The Menopause Reality Check
Why Menopause Month Should Be A Moment Of Strategic Reflection, Not Awareness
Every October, as organisations mark World Menopause Day and Menopause Awareness Month, the conversation tends to follow a familiar pattern. Media coverage focuses on symptoms. Employers launch awareness campaigns. Health professionals share advice. Social media fills with personal stories and well-intentioned messages of support. World Menopause Day, led globally by the International Menopause Society, has played an important role in bringing menopause out of the shadows and into public discourse.
What if one of the biggest risks facing productivity, leadership succession and economic growth isn't AI, skills shortages or hybrid working, but a biological transition affecting millions of employees that many organisations still treat as a wellbeing issue?
Yet for founders, board members, business leaders, policymakers and investors, October should represent something more significant than awareness. It should be a moment of reflection.
It is a moment to examine whether the systems that organisations have spent decades building are capable of retaining, supporting and benefiting from some of the most experienced, qualified and influential women in the workforce.
Beyond the awareness campaigns lies a more uncomfortable question.
“What happens when women reach their peak influence years?”
Not when they are entering the workforce. Not when they are climbing the corporate ladder. Not when they are identified as high-potential talent. But when they have acquired the experience, judgement, networks, leadership capability and institutional knowledge that organisations spend years trying to develop.
For millions of women, that period coincides with menopause.
The irony should concern every executive team and boardroom in the country.
At precisely the stage when many women are stepping into their most influential leadership roles, growing mature businesses, serving on boards, mentoring future talent and contributing at the highest levels, many are simultaneously navigating one of the least understood transitions of their professional lives.
Research from the CIPD found that 73 per cent of working women aged 40 to 60 experienced symptoms associated with the menopause transition, while 67 per cent reported a negative impact on work and more than half had been unable to attend work at some point because of their symptoms.
This is why menopause is no longer simply a health conversation it is a:
leadership conversation.
talent retention conversation.
economic participation conversation.
business continuity conversation and increasingly, it is a conversation about whether organisations truly understand the value of leadership capital in an age when experience has become one of the most precious and irreplaceable assets available to them.
