Happy you’re in perimenopause or menopause but you still have to work day!
Because you aren't done yet. Not by a long shot.
One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the recent third season of one of the most beautifully heartbreaking shows, The Bear, was dedicated to a perimenopause-aged woman named Tina Marrero.
If you haven’t watched The Bear, it’s an American show centered in a restaurant, circled around a blood and assembled family, with lots of dysfunction and a ton of shouting. The episode told the backstory of a cook-turned-chef, played so well by the actress and playwright Liza Colón-Zayas. When she lost her office job after 15 years, her little modest-living family already financially squeezed, Tina kept getting up at 6am, loading up the crockpot and pounding the pavement. No luck and many indignities suffered. At the end of her rope, she ended up the restaurant where she would not only end up working, but thriving, becoming a the group’s matriarch and getting her groove back too.
But first, on that very bad day, over a free sandwich and a cup of coffee, in front of a kind-hearted stranger, when she sniffled “I’m a 46-year-old woman” your chest ached for the defeat she felt. When she had so much yet to offer but couldn’t see it yet. And for all the other women like her, who can’t see or feel that there might be more for them than they ever dreamed of, if they could just look up and think a bit bigger.
Although Colón-Zayas has worked for decades, it wasn’t until she was around 50 that The Bear came along with what some call her “breakthrough” role. In an interview with Elle magazine, the actress said she appreciated how Tina’s arc didn’t play out in a stereotype.
“It’s not this story of her transforming into a sexy character in order to see her value or something like that,” she said. “The backbone of this country looks like Tina, so let’s give a little more credit to what people like her have to bring and have been bringing to the table.”
One of the things I love about Tina’s story is that the characters around her see more in her than she does, at first. It isn’t always like that in real life, is it?
Today, September 7, is World Menopause and Work Day, which was started in 2021 by the European Menopause and Andropause Society (EMEA). (Those Europeans are on to something, gathering midlife hormonal changes in all humans in one place).
It’s becoming clear from precedent-setting tribunals that this is an issue companies need to get ahead of or it will be done for them. Consider the consultant at UK insurance firm Direct Line, who after four years on the job started experiencing brain fog and was demoted, with less pay. She was awarded £64,645 in damages after a tribunal found her workplace failed to make adjustments for her. Or an office manager who won a £37,000 payout after she was let go by the boss told her she used menopause as an excuse for ‘everything’. Or the pet store sales assistant who won £20,057 after she was dismissed by the boss who humiliated her by shouting she ‘must be on the menopause’.
As for how many women are really leaving their jobs because of menopause, that’s hard to track down and often based on flimsy surveys that don’t hold up. If you want to see how flimsy, consider the famous ‘900,000 women per year’ figure tracked back to an organization called BUPA, that lives to this day online from Bloomberg to The Guardian but is not even close to being real.
If you’d like to read a fascinating tale of how not-careful the media is with quoting and re-quoting stats, Menoclarity and Magnificent Midlife founder Rachel Lankester did us all a service by taking this on. And then take every menopause-at-work statistic you see henceforth with a few grains of Celtic gray sea salt. (You’ll be multitasking: Best menopause mineral hack ever).
As with almost everything these days, it’s hard to know where the narrative ends and reality begins. Women either leaving work in droves or suffering silently suits the woe-is-us crowd well. And who are we talking about anyway? We are accustomed to seeing successful women splashing their faces with water or standing in front of the refrigerators in hot flash shame on television. You don’t really know how that woman who works at Dunkin’ Donuts is getting on, you know? In the majority of work places, you can’t even leave your station to compose yourself in the bathroom off-schedule.
Some women are at the height of their careers in midlife. Some women are forced out of their jobs in midlife. And many others want to leave because they feel wretched and they just need a little flexibility and understanding. It’s a tough spot. For others, it’s their menopause, not their menopause symptoms, driving their need for change. This is what the research team of Camilla Quental, Pilar Rojas Gaviria and Celine del Bucchia explored so well in their fascinating 2023 report challenging the prevalent narrative of pervasive decline, The Dialectic of (menopause) zest: Breaking the mould of organizational irrelevance.
“Menopause-friendly organizations provide a supportive and responsive work environment. By doing so, they strengthen corporate reputation, recruitment, and retention of talent.”
