October is Menopause Awareness Month.
I’m still in a WhatsApp group for a road I haven’t lived in for six years. Quite a few of us have moved now, and at some point it was renamed “The Defectors”. It’s prime meme territory.
One of the people in it used to be headteacher of a large independent school.
She was one of those people everybody seemed to love. The teenagers, the teachers, the parents, the dinner staff and cleaners all loved her.
Me too.
She was brilliant at the job and genuinely passionate about it.
During menopause, she asked the organisation that actually owned the school for some pretty reasonable adjustments. The response made things so difficult that eventually she gave up trying to make it work and left.
We all said, “But you’re the headteacher. Surely you get to make that call?”
Apparently not.
The school then spent the best part of a year without a permanent head while they tried to fill her shoes.
I’ve thought about that quite a lot since.
We’ve been doing Menopause Awareness Month in the UK for well over a decade. Which feels like long enough to ask whether awareness is still the thing we’re short of.
Most organisations can point you to something they have done about menopause by now. Policies, webinars, toolkits, maybe even a menopause champion.
Take 100 points all round. Great stuff.
But there is one box I’d particularly like to tick: what changed afterwards?
I want to know whether people felt more confident raising a problem, whether managers responded better when they did, and whether someone could go for a promotion without wondering if menopause might count against them. I want to know whether any improvements were still there six months later.
Most of all, I want to know whether anyone went back to check.
Around one in ten women who have worked through menopause have left a job because of their symptoms. In one financial-services study, almost half said menopause had made them less likely to apply for promotion.
Almost half.
And some workplaces are absolutely nailing this. They’re listening, adapting, checking what works and keeping good people as a result.
But across UK workplaces as a whole, those figures suggest we still have some distance to go in bridging the gap between providing support and creating an environment where people feel confident using it.
Fans, air conditioning, flexible working, somewhere quiet to take a break, access to cold water, uniform adjustments, more control over working hours and the option to work from home can all make a real difference.
Of course they can. They are sensible, practical adjustments.
But if that is where menopause support begins and ends, it can become a little too focused on making the woman more comfortable while everything around her carries on exactly as before.
Here’s your fan, your quiet room and permission to come in at ten. Off you pop.
There is something slightly patronising about reducing support to comfort and flexibility while the bigger questions go untouched.
Is the workload realistic? Do managers know how to respond? Do people feel safe asking for help? Is menopause affecting progression?
And are we, somewhere along the way, making it easier to replace experienced women than to keep them?
That is the bit I’m interested in.
Because an organisation can have a menopause policy, good intentions, and a folder full of resources, and still have no real idea of what menopause is doing to confidence, progression, retention, or day-to-day performance.
And that is a very different problem from awareness.
At Human Upgrade, we start by finding out what is happening in the organisation itself.
Where are people getting stuck? What are managers finding difficult? What in the working environment is making symptoms harder to manage? Is the support already there being used, and is it making any measurable difference?
Only then does it make sense to decide what the organisation needs next.
Sometimes that might be training. Sometimes it is manager capability, working practices, practical adjustments and better routes into support. Usually it is a combination.
The important bit is that somebody goes back afterwards and checks. Because it would be a shame to put all that time, money and good intention into support, then never find out whether it made a difference.
If you can tell me what you have put in place for menopause, but you can’t yet tell me what changed because of it, that is probably the more interesting conversation.
That is what our Menopause at Work workshop programme is designed to help organisations find out.