With one in 10 women leaving jobs due to menopause, HR leaders must act now to prepare their managers for supportive conversations
A fast-growing segment of working women is going through menopause – and in most organizations, the managers responsible for supporting them have no training to draw on and no policy to consult.
The Menopause Foundation of Canada’s (MFC) 2023 Menopause and Work in Canada report – based on a survey of more than 1,000 Canadian women aged 40 to 60 – puts the cost of that gap at $237 million in lost employer productivity and $3.5 billion to the Canadian economy annually, with one in 10 women leaving the workforce because of unmanaged symptoms. With MFC’s report projecting that female workers aged 45 to 55 will grow by 27 per cent by 2040, it’s a business case to address the issue. However, it starts with the human failure on a smaller scale: an employee summons the courage to raise menopause with her manager and the manager doesn’t know what to say.
Aimee Debow, founder of Menovate and a certified menopause coach based in Toronto, has testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women in its study of the labour force impacts of menopause and perimenopause, and appeared before Ontario’s Queen’s Park on the same issue. The pattern she says she observes across organizations is that the issue is being avoided.
“When I do these talks, for the mass majority, the first time anybody is saying the word menopause out loud is when I show up,” says Debow.
Losing experienced employees at their career peak
That silence carries a measurable cost. According to the MFC report, 32 per cent of women say menopause hurts their performance, 24 per cent actively hide their symptoms, and 87 per cent report that their employer either does not provide menopause support or they have no idea whether it does. As HRD Canada’s reporting on breaking the silence on menopause and the mid-career drop-off has shown, these patterns drive the departure of experienced women at the peak of their careers.
Lauren Chiren, chief executive officer and founder of Women of a Certain Stage, a menopause training and coaching organization in Bristol, U.K., contributed to the British Standards Institution (BSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committees that developed ISO 45010, the new global standard on menstruation and menopause in the workplace. She believes the manager knowledge gap sits inside a broader failure to invest in people leadership capability.
“We haven’t necessarily invested in soft skills training in our managers an awful lot since the pandemic,” says Chiren. “This is where using menopause or menstruation as a topic can help managers think about how to have enough awareness of each of their team members, to notice when somebody is perhaps not operating at that individual’s normal – so that they can step in and say, I’ve noticed XYZ, is there any help and support I can provide for you?”
What a good managerial response looks like
Two-thirds of working women say they wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking to their supervisor about menopause and that number goes up to seven in 10 regarding someone in HR, while nearly half would be too embarrassed to ask for help at work, according to the MFC report. How a manager responds to an employee’s disclosure that she’s experiencing menopause symptoms determines whether the conversation opens a door or closes one, according to Debow.
“It should not be guessing that she’s just stressed, or making it humorous, making assumptions about an age, taking responsibilities off her plate, or not keeping it confidential,” she says. “Like any conversation, it should be formal with private space and private time set aside, not rushed, and then it looks like being empathetic – acknowledging that this could be hard for her to be raising it, not asking medical-specific questions, letting her describe it in the way that she best needs to get it out.”
The question most managers never reach is the most important one: “Asking specifically what accommodations would be most helpful to her,” says Debow, who adds that needs differ enormously across workplaces – a nurse managing a 10-hour surgical shift faces entirely different challenges from someone in an open-plan office. The employee is the authority on what would make a difference, not the manager, she says.
Chiren says the manager’s role is to listen and act according to what the employee is experiencing. “Their job is never to diagnose somebody – it’s not to dictate what treatment pathway they should be on,” she says. “The manager needs to be trained in the soft skills and learn how to listen without judgment.”
Well-meaning managers still fail largely because fear of getting it wrong stops them from trying at all, according to Chiren. “People can be paralyzed by fear of getting it wrong, and that’s where we really do need to have that conversation ongoing, and just reiterate to our managers that it’s okay to make a mistake or get it wrong, but you have to try – even the organizations that have delivered management training once, it’s not enough,” she says.
What HR can do immediately for a supportive environment
Debow suggests an external specialist to open the conversation and give managers a foundation. “Until you have someone actually start breaking the ice and talking about it… maybe they don't even have to have a formal policy, but at least starting to discuss that menopause is here and it’s not going away,” she says.
Leaders need to also get the conversation going and create a safe environment, according to Debow. “The senior execs need to be talking about it, especially female senior execs who have gone through it and are willing to talk about it,” she says. “And HR needs to start talking about it.”
Auditing existing employee benefits to surface menopause-relevant coverage that many employees may not know they have can also help build a supporting environment, says Debow. “They already have counselling part of their program, most companies, and they have access to health coverage, which includes prescriptions or paramedical, physio, massage, pelvic health,” she says. “Some already have flexible work, but they don’t make the connection that those services can actually be for menopause care.”
HRD Canada’s coverage of menopause in the modern workforce and the need for better benefits alignment found that the gap between what employers already offer and what employees believe is available is a communication problem HR can close without additional spend.
One high-impact low-cost measure Chiren suggests is a regular social event for employees experiencing menopause – an informal space that normalizes the experience and builds the confidence to speak up. She also recommends training internal menopause champions, modelled on mental health first aiders: people with enough foundational knowledge to answer manager questions, identify reasonable adjustments, and signpost colleagues to support without requiring HR involvement in every conversation.
The business case for supporting employees with menopause
The cost of inaction runs beyond the 10 per cent who leave that MFC report revealed. “There's a lot of women who are not putting their hand up for promotion, or stepping down, or stepping back, and so you lose that potential of these really qualified people in your employee base from stepping up and taking these bigger roles – and not only are they quitting or stepping back, they're taking sick leaves,” says Debow. “It is definitively a cultural and employee wellness issue, but it also has significant financial implications to companies.”
Given these implications, the issue of employees experiencing menopause should be a key part of workforce strategy, says Chiren. “Don’t underestimate the commercial implications,” she says. “It’s not a wellbeing initiative – it connects to talent retention, employee engagement, productivity, leadership development, and workforce planning.”
Canada has no menopause-specific workplace legislation, though the issue currently falls under existing human rights frameworks. Debow, who recommended a federal mandate during her House of Commons testimony, notes that the U.K. and Australia have introduced requirements and that other jurisdictions are following. As HRD Canada has reported on how employers can support employees through menopause without breaking the bank, the earliest steps – opening the conversation, training managers, and mapping existing benefits – cost relatively little. They require a decision to start.
“Menopause has been stigmatized for generations and generations, so it's not a one-time kind of education thing and then we're done,” says Debow. “It's going to take over-and-over reinforcing that this is safe and that it's okay to bring this topic to work – we might as well start now.”