EMAS Menopause and Work Charter
Quental, Gaviria and del Bucchia say their work may have been fueled by the rising awareness of menopause, but it was “animated” by a powerful statement American anthropologist Margaret Mead made in the 1950s: “The most powerful force in the world is a menopausal woman with zest.”
A lot of this is about finding the work we were meant to do.
And some of us have been lying to ourselves about that all along.
One of my favorite things about this report is that it is at complete odds with doom-and-gloom, fear-based approach that we see in media and on social media, when it calls for “an educational approach that accounts for a ‘menopause renaissance’ and that acknowledges multiple lived experiences during this transformation”.
There are a ton of women leaving for something better, or even just because something much more compelling came along. Exhibit A is Tamsen Fadal, who spent decades as a news anchor at a local New York television station until she started talking about menopause. Since leaving last year, she’s become a speaker, is publishing a book, filmed a documentary for PBS (The M Factor, out October 17) and became one of QVC’s Quintessential 50. No clinging to a youth-obsessed business by her fingernails for this one; menopause was literally her doorway to everything.
There are shades of this kind of thing everywhere in the menoverse. At 47, I lost my job as a features editor in the sale of the paper I was working for, a golden-handcuffs situation that I had been convincing myself was as good as it gets.
It was not. And I needed that boot in my back; without it, I may have taken longer to find my zest. I may never have started Hotflash inc. And just like Tina, in the crappy weeks after losing my job, it was other people who saw in me what I could not. Like the former editor who took me to lunch and said: “The thing about you is that you are going to have too much work.”
All I could think at the time was how kind he was.
But he was right.
Yet as I’ve dipped in and out of different workplaces over the last seven years, I’ve also been able to see first-hand some of the other issues that crop up at work when you are going through hell at the same time as you are coming into your own.
There is a danger to us, when those hormones that kept us outwardly focused on others begin to ebb. Not putting up with other people’s crap is one of the first signs. No longer being able to contort yourself around a too-sensitive colleague who can dish out disrespect, but not take it. Even asking questions of people ill-prepared to answer them, when you might not previously of dared? These are things can rock the boat.
All of this can start before we are emotionally equipped to handle the fallout. Before our true menopausal power kicks in. About a decade ago, simmering, I asked a male colleague why he called me out in the morning news conference for something he thought I’d missed in my Arts & Life section, rather than just mentioning it to me on the side. When he told me I was being “aggressive”, I literally lost any ability to reply. To my embarrassment, I ended up ordering a book by an author named Jean Baer titled: How to be an Assertive (Not Aggressive) Woman. I tried to read that damn book but couldn’t. And now I know why: Certain people have a special way of making you feel wrong if you call out their bad behavior – and no book in the world is going to fix that situation.
“The most powerful force in the world is a menopausal woman with zest.”
Margaret Mead, anthropologist
All these years later, that paperback is still on my bookshelf – mostly for the giggles on how far I’ve come.
In a lot of ways, menopause in the workplace is like so many other issues we encounter at midlife: sitting right at the intersection of where we need to take responsibility for and stand up for ourselves, and where we are humans who need support from others around us.
If we are doing the first and not getting the second, chances are, we just might be going somewhere else where we are going to get it. Either way, someone is going to get our wisdom and experience.
But whether you are getting forced out or want out, or are fully freaked out by all the people around you talking about retiring (is it just me?) it’s all just one more confusing and sometimes terrifying layer to midlife.
I had a British friend who made endless fun of herself for having read the Louise Hay book Feel The Fear and Do it Anyway. I ended up reading it in my 40s, and never forgot its overriding message. When we are facing change, all we can conjure up are the bad things that might happen. What we can’t imagine are the goodies.
Check out the EMAS Menopause and Work Charter for detailed recommendations on menopause at work. It has advice for employers and organizations, for managers and supervisors, healthcare professionals and employees. We are in the middle of this developing story, and it’s on all of us to make sure that we are talking about this issue and moving it forward.
Work like the EMAS has done is visionary because not all of us can fall up – or even to a better sideways. Many women don’t have much agency at all in their work, or much in the way of options if they lose it. The stress of all that on top of feeling the way you can feel in this transition?
That is something we should all be seeking to change.