Recently, menopause has gone from taboo to mainstream, with celebrities turning “the change” into a status symbol and vocal clinicians becoming household names. Those brave women paved the way for more conversation, catalyzing focus and research on women’s health, and we should all be grateful. But what happens in media and pop culture rarely transfers to corporate culture.
As a 22-year corporate veteran, I (Kacy) make my living studying and speaking to employees in organizations. From New York to Houston, and from manufacturing associates to CFOs, I have encountered very few women who want to talk about menopause at work. Those who have talked about it typically described closed-door conference room confessionals with work friends they trust.
I knew why it took me years to talk about my own struggles with menopause at work: In 2021, I had never ever heard of perimenopause, and thought I was just losing my mind, which seemed like career suicide for someone responsible for designing well-being strategies for 50,000 people globally. I sought care on my own, and became increasingly curious about how other women were handling menopause at work.
At a conference, my team from The Fuchsia Tent and the Society for Women’s Health Research, Syreen’s organization, bumped into each other and discussed how to practically make menopause mainstream. Soon, we were coleading a study on menopause at work. We couldn’t have anticipated how much we’d learn from this study, or that one of our most surprising findings would be that comfort does not equal disclosure when it comes to menopause and work.
In the survey portion of “Menopause at Work: From Echo Chamber to Mainstream Practice,” an IRB-approved mixed-methods study of 1,110 U.S. employees across genders, ages, ethnicities, and work settings, 53% of women with symptoms said they would be comfortable telling their manager, but only 21% actually disclosed. The “comfort-disclosure gap” widened when it came to Human Resources, with 49% of symptomatic women saying they would be comfortable telling HR, but only 6% disclosing.
Why Women Say They Are Comfortable With Menopause, Yet Don’t Disclose
Across our roundtables we found that all genders were responsible for silencing when it came to menopause. A participant revealed that after pitching the idea of a menopause webinar, a senior executive told her, “Women have enough handicaps. We don’t need another one.” Our survey data showed that only 46% of workers identified their work culture as open to speaking about menopause.
Our survey didn’t ask what was behind the silence, but a literature review published by The Fuchsia Tent in March 2026 on menopause at work offers additional clues. Data shows that women’s fears of disclosure are well founded; nearly 80% of women in one global survey reported age-related discrimination at some point in their careers. Another global survey of nearly 2,900 women had 72% of respondents admitting to hiding menopause symptoms at least once at work.
What Does Silence Cost Businesses and Women?
If you have worked anywhere near benefits or menopause, you have heard the stat that menopause costs businesses $26.6 billion in health care costs and lost productivity, according to Mayo Clinic Proceedings. So why haven’t businesses done more? Benefits and resources tend to be dictated by population health data, but in 2022 only 14.7% of women aged 45-64 received a documented diagnosis of menopause, according to the Health Care Cost Institute. Claims data doesn’t accurately reflect the prevalence of menopause at work.
So if benefits departments don’t see menopause in the data and wait to hear about menopause from employees, our data shows that employees’ needs will likely remain invisible. In the study, 83% of employees said they would be comfortable responding to a colleague who needed support, but only 64% said they’d be comfortable starting a conversation about menopause. Menopause symptoms become a don’t-see, don’t-ask, don’t-tell situation.
Symptomatic women may pay an economic penalty as well. Economists estimate that the “menopause penalty” costs symptomatic women dramatically, with their earnings falling almost 10% by the fourth year after a menopause diagnosis. And that is when they stay employed.
In our survey, 33% of women with symptoms said they had considered leaving or reducing hours due to menopause symptoms. One participant told us, “I quit my job, in part, because I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t concentrate on work. If I had been in a different environment . . . I would probably have made it, but I didn’t feel supported.”
What Should Employers Do Instead of Waiting for Someone to Speak Up?
Since disclosure is unlikely in the workplace, and proactive support conversations with managers may be off the table, employers need to take steps to ensure they have the right benefits to support employees in the menopause transition, and most importantly, communicate these supports properly. Our external report lays out an employer roadmap in four key steps.
1. Audit existing benefits and programs before you add something new to the mix. Many of the benefits employers currently have may be helpful for menopause symptoms (e.g., medical benefits, telehealth, mental health benefits, and employee assistance programs).
2. Deliver support by integrating the benefits you already offer. This includes mapping current benefits coverage to the different menopause symptoms, and making the related prescription coverage explicit.
3. Communicate benefits in a way that all employees can access and understand them. Survey your workers to understand awareness of benefits offerings. Then vary communication styles and delivery to meet the unique needs of different work settings (e.g., factory versus office).
4. Treat compassionate dialogue as a universal life skill. Leadership training should cover the gamut of employee needs and not be siloed to menopause. Only 44% of managers globally have received management training, according to Gallup. Universal skills are needed first.
In our study, we asked those 1,110 people what they wanted when it came to workplace menopause support, and 56% of the comments fell into three categories: 1) compassionate culture, 2) flexibility in when, where, or how work gets done, and 3) access to affordable benefits. The goal shouldn’t be to make women talk about menopause. It should be to provide us with affordable, easy access to care: the same things every employee wants regardless of age or gender.
