"Menopause isn't really an issue here" and why that's usually the tell

If you're confident menopause isn't affecting your organisation, it's worth asking what that confidence rests on. Because the nature of menopause at work is that it stays hidden and "no one's mentioned it" isn't the reassurance it sounds like.

Plenty of employers will tell you, quite genuinely, that menopause isn't really an issue for them. No one's raised it. Nothing's come up. It doesn't feel like a live problem.

I'd gently suggest that's often the clearest sign that it is.

The assumption underneath

When an organisation concludes menopause isn't an issue for them, that conclusion almost always rests on one of two things: no one has raised it, or the person deciding hasn't experienced it.

Neither can actually tell you what's happening. One is the absence of complaints which, as we'll see, is exactly what you'd expect whether or not there's a problem. The other is a single person's experience standing in for everyone's which brings us to the first reason this is so easy to get wrong.

No two menopauses are the same

Menopause is not one experience. Some women barely notice it. Others are floored by it; disrupted sleep, brain fog, anxiety, joint pain, low mood and more, severe enough to reshape their working lives. Most are somewhere in between. And where a woman lands often has little to do with how healthy or resilient she is; it's simply how her body is navigating a major hormonal shift.

It varies within women, too, not just between them. For many it comes in waves; manageable one month, overwhelming the next. With perimenopause, the years leading up to menopause itself, often the most unpredictable of all.

So if you've been through menopause and found it manageable, that's genuinely good but it tells you almost nothing about what a colleague may be going through. And if you haven't been through it, it's easy to picture something milder and more uniform than the reality. That variation is the first thing that makes menopause so easy to underestimate.

Invisible by design

The second is that the women living it are often working hardest to make sure you don't see it.

A woman managing symptoms at work will frequently put enormous effort into appearing unchanged. She reworks the email four times so it still reads as sharp as ever. She quietly volunteers for less, so nothing slips in public. She books annual leave rather than call in sick. The better she is at her job, the better she is at hiding it which means the very people you'd least want to lose are the ones least likely to show it.

And she rarely says a word. Only around a quarter of women who've been unable to work because of their symptoms feel able to tell their manager the real reason (CIPD, 2019). To raise it is to risk being seen as less capable and for a woman who's spent decades being the reliable one, that's a risk she'll usually decline.

Silence isn't absence

Put those together, and the conclusion is hard to avoid: "no one's mentioned it" isn't evidence that menopause isn't happening in your organisation. It's evidence of silence which is exactly what you'd expect, given how varied and how hidden this is.

The maths makes it starker. Women over 45 are one of the fastest-growing groups in the workforce, and menopause lasts years, not months. So in any workforce with women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, someone is very likely living it right now. Unless your organisation is unusually small or unusually male, it's already here whether or not anyone has told you.

None of this is a criticism. It's genuinely hard to see something built to stay hidden. But "we don't have a menopause issue" and "no one has told us about our menopause issue" are very different statements and only one of them is something you can actually know.

What to do when you can't see it

If you accept that you can't know, from the outside, who's affected or how badly, the response changes. You stop trying to spot individuals and start building for the reality that some of your workforce is affected right now, invisibly.

That means two things working together. Making it genuinely safe to raise so the women who want to talk, can, without fear of being judged less capable. And, because most won't raise it however safe you make it, making sure something reaches them anyway: support they can access directly, privately, in their own time, whether they've told anyone or not.

The more honest question

So the more useful question isn't "is menopause an issue in our organisation?" which you can't truly answer from the outside. It's this: given how varied and how hidden it is, what would we need in place for it not to matter whether we can see it?

That's the problem we're working on at Hello Mimi. If you've been assuming this one wasn't yours to worry about, it might be worth a second look and we'd like to hear how you're thinking about it.

About this article This article is educational and general in nature, about the variability and invisibility of menopause at work. It is not medical advice; every woman's experience of menopause is different, and anyone with specific health concerns should be supported to seek care suited to their own needs. For guidance on your organisation's legal obligations, consult a qualified employment-law professional.