Why older women dare not mention the M word

Or should we acknowledge our female-ness (with all the risks that entails) and encourage, cajole or demand the workplace to bend to us?

The challenges change throughout the life cycle of working women.

First, there are barriers to entry (only 9 per cent of women in tertiary education are studying STEM subjects, compared with a third of male students, Foley laments).

Then, there is the mid-career difficulty of what Foley calls “ensuring careers don’t get stuck in quicksand once children come along”.

Both those challenges are well documented and at least acknowledged, if not fixed.

But the later-life difficulties of working women are mostly ignored.

Women themselves are coy about them. Men are probably largely oblivious, or perhaps too chivalrous to speak of them.

“For women, there is an added layer, and that is the issue of menopause,” Foley told her audience.

“Yes you heard me right!”

Foley said that despite the fact that half the population went through menopause, it was not discussed enough.

There is almost no research on how it affects women’s careers in Australia, “which probably reflects the fact that it has not had enough focus or visibility”.

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But in Britain, menopause is coming out of the closet.

The British Parliament began an inquiry this year on menopause and the workplace.

It has heard that more than a million women in Britain have left their jobs because of menopause symptoms, at the very point when they should be moving into senior positions, and younger employees should be sponging up their experience.

More and more women in Britain are launching employment discrimination cases to do with menopause.

Women report being reluctant to speak to their managers about their (sometimes debilitating) menopause symptoms because the managers are men and/or younger than them.

The taboo is so strong that the British Medical Association reports even female doctors – experts on the body – are reluctant to speak about their own menopause experiences.

They fear doing so will damage their career, or that they will be ridiculed.

“We can be sure these same things are happening in Australia, and women are leaving work because of it,” Foley concluded.

The reluctant acknowledgement of menopause is bizarre when you consider it as a huge biological change that affects half the population.

Not so bizarre when you consider that women have always had to choose between acknowledging their biology, or trying to fit into workplaces created with a different norm in mind. If you think this is overblown, consider the skewing of medical studies to male bodies.

A study reported this week in the medical journal, Neurology, was just the latest example of this. It looked at 281 medical trials on stroke, conducted between 1990 and 2020.

Just over 37 per cent of the participants were women, but the average prevalence of stroke in women across the countries included in the trials was 48 per cent.

The famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal research project started in 1938, tracked 268 Harvard Sophomores over their lives.

It is a monumental piece of work that has shed light on human happiness, relationships, and the building blocks of what makes a good life.

But only in men because there were no women in the college when it began (very recently, some female cohorts have been included).

The push for recognition of menopause, and other biological events like menstruation, is interesting because there is something of a generational clash at play.

Some older feminists are reluctant to talk about hormones and hot flashes because they fear women, and female workers, will be stereotyped as at the mercy of their hormones.

Hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb.

But younger feminists are less timid, and they’re tired of pretending. They demand an end to period poverty, and some agitate for menstrual leave.

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Leave for pregnancy loss was recently added to the grounds for compassionate leave under federal legislation.

The biological travails of femininity are a personal matter, and difficult to legislate for. One suspects male legislators, and bosses, tread delicately on this territory, mostly for the right reasons. But when it comes to menopause, women’s embarrassment, and even shame, surely come from a place of self-protection.

In a world where women are still valued for their youth and sexual appeal, there is risk in women acknowledging they are ageing. In a workplace context, it could cost them. Quite literally.

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