Menopause symptoms can be extremely disruptive to women’s working lives. Typically, menopause is experienced between the ages of 50-55 (though this can vary widely), as women gradually (yet often unevenly) cease menstruating. Currently, around a quarter of women aged over 50 are considering leaving their job due to experiencing menopausal symptoms. Only in very recent years have some organisations begun to recognise that offering wellbeing support and flexibility during menopause can be a means to ensure women do not leave employment. The risk of losing any employees before retirement age matters for several reasons. Firstly, it is important for people themselves to be able to keep working and earning. Secondly, the UK workforce is facing serious labour shortages, which cannot be filled purely by the numbers of young people entering the workforce. Thirdly, for employers, it is an expensive waste of talent to lose experienced employees and costly to recruit new ones. Women currently make up almost half the UK workforce (47%), and until 2010 they could retire with a pension at age 60. Now they must wait until 66 and this will rise further in 2026 to age 67. This means that, unlike in the past, women could easily be working 10-15 years post-menopause. That is a third to a quarter of their working lives. However, very little is known about the work-life experiences of women in this age bracket. Consequently, there is little known about how women might be supported, and their skills and talents retained at work, postmenopause. RENEWED DRIVE This knowledge gap is what prompted me to research women’s experience of working post-menopause. I was interested in how they made the transition from working whilst being menopausal and in how they viewed their working life now, their aspirations and ambitions for this stage. I had a personal motivation. My experience of finding myself postmenopausal with renewed drive and further career ambitions seemed so contrary to the rather pessimistic images circulating in society about my sex and age group which suggested that working life and productivity were more or less over alongside the cessation of your reproductivity with menopause. I wanted to find out what other women’s experiences were and the potential implications for employment practices. We are speaking to women aged 55 and over about their career experiences post-menopause. So far, we have interviewed and held a focus group with dozens of women and received eightweek diaries of experiences from some of them. We have also interviewed employers about their perspective. This is an ongoing study, which so far has not included many women in manual jobs. We do not pretend that what we have found is necessarily true for all. But here are some of our early findings. MORE AMBITION All the women in our study said that, compared to working during their menopause, they now have more energy, enthusiasm for working, and a new-found confidence. As one woman put it: ‘Oh, my God, it’s back. I’m back’. Several described life as levelling out: ‘I think one of the great things about it is that you can trust that every day your mood is going to be stable, right? You know, once you get through it all… Also, I have loads of energy.’ Some described having enhanced ambition and had gone on to take ‘bigger’ roles with more responsibility in their late 50s and early 60s, including setting up their own business. Several said they had felt forced to leave their jobs or change their roles during their menopause, due to symptoms that are widely reported, such as extreme tiredness, anxiety and/or brain fog. One woman who quit her job, who had previously worked long hours as a London solicitor, illustrated this, saying: ‘Back then I thought I was burnt out, but I was experiencing the menopause. I couldn’t concentrate. I was bursting into tears in front of clients, and I lost all confidence in my own ability to be a competent solicitor.’ Another described a situation that made her reevaluate her job: ‘I could feel the blood leaking into my shoe under my trousers, right, and going, “How the feck am I going to get out of here?”, right? And it was just one of those awful moments when you’re thinking your body is utterly betraying you. … I didn’t really know that those kinds of things could happen.’ All the women we spoke to who left jobs returned to work once their menopausal symptoms cleared, though not necessarily in the same careers. Some retrained into something completely different and were happy with their choice. Others, however, felt they were never able to retrieve their career trajectory. 16 | ‘I have gone through that hell in my life and now I feel like a new woman… I am about to live again’
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