We have made the menopause a woman's private problem, to be managed quietly and never mentioned. That framing is expensive, and women are the ones paying for it.
Consider the arithmetic of it. Women over fifty are the fastest-growing group in the workforce. A woman going through the menopause transition is often at the height of her experience and influence, exactly the person an organisation should least want to lose. And yet, again and again, she is the one who quietly steps back, turns down the promotion, or leaves altogether, and tells no one why.
The cost of the silence
The Fawcett Society, in the largest survey of its kind in the United Kingdom, put numbers to what many women already knew. Around one in ten women who had worked during the menopause had left a job because of their symptoms. Large numbers had reduced their hours or passed on promotion. The great majority said their workplace had no basic support in place, no policy, no adjustments, often no one they felt they could tell.
Read that again. Not one in a hundred. One in ten, leaving work, in silence, at the peak of their capability, because a normal biological transition met a culture with no language for it. This is not a private problem. It is a structural one, and it is dressed up as a private problem so that no one has to fix it.
What the silence does to a woman
The symptoms are real and, for some women, genuinely disruptive: the broken sleep, the brain fog that makes a sharp mind doubt itself, the anxiety that arrives without a reason attached. But the deepest damage is often not the symptom. It is the interpretation. A woman who has been told, implicitly, that this is hers to hide will tend to read her own struggle as decline. She concludes she is losing her edge, rather than moving through a phase. She apologises. She shrinks. And a woman who was, until recently, entirely sure of herself begins to question whether she still belongs in the room.
This is not the end of her power. Handled honestly, it can be the beginning of the most unapologetic chapter of her life.
Because there is another version of this passage, and women who find it describe it in remarkably similar terms. Freed from the monthly rhythm and from a lifetime of accommodating everyone else, something clarifies. Priorities sharpen. The tolerance for nonsense drops away. What the culture frames as an ending, many women experience, once the fear is met and named, as a coming into their own.
The menopause is a medical transition, and this piece is written for reflection, not as medical advice. If your symptoms are affecting your life, a GP or a menopause specialist can help, and support and information are available through the NHS and organisations such as the Menopause Charity.
Why we talk about it on the mountain
The Clearing does not treat the menopause and makes no claim to. What it does is refuse the silence. On the mountain, among women at the same crossing, the subject stops being shameful and becomes simply true, spoken plainly and met with recognition. For many women, saying it out loud in good company, and being met not with awkwardness but with understanding, is the moment the interpretation changes. Not a decline to be hidden, but a passage to be walked, deliberately, into the next and often boldest chapter.
References.
Fawcett Society, Menopause and the Workplace (2022), the largest UK survey of menopausal women at work.
General information only. For medical support, consult a GP or menopause specialist.