Kathleen Riach: Menopause support can help ensure women remain engaged in workplace

Yet many employers are still overlooking women over 45 as a talented, experienced, and highly skilled source of talent.

Ensuring that women remain engaged and motivated in the workforce for as long as they can, or want to, is vital for our economy. The participation of women is key to a thriving and sustainable economy and can also reduce pension poverty in later life. Gender equality also sits at the heart of a wellbeing economy where everyone prospers as well as leading to a significant increase in overall economic prosperity. And one of the best ways to achieve this is ensuring that organisations support employees going through menopause.

While sometimes not on the radar of businesses looking to recruit and retain staff, there is a strong business case for workplaces to become more menopause sensitive. Supporting menopause often involves creating opportunities for solution-orientated discussions or simply making existing policies open or relevant to menopausal employees. Feedback from employers in over 50 countries who have accessed the Menopause Information Pack Online (MIPO) suggests that best practice in menopause support can bring about wider benefits, such as providing opportunities that allow all employees and supervisors a space to proactively and productively discuss how their health and wellbeing interacts with their work before anything becomes a potential issue.

Workplace cultures can also make a huge difference to how comfortable employees feel about managing their symptoms at work. Although some women prefer to manage their menopause privately, for others, having to talk to a manager about menopause who responds with ‘too much information’, as was reported in a recent employment tribunal case, sends a clear message that their symptoms - and by extension they - are not welcome in the workplace.

Menopause marks the 12 months after a women’s last period, although the term menopause is often used to refer to the surrounding years around this that may be accompanied by a wide range of symptoms. Many of these such as joint aches or vasomotor symptoms - including the ubiquitous ‘hot flush’ - can be made worse by work environments, such as when employers are required to stand or sit for long periods or unable to control workplace temperature.

While the average age for menopause is 51, it can happen earlier, or be triggered by surgery or treatment for illnesses such as cancer. Although most women experience symptoms that can be managed at work, up to 25 per cent of women will, at times, experience symptoms that can disrupt their day-to-day work practices. Yet even in these cases, studies show supportive line management can significantly help employees to offset the impact of symptoms on work, as do relatively minor changes that have low resource implications.

At the same time, we need to note that there is an increasing schism between employees who are supported through menopausal transition at work, and those whose experiences of menopause are still ignored, overlooked or the target of discriminatory behaviours.

One reason for this is the uneven uptake of menopause support across different sectors or types of work in recent years. We know that a significant number of large corporate and public sector bodies now have guidance that aim to support employees going through the menopause. Much of this work has been assisted by a growing ‘menopausal market’, where providers supply training, policy recommendations and even opportunities to become accredited as a menopause friendly workplace.

Such an investment in these professional services can be valuable in transforming workplaces to become more sensitive to menopause, but it is not the only way, or even the best way for employers to approach supporting menopause in the workplace. There are now, for example a range of free menopause resources produced by professional bodies to help employers. However, in some cases, the cost and time needed for training and awareness raising to implement these can often be prohibitive for the small businesses who employ 12.9 million people in the UK.

More generally, the proof in the menopause-friendly workplace pudding will be the ability for menopause support or initiatives at work to survive budget and resource constraints during the economic downturn. This will depend on the extent to which it is embedded into operational practice and supported by leaders and champions in the workplace.

Moving forward, we need to ensure that we do not assume that policy or legislation is going to bring more employers onboard in creating menopause inclusive workplaces. Indeed, recent calls by MPs to make menopause a protected characteristic within Equalities legislation have had a mixed response.

An alternative approach could be enabling employment tribunals to recognise intersectional discrimination. In other words, any policy reform should centre on a legal recognition of the accumulated effects of age and gender discrimination, or ‘gendered ageism’ coming together, rather than a specific life course episode.

Whatever the future of menopause policy or practice holds hold for business, we need to be careful that supporting menopause in the workplace is seen as an opportunity rather than another burden on employers. Many campaigners start their call to actions by stating that one in four women are considering leaving the workforce due to their menopausal symptoms. While well meaning, these alarmist figures may have the opposite effect of making menopausal women seem a problematic and disengaged group of employees.

Instead, we need to start noticing that menopause is part of a broader economic story about how we rethink women over 50 as both an untapped pool of talent of highly resilient and motivated workers and future leaders, and a valuable and important part of our society.