Menopause support inside organizations is a communications problem before it’s a benefits problem.
Most organizations that say they support menopause have written something down. A policy on the intranet. A line in the wellbeing guide. Maybe a lunch-and-learn in October.
Then you look at what people say when they’re asked. In a 2023 survey of Canadian women aged 40 to 60, 70% said they wouldn’t feel comfortable raising menopause symptoms with HR. Sixty-seven percent wouldn’t tell their supervisor. (Menopause Foundation of Canada with Deloitte, n=1,023.) And in research from the British Standards Institution across seven countries, six in ten women said they have never heard their employer proactively talk about menopause support.
So the policy exists, and nobody feels safe using it. That is a communications failure, and it is one we know how to fix.
I know how this feels from the inside
For eighteen years, my endometriosis went unnamed. Then came a cancer diagnosis, and treatment pushed me into chemical menopause almost overnight. The surgery that followed was the one that finally found the endometriosis. Everything arrived on the same day.
I’ve spent my career as a communicator, and I still didn’t have the words. What I had was a phone full of screenshots and a notes app full of half-questions for my doctor. I couldn’t work out how to describe what was happening in my body without sounding like I was making it up.
If that’s where a professional communicator ends up in a doctor’s office, imagine the one-on-one with a manager.
Silence is a message
Employees read what leaders don’t say as carefully as what they do. When no executive has ever said the word “menopause” out loud, the absence works as an announcement: this is private, this is risky, handle it yourself.
Every comms professional knows what happens in an information vacuum. It gets filled. Here it fills with fear: of being seen as less capable, less committed, past it. In the Canadian survey, 48% said they’d be embarrassed to ask for support that would actually make a difference—nearly a quarter had hidden symptoms at work. Three in ten expected to be seen as weak, old, or past their prime if they said anything.
I’ve been writing for a while about who gets to shape meaning inside organizations, and who is allowed to speak. Menopause is a clean test case. It affects a large share of the workforce, including many senior people, and it remains close to unspeakable. That silence follows a pattern in what gets treated as a legitimate workplace subject and what gets treated as a personal problem.
Three ways menopause comms goes wrong
The euphemism. “Life-stage support.” “Women’s wellness.” “Health and wellbeing resources.” If the label doesn’t say menopause, the person who needs it won’t find it, and the person who might have raised it won’t feel invited to. Vague language protects the organization from discomfort. It doesn’t protect the employee from anything.
The launch and leave. One campaign during awareness month, a well-designed intranet page, a few shares on the internal channel, and then nothing until next year. Menopause has no launch date. People hit it at different times, for different lengths of time, with different symptoms, and some, like me, arrive through cancer treatment or surgery with no gradual transition at all. Support that appears once a year is invisible for the other eleven months.
The announcement that outruns the reality. A pledge signed, a badge added to the careers page, a warm statement from the CEO. Then the first employee who asks a manager for an adjustment discovers the manager has never been trained, doesn’t know what’s on offer, and improvises. Employees talk. The gap between what you said and what happened becomes your reputation, and it travels faster than the announcement did.
What better looks like
Most of this costs little, provided comms treats menopause the way it treats any other change that depends on trust.
Say the word, early. In the title, the first sentence, the subject line. Plain language is a form of respect. (If you need a starting point, there’s an all-staff announcement template and language do’s and don’ts in the free toolkit listed below.)
Give leaders words that are theirs. A scripted statement of solidarity reads as a script. What lands is short, first-person and specific: what the organization is doing, what a leader has noticed, what someone can do next. Tell people what’s changing, not how you feel about it.
Equip managers before you announce. Most communication problems don’t show up in the meeting. They show up in the five minutes after. The equivalent here is the Monday morning when someone quietly tells their manager what’s going on. If the manager hasn’t been prepared for that moment, the rest of the program is decoration. A ten-minute manager crib sheet and a 45-minute training outline are a realistic place to start.
Make support usable without disclosure. This is the design principle I’d push hardest. If the only way in is to tell someone at work first, most people won’t use it. Give employees a way to understand what they’re experiencing, prepare for a medical appointment, and find the language to ask for what they need, all before they tell anyone anything.
