Menopause Is a Leadership Issue, Not Just a Women’s Issue

Despite the inevitability of this situation, it seems that many men simply aren’t prepared. They don’t understand menopause, they aren’t ready for its impact on their female colleagues and partners and they really don’t know how to respond when it arrives. Many that I speak to don’t even believe that it’s anything to do with them or that they have any part to play, apart perhaps from keeping their head down and waiting for it to end.

Let’s take that further: The great majority of our workplaces and organizations have been designed by men. It’s still fairly common for parental responsibility to be seen as a ‘female problem’, nothing to do with a job role and therefore for organizations and managers to make little or no provision to support those impacted by parenthood.

Which, by the way, is most of the population.

If something as natural and blindingly obvious as people often have children can be ignored or treated as an irrelevance in the workplace, what chance do women have of getting supported through menopause?

So why might this be such a blind spot in organizations?

1. The aforementioned original design of the hierarchical organization, which assumed that it was filled by men, that their career and their job role was their primary concern and that anything else was a problem that should be left at home.
2. Embarrassment and a fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. In the conversations I’ve had with other men, most were reluctant to discuss it even in a conversation arranged for exactly that purpose. It may seem trivial as a reason to avoid the discussion, but many men feel that it isn’t their place to discuss it, don’t understand very much about it from either a biological or behavioural standpoint and see it as dangerous territory.
3. Perhaps most significantly of all, there is very little information or training given to men about what happens, why, how it affects women and what can be done to provide the right support.

In a world where men still fill so many of the leadership roles, this subject has to move into the mainstream. Men need to know far more about menopause and be far better prepared to support and help. Adjustments and adaptations to workplaces and working lives need to be commonplace, to enable women to continue to use their talents and capabilities for the good of their organizations.

Menopause tends to affect women just at a critical point in their careers. The absence of effective adjustments and support often means that they withdraw from the front line just when they are at peak impact and influence.

In a time when organizations are often crying out for talent, desperate to innovate and struggling to manage the mental health and capability of workforces under pressure, we need to enable our female colleagues to bring their best selves to work and to perform at their peak.

This isn’t going to go away. We need to act.