The final two CVs are on the table in front of you. The meeting finished with, “It’s your call on this one.” And so here you are with a horrible cup of coffee, closed blinds and some thinking to do.
Somebody has already said, “They’re both excellent,” which is usually the point at which people start looking for reasons why one of them isn’t.
Jeanette is fifty-one, with twenty-five years of experience behind her. She knows her stuff, has a solid track record and brings the kind of judgement you only really acquire by having dealt with a lot of difficult things before.
She knows the clients who need a quick call rather than an email, the supplier who always says something will take three weeks when it is never less than six, and the member of staff who goes very quiet about ten minutes before something goes seriously wrong. You would want Jeanette by your side as you go into battle.
She is also ragingly menopausal.
At the moment she isn’t sleeping for more than about four hours at a time. Occasionally she loses a word halfway through a sentence. There was the incident with the missing keys turning up on the roof of the car. There have been a couple of little mistakes that would have been unusual for her a year ago. She would quite like the office several degrees colder than everybody else and, on a bad day, may need ten minutes to disappear and regroup.
Then there’s Josh. Thirty-nine, ambitious, excellent at his job and thoroughly deserving of consideration. He has a strong record, good relationships across the business and some interesting ideas about where the department could go next.
He’s less experienced than Jeanette but brings a different perspective, plenty of energy and genuine potential. He’s a very good candidate. And, right now, he looks considerably less complicated.
If you’re responsible for a business, a team and the numbers, you can see how the maths starts mathing. I mean, it’s business, right?
Jeanette’s fantastic. Five years ago it might have been a done deal. But now?
Why choose the person you already know might not always be on top form? Why take the risk? Why promote somebody whose performance has become a little less predictable when there is another perfectly good candidate sitting right there?
It sounds horribly discriminatory when you write it down. We all recoil a bit reading it. But I suspect it can sound considerably more reasonable inside the heads of the people making the decision. And that is where this gets interesting.
We may be counting the wrong things
There is nothing unreasonable about considering a candidate’s performance, the demands of a role or the support somebody might need to succeed in it. Those are legitimate management considerations.
The difficulty comes when we start treating what we know about one person’s current circumstances as though it tells us everything about their future, while treating somebody else’s future as an entirely blank, and therefore rather more promising, page.
Josh might leave in eighteen months for an exciting opportunity elsewhere. He might have a baby next year, decide to become a stay-at-home dad and take a career break. He could develop a health problem, become a carer, go through a divorce, burn out, need surgery, move to Cornwall or decide that corporate life is vastly overrated and open a café.
Jeanette could do any of those things too. We have absolutely no idea. But Jeanette is easier to get twitchy about because her time of life has had the decency to announce itself in advance. And not particularly discreetly, either. Menopause is all over the media, in pink pamphlets at reception, and on LinkedIn.
We know what might go wrong because we’ve been told, repeatedly, what might go wrong. Which makes Jeanette a remarkably convenient target. Her menopause is conspicuous, but her value is much less so.
Twenty-five years of judgement doesn’t appear as a line item. Neither does instinct for people, an artfully effective negotiation style, or an ability to sense when something is about to hit the fan before anybody else notices.
None of that is magic. It’s years of pattern recognition built from difficult conversations, risks that paid off and plenty that didn’t, deadlines skidded under, and lessons learned the hard way. Skill, nuance, finesse and experience all compressed into something that now looks like knack. Those things tend to become most noticeable just after the person who had them has left.
And once you include them in the calculation, the apparently obvious decision becomes considerably less obvious. In 2023, CIPD research found that 27% of working women aged 40 to 60 who had experienced menopause symptoms said their career progression had been negatively affected.
That's an awful lot of Jeanettes.
The bit nobody writes on the scorecard
There may be another reason Jeanette’s recent disruption bears more weight than it deserves. She dares to be fifty-one.
Smart, commercially astute, experienced and extremely good at what she does, but no longer fitting quite so neatly into the picture many of us have internalised under the heading of female “potential”.
That picture is often young. Energetic. Polished. Ambitious. Visibly going somewhere. Preferably with excellent hair and no need to discuss her ovaries.
Nobody is sitting around the promotion table saying, “Jeanette isn’t sexy enough anymore.” That would be absurd. But there is a more subtle version of it.
A younger man can be described as dynamic, hungry and full of potential. A woman in her fifties can possess considerably more knowledge, judgement and commercial nous and somehow find herself being discussed in terms of whether she still has the energy for the next step. Smart, but no longer quite so shiny.
Men can absolutely be judged for getting older at work. They may be seen as too expensive, less flexible or too set in their ways. But ageing can also confer something on men that it does not always confer on women: gravitas.
A fifty-five-year-old man can look seasoned. A fifty-five-year-old woman can find herself seeming, somehow, less like “potential”. And menopause arrives at a particularly unhelpful moment in that story.
A woman who may already be moving out of the cultural spotlight suddenly looks tired, forgets the occasional word, asks for flexibility and has a desk fan pointed directly at her face.
It is surprisingly easy for “she is having a tough time” to slide into “perhaps she is past her best”. Those are not the same statement. And if we are going to make decisions about somebody’s future based on the second one, we should at least be honest enough to acknowledge how we got there.