Measure honestly, and say what you’re not measuring. Use of resources in aggregate. Manager confidence. Retention and participation among people in their late 40s and 50s. Not individual names, not symptoms. Being clear about what you won’t collect is part of what makes people willing to use the thing. (What to measure includes the things worth refusing to collect.)
The cost, in comms terms
The business case is real, and it’s worth being careful. The Canadian estimate from the Menopause Foundation of Canada and Deloitte research puts the annual cost of unmanaged menopause symptoms at around $3.5 billion, including roughly 540,000 lost workdays. Thirty-two percent of women in the survey said symptoms had hurt their performance at work. The share of Canadian women in employment drops 14% between ages 45 and 59, compared with 10% for men over the same years. In the UK, the Fawcett Society found in 2022 that 1 in 10 women had left a job because of menopause symptoms.
These are national and survey-based figures. They are not your organization’s numbers, and your own turnover and absence data will tell you more.
The part that doesn’t show up in any absence statistic may be the largest. In focus groups with the BC Nurses’ Union, some nurses described quietly moving off bedside nursing into desk roles, taking a pay cut, rather than asking for an accommodation. No report counts that as a menopause cost, yet it is paid all the same, quietly, by people who didn’t feel able to say why.
The standards are catching up
Two recent developments make this harder to put off.
On September 7, ISO published ISO 45010, the first international standard on menstruation and menopause in the workplace. It’s free to access. It covers workplace culture, policies, manager awareness and training, practical adjustments, and how to measure impact, and it sits inside the same family of occupational health and safety standards many large employers already use.
In the UK, the Employment Rights Act 2025 requires employers with 250 or more staff to publish equality action plans that include menopause support. Publishing has been voluntary since April 2026 and is expected to become mandatory from spring 2027, subject to secondary legislation. Legal counsel should shape anything a UK employer publishes.
Both point the same way. A published plan or standard is a communications document, and employees, candidates, and journalists will read it. Comms teams will be asked to help write it, and they’ll do it better if they’re in the room from the start rather than handed a draft to polish.
A test for your organization
Try this. Imagine someone on your team wants to know, tomorrow, what menopause support your organization offers. She doesn’t want to tell her manager. She doesn’t want to email HR.
How does she find out?
If the answer is that she has to disclose something first, the policy isn’t finished. And that’s a good place for comms to start.
World Menopause Day is October 18. If you’re going to say something, decide now what happens on October 19.
Resources
Free, from Nila (print, adapt, share; no login):
- The menopause-at-work toolkit, including a four-minute readiness check.
- Awareness and comms starter: announcement template, session outline, language do’s and don’ts.
- Manager conversation script and disclosure scripts.
- Sector by sector: health care, education, public service, retail, trades and self-employed work.
- The menopause champion pack for the internal volunteer driving the change.
Standards and frameworks:
- ISO 45010: Menstruation and menopause in the workplace (free).
- Menopause and the Workplace: Consensus Recommendations, 2024, The Menopause Society.
- Menopause Support Toolkit, 2025, Catalyst.
- How to Accommodate Menopause at Work, SHRM.
Canadian evidence:
- Menopause at Work in Canada, 2023, Menopause Foundation of Canada with Deloitte.
Erin Beattie is the founder of Engage + Empower Communications Consulting and of Nila, a menopause education and support platform. Nila offers workplace programs and publishes the free toolkit linked above, so this piece has a stake in the subject; the argument rests on the cited research.
Sources: Menopause Foundation of Canada with Deloitte, “Menopause at Work in Canada,” 2023 (Leger, n=1,023 women aged 40 to 60; includes BC Nurses’ Union focus groups); Fawcett Society, “Menopause and the Workplace,” 2022 (UK); ISO, “World-first International Standard launched…,” 7 September 2026, citing BSI research (n=6,494 women, seven countries); UK Employment Rights Act 2025 action plan timeline as summarized by DLA Piper (March 2026) and Farrer & Co (March 2026).
