Ending the taboo of the menopause in the workplace

24 Jul 24

Thousands of women leave public sector jobs every year as a result of the menopause. Finally, the issue is showing on employers’ radars.

flight radar 1 - CREDIT - shutterstock - 2278534209

 

Lynda Bailey was a police inspector with West Midlands Police when she started to experience menopausal symptoms.

“Like so many people, I hadn’t got a clue what it was,” she says.

“I started to lose confidence, self-esteem; I didn’t feel I could do my job anymore.

“I thought I’d got dementia and that this was it: I was suicidal, the full works.”

It was after she was signed off work for three months that she began to have an inkling of what was going on. Her manager suggested that she return in a less pressurised role without supervisory responsibility, but Bailey was still too unwell to cope.

“I used to cry on the way to work on public transport,” she remembers. “Some days I would go in, take my coat off, put it back on again and leave.”

Her manager’s understanding gave her the space she needed to grasp that her symptoms were menopause-related, and, in an organisation of 11,000 people, that she was not alone.

She became the menopause lead for the West Midlands Association of Women in Policing and started working with others to raise awareness and provide support for what, for many, can be a confusing and destabilising experience.

“It sneaks up on you,” she says. “When I look at it retrospectively, my confidence had started to drop a long time before the crisis, when I hadn’t realised what it was.”

 

flight radar 2 - credit - shutterstock -2278534209

 

Impact

Even without the symptoms of menopause, long-serving police officers will inevitably be affected by the stressful, highly emotional environment in which they work.

“You think, am I burnt out? Have I lost the plot? Can I just not do this anymore?” says Bailey.

“In a very male-dominated environment, it’s hard to say that stuff out loud. But I was a leader in my organisation, so I thought, if I can’t talk about this, who the hell is going to be able to?”

Five years ago, the first attempt was made to understand the impact of menopause on policing nationally.

The survey, carried out by the Police Federation of England and Wales, revealed that more than three-quarters of respondents found menopause symptoms either moderately or extremely problematic at work.

Overall, a fifth said that they had considered leaving their jobs because they struggled to deal with the menopause at work; this increased to 44% among respondents who found their symptoms extremely problematic.

Based on that data, national guidance on the management of menopause was published two years later, setting out minimum levels of support that should be available across all 43 English and Welsh police forces.

Wake-up call

According to Hayley Aley, menopause lead at PFEW, the survey acted as a wake-up call for policing on the risk posed by menopause to their sickness absence and retention rates – especially where the data was sufficiently granular to lay bare the performance of individual forces.

“It was almost naming and shaming if I’m honest, because we tried so many other different methods to try to get them to sit up and take notice. In the end, the best way forward was to show them the business case,” says Aley.

The results of a second survey, launched late last year, are due shortly, but Aley expects it to show that despite pockets of good practice – she highlights Hampshire, Thames Valley and West Midlands as leading examples – support for women affected by menopause remains patchy.

One of the biggest issues is how sickness absence is recorded, she says, as not all forces offer ‘menopause’ as one of the available options for employees reporting absence from work.

“In 2024, how can it be that as a police officer if you need to take a day off through sickness the dropdown list has ‘biliousness’ on it, but you cannot put ‘menopause’?” she asks.

“If a force doesn’t understand the scale of staff that are having to take time away from the workplace because of menopause, then how does it know it has a problem?”

She believes the inability to accurately report menopause as a reason for absence, combined with the continued “stigma and shame” of doing so, masks the true scale of the issue.

“It encourages people to lie and say they need to take sickness absence for some other reason, or to take leave – people are taking annual leave rather than [admitting] they’re poorly and struggling with the effects of menopause,” she says.

“They think it will affect their future career to say they’re not at the top of their game, so they can’t honestly say [their absence] is through menopause.”


Menopause matters for local authorities

Pam Parkes, president of the Public Services People Managers Association and a commissioner at Birmingham City Council, says menopause is a business-critical issue for local government.

“At a time when councils are experiencing skills shortages, it is imperative to link menopause support to retention and attraction objectives,” she says.

“With a workforce heavily skewed towards older, female workers – in some councils, as many as 70% are female, of whom 50%-70% are aged 50-plus – it makes sense to support the wellbeing and performance of our largest cohort.”

While there is no ‘right’ way to support employees, says Parkes, there are several ways a council can drive best value from menopause support.

Those with contractual arrangements for occupational health should ask their provider to prioritise support for individuals and to run sessions on menopause awareness in the workplace, she says.

