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A woman can spend twenty years building expertise inside an institution whose priorities shift in twenty weeks. Much of what she has accumulated, reputation, relationships, credibility, influence does not automatically travel with her when that institution changes course. The title, the email database, the platform, the programme. These belong to the employer, not to her. The same risk applies to founders and consultants who are, in effect, concentrated in a single client, fu

Consider the executive who has known for six months that a member of her leadership team is no longer right for the role. Nothing catastrophic happens, so she compensates. She checks their work more closely, quietly corrects mistakes, steps into conversations they should be handling and gradually redesigns her own workload around a decision she has not made. The organisation continues to function, but at an invisible cost to her time, attention and leadership capacity.

A woman wakes at 2:47am because she is hot. She throws off the duvet. Twenty minutes later she is cold. Her mind starts running through tomorrow’s presentation, her mother’s hospital appointment, the unresolved conversation with a direct report, the invoice she forgot to approve and whether those palpitations she experienced yesterday are something she ought to mention to her GP. Eventually she sleeps. At 5:45am, the alarm goes off. By 8:30 she is dressed, composed and lea

AI can describe redundancy, but it has never carried the responsibility for a decision that changed somebody's livelihood. It can explain discrimination without having experienced the subtle shift in a room when a difficult subject is raised. It can summarise entrepreneurship without having faced the uncertainty of making payroll, just as it can construct a leadership case study without carrying the organisational memory of what happened after the decision was made.

There is something wonderfully optimistic about September. Summer begins to retreat, schools return, diaries refill, Q4 suddenly stops looking comfortably distant and organisations rediscover all the meetings they apparently managed perfectly well without during August. Menopause, unfortunately, has no respect for the corporate calendar.