Why is “Menopause” a NSFW Word?

At the peak of their careers, nearly 50 million women in the United States workforce aged 35+ will experience menopause symptoms that can last a decade or longer. Massive physical and emotional costs aside (menopause also often overlaps with other radical life changes like empty nesting and divorce), the financial toll is staggering. 

Menopause costs women ~$1.8 billion in lost working time per year.

What can women in the workplace do? Currently, there’s no good choice. 

If you take a career break (maybe for the second or third or fourth time if you’re a mom), your earning potential plummets (again). This really hurts us because women live longer than men and tend to make less than men in the same job throughout their careers. 

That’s the best-case scenario. Because presumptions about your age didn’t get in the way of your offer to return to work. One Harvard Business Review report from 2023 found that search committees chose not to hire women between the ages of 40–60 because of “impending menopause” and “menopause-related issues.”

If you power through your job, you could really struggle. A 2023 report of 8,000+ women found that almost half (47%) of women surveyed found their work performance disrupted by perimenopause and menopause-related symptoms. Most women surveyed didn’t feel adequately supported at work, and only 26% said they received support from formal work policies or programs. 

What’s worse: Most women surveyed chose to stay silent at work about their experiences, refraining from communicating about their menopause journey with their managers, HR departments, or senior leadership. 

We’ve heard this directly from the Ellevest community, too. They recognize that menopause is difficult to talk about … because no one is talking about it. Rather than broaching the subject, women have been conditioned to struggle silently, to tough it out, to hold it together. And society, including the workplace, has been conditioned to be complicit in it.

At Ellevest, we know that staying silent about historically taboo topics — like menopause and money — has left women worse off. 

As leaders, we must remove the graphic subject matter label. To start, vocalize your support for women in this life stage. If you can say something that helps women feel like they don’t have to silence and disguise their experiences to be a valued employee, you should. 

Together, let’s advocate to make “menopause” a word that’s no longer NSFW. Menopause is a work-related issue.

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