Otherwise, councils could consider partnering with a credible specialist menopause support organisation to gain access to best-practice advice and resources, tailoring the programme to their specific strategic workforce needs.

She also suggests ongoing employee engagement with menopause support, with leaders championing the support available to normalise conversations about menopause, as well as separate awareness and training events for managers and staff.

Parkes stresses that evaluation should be a key component of any programme. “As your target demographic transitions from peri- to post-menopause, it’s important to check that support still aligns business, staff and manager needs,” she says.


Guidance

The fact that national guidance now exists is a major achievement, given that getting 43 forces to sign up to anything is an “absolute nightmare”, she says. But the risk is that it ends up gathering dust on a shelf in the chief constable’s office, alongside a myriad other policies and procedures.

“What happens is that there’s a big push, everyone gets on board, it works for a very short while… then it just gets left,” she says.

“They do group cafés for this, and they have mentors for that, then they go, tick, we’ve done that now, move onto the next thing, so then it loses its momentum and gets parked.”

She hopes the release of data from the follow-up survey will put menopause firmly back on the agenda.

“The aim of the report is to shine a light back on the forces – to say, right, what are you going to do now, because you really need to nail this,” she says.

“Our next goal is to get the forces to realise that there should be an absolute standard, and it should be the same everywhere.”

Ultimately, however, the full impact of menopause on the workplace will not be understood until there is far greater knowledge – both among the medical profession and women themselves – of what menopause is and how it manifests itself.

The number of women who quit their roles prematurely, unaware that their symptoms are, in fact, menopausal, is unknown.

Because of the age-group that menopause hits, many of those affected will be experienced professionals at the height of their careers.

Derbyshire chief superintendent Maria Fox, now on the point of retirement, suffered burnout four years ago as a result of a range of physical and mental health symptoms that eventually overtook her, including acute perimenopausal stress.

“In policing, you keep going and you keep going – until you can’t,” she says.

Fox, who wrote about her experiences in her book Crisis to Comeback: A Roadmap to Health Transformation After Burnout, was forced to go on a voyage of discovery about her own health after being failed by GPs who were “woefully ill equipped and lacking in understanding” when it came to the menopause.

Understanding

She considers herself lucky to have had an understanding line manager, who helped to put in place reasonable adjustments in terms of flexible working until she fully recovered.

“He really got it, and was very caring, and gave me the space to get better and flourish again,” she says.

Without him, she doubts she would have been able to go on to gain promotion and take on her leadership role in promoting menopause awareness across the police service.

She chairs a national action group, which aims to share best practice and get all police forces up to the same basic standard, using her own experience to keep the issue at the forefront of minds.

“Unless these things are constantly being drawn to people’s attention, it’s easy for it to go off the radar,” she says.

flight radar-3 - CREDIT - shutterstock - 2278534209

 

Integration

As well as senior leadership buy-in, she wants to see the integration of menopause training for managers at all levels to create a culture of openness and honesty across the organisation.

“Where it’s going wrong is where you have young supervisors, often male, with no exposure to or training on the impact of this transitional stage in a female’s life. Many just get embarrassed if anybody brings up anything hormonal,” she says.

“There needs to be a greater sense of maturity and emotional intelligence.”

She believes a greater focus on encouraging police forces in every region to support each other will make it easier to hold every force to account and to drive up standards nationally.

“We’re trying to transition to a more regional approach to this, so we can really utilise the forces that are moving forward to help those neighbouring ones that need scrutiny and support to improve,” she says.

Overall, she is optimistic about the future, citing progress on normalising reasonable workplace adjustments and appropriate adaptations to uniform, but says that work needs to become mainstream.

“It’s in a better place than it was 10 years ago [but] we’re not going to influence consistent organisational change with scattered pockets of good practice,” she says.

Bailey, who after retiring from policing went on to co-found Talking Menopause, an organisation that provides professional training in menopause openness and awareness, believes passionately that culture change depends not just on policy but on senior leadership buy-in, lived experiences and allies.

The fact that more and more males are joining her organisation’s champion courses because they want to be better managers is a hugely encouraging sign.

“We need male allies – it’s not going to work without them,” she says.

“It’s about taking it seriously, because it’s real.

“It’s about all managers being trained in menopause, because if you manage people, you manage menopause.

“And it’s about a level of consistency, so everybody is getting that right level of support for them.”

Image credit | Shutterstock

Did you enjoy this article?

AddToAny

Top