World Menopause Month: Enough talk with no change – we need to move to action
Opinion
Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, employers with 250+ staff need to publish a menopause action plan from spring 2027. Kerry Nortcliffe looks at what makes a good policy.
World Menopause Day took place on 18 October, and all of this month has been Menopause Awareness Month. Now you may feel that, in the last few years, awareness is no longer something the menopause is struggling with. And while it’s true that the taboo around mentioning the menopause has been broken thanks to the efforts of Davina McCall and others, the support that should accompany that taboo-breaking hasn’t followed.
According to research from Serenova in March this year, of women who were in or past perimenopause, only 18% said their workplace has a menopause policy, and 37% said their employer gives no menopause support at all.
This lack of support has a real cost. According to CIPD research from 2023, of women aged 40–60 in work who have had menopausal symptoms, 67% say their symptoms have had a mostly negative effect at work, 53% have missed work because of symptoms, 23% have considered resigning and 14% plan to.
Bloom members who contributed to our Menofesto report have told us how silence and a lack of support have crushed their self-worth or made them feel useless at work.
One member told us:
My mum was treated for depression and left her job – it was the menopause, but we didn’t realise until a lot later.”
Those who are forced to leave the workplace due to lack of menopause support are also likely to hit a new barrier: the sheer difficulty of finding a new role as a midlife woman, as highlighted by journalist Stacey Duguid, who spent 16 months job-hunting at 52, as reported in The Times this summer.
Age is a massive issue for advertising, which, as we know, skews young. There are still far too many accounts of office “banter” about “the change”, or the concern that talking publicly about symptoms makes older women “even less attractive to employers”. And responses like “Most of our workforce are younger and not of the age where the menopause is relevant” are part of the problem.
However, this can’t be put off any further. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, employers with 250+ staff need to publish a menopause action plan from spring 2027. Each plan must include at least one action from the Government’s menopause list, explain why that action was chosen, be signed off by senior leaders, and be published on the gender pay gap reporting service. This means companies’ efforts will be public and comparable with other firms.
So what makes a good policy?
First, allow reasonable adjustments, including temperature control, fans, and quiet rooms; flexible hours and extended deadlines; someone to proofread on brain-fog days; and help with delegation. Most of this costs little or nothing – as the Menofesto puts it, “the smallest changes can make a world of difference.”
Make sure menopause-related absence doesn’t count against people under absence management rules, and revisit any schemes that reward staff for not taking sick days.
Consider up to five dedicated menopause leave days. Ensure health support is available, whether that’s counselling, private healthcare that covers menopause, mental health first aiders, and a menopause champion who isn’t the person’s line manager or HR, since not everyone feels comfortable talking to their boss.
That’s the policy, but policies can easily sit ignored in an HR handbook. There’s a telling gap here: Brightmine research found 45% of employers say they have a menopause policy, yet only 3% make it public – and in Serenova’s survey, fewer than one in five women said their workplace had one.
A policy no one knows about isn’t support. So we asked Bloom members how best to bake the policy into culture.
They advised writing the policy with the people it’s for, saying the policies that work best are developed with staff so they feel they own them. Ensure you get senior leaders behind it. In fact, the new law requires leadership sign-off, so for the bigger companies this is a legal responsibility, but it should be just as important for all companies.
Another key point was to train men and younger staff as well – and managers above all, since Brightmine found 60% of HR professionals say line managers have low or no confidence handling menopause issues.
One Bloom member said menopause “should be shared with men as readily as women.” Avoid talking about it as if it’s purely a medical condition, which one member said made her feel “patronised and slightly othered.”
Members also advised that you should keep talking about it all year. Make it part of wellbeing weeks and bring in outside speakers, so it isn’t a one-off every October.
One member’s company found a menopause session drew more interest than sessions on any other topic. Finally, publish your policy and measure how it is used.
This World Menopause Month should be the last one of talk and no action. Whether legally obliged to or not, having a menopause policy which is useful, used and usable is a key element in keeping valuable and experienced talent in your business and the wider industry and in winning back the accomplished talent that has left due to lack of support.
To learn more about what makes a great policy and why it matters, read Bloom UK’s Menofesto here.
Kerry Nortcliffe is the co- lead of Mpower and head of membership at Bloom UK