, and what never survives the draft.
61% of working women with an autoimmune diagnosis have not fully disclosed it. 41% say disclosing would not help them. 32% expect to be judged. Meanwhile 56% of HR managers saw accommodation requests rise last year, the third consecutive year of increases, with chronic physical conditions among the top drivers.
This talk puts those numbers next to each other and works through the gap between them: what a people leader is measured on, what an employee calculates in the days before she says anything, and the exact point where those two calculations stop lining up.
For the people who write the training.