Sometimes it really does affect the work
Let's say the uncomfortable bit out loud. Sometimes menopause really does affect performance.
If you have been sleeping for four hours a night for weeks, concentration may suffer. If your memory is all over the place, things may get forgotten. There may be days when fatigue, headaches, joint pain, anxiety, or simply feeling physically awful make somebody less effective than they usually are.
Jeanette’s colleagues may notice and even have to pick up some of the slack, which matters too. If Sarah has covered the early shift three times this week because Jeanette has had another dreadful night, Sarah is allowed to find that annoying.
Being supportive does not require everybody else to develop limitless patience and absorb whatever lands on their desk. But workplaces already deal with fluctuations in human performance all the time.
If someone has been awake all night with a sick child and arrives the next morning looking like something out of Shaun of the Dead, we pour them another coffee and understand that today may not be the absolute pinnacle of their professional capability. We don’t usually reinterpret their entire career through that one exhausted morning.
Someone recovering from an operation gets a period of reduced capacity. Someone going through a bereavement or divorce may not be firing on all cylinders. A brilliant employee can have a horrible six months because they are dealing with things at home. We understand context.
The difficulty with menopause is that symptoms can fluctuate and there may not be a nice, predictable end date to put in the calendar. That creates genuine operational questions about workload, cover, fairness and what the role requires - and those questions deserve sensible answers.
What they don’t deserve is a shortcut from “her performance is being affected at the moment” to “she is no longer the person for the bigger job” because those are two very different judgements.
This is where good management lives
If Jeanette’s symptoms are affecting her work, then the sensible response is to look at what is happening, what the job requires and what might help. That is hardly revolutionary.
Workplaces already make practical adjustments when employees experience periods of ill health or difficult circumstances. We adjust shifts, change work arrangements, make time for appointments, and find ways to maintain service when someone needs additional support. Menopause belongs in the same category of inclusive, everyday, grown-up problem-solving.
Jeanette might be sitting at a desk, but she could equally be standing in front of thirty fourteen-year-olds, scrubbed into an operating theatre, supporting a grieving family in a funeral home or halfway through teaching a fitness class.
I’ve had almost comedic hot flushes while teaching HIIT. When you’re already hot, working physically, responsible for a room full of people and expected to keep talking, cueing, watching technique and looking as though everything is completely under control, it is no laughing matter. To be fair, we did laugh, but you get the point.
Air conditioning might solve one problem beautifully and be completely irrelevant somewhere else. It might mean different clothing, access to water, changing the timing of a task, temporarily altering a shift, or having somebody available to step in for five minutes without having to draw a diagram to explain why.
And let’s not forget that perimenopause can involve biblically heavy and unpredictable periods, which present a rather different set of practical difficulties.
The point is that people have different symptoms, different jobs and different working environments. What helps one person may be useless to another.
Some adjustments will be straightforward and inexpensive. Others will need more thought, particularly where staffing, safety or the requirements of a role limit the options. And if Sarah is doing two jobs to accommodate Jeanette, that isn’t a satisfactory solution either. Supporting one person shouldn’t mean simply passing the problem on to someone else.
This does require management; it just isn’t necessarily particularly exotic management. Quite often, the requests that the women we speak to have made are remarkably modest.
If Jeanette were a rock star, this would be an exceptionally undemanding rider. No twelve white orchids, imported mineral water chilled to exactly eight degrees or bowls of confectionery sorted by colour. She might want the room cooler, some flexibility after a dreadful night and the occasional ten minutes to regroup.
For twenty-five years of experience, judgement and expertise, I’d be inclined to book the dressing room.
But the point is not that every adjustment is easy, or that every promotion decision should favour the person with the longest CV. Josh deserves a fair assessment too.
The point is that we should assess both candidates on their skills, performance, suitability for the role, and the evidence available to us. Not allowing one person’s visible difficulties to dominate the entire conversation.
Back to those two CVs
So before we make the decision, there are a few more things worth establishing.
How much of Jeanette’s recent change in performance relates to symptoms that might be completely manageable? Have reasonable adjustments been considered, and have we looked at whether they work?
What does this role need, and how do both candidates measure up against those requirements? Are we giving fair weight to Jeanette’s experience and capabilities, as well as Josh’s strengths and potential?
And, maybe most importantly, are we deciding on evidence, or have a few lazy assumptions about menopause and middle-aged women found their way onto the agenda?
Jeanette may still turn out to be the wrong candidate. Josh may be exactly the person the business needs. A fair decision doesn’t require us to choose Jeanette.
It requires us to recognise the difference between assessing somebody’s current circumstances and making assumptions about their future.
Jeanette may be having a difficult year. That tells you something about this year. It does not erase the twenty-five that came before it, or tell you what the next ten will look like.
P.S. Earlier this week, Olivia Colman walked for Miu Miu with glorious grey hair, and I practically climbed on my chair and applauded.
We've always had silver foxes, wise, confident, sexy and somehow more distinguished with every wrinkle. I'd like to see more silver vixens getting the same treatment. Women whose experience, confidence and authority make them more valuable, not less.
And not just on the catwalk. Around the boardroom table would be a good start.