senior‑led buy-in and championing; physical environment, in terms or layout or fabrics and uniforms used in the workplace; line management due to supervisors often being the first point of contact; and education and awareness through policy and training for all staff that explains menopause and the benefits of corresponding workplace support. Why ‘outing’ is not the answer Notwithstanding these practices, there are several enduring challenges and tensions around menopause in the workplace. One of the most contentious areas is disclosure and whether or how employees share their experience with managers, colleagues or central functions such as HR. Disclosure around menopausal symptoms remains a challenge for both employees and managers. On the one hand, accessing support may require employees having to open up about their menopause, which many feel is a private experience. Recent employment tribunals suggest that there should be an explicit and formal disclosure in order to make a claim of discriminatory behaviour, or unfair dismissal due to symptoms that are deemed to be ‘disabling’. On the other hand, given the lingering stigma around reproductive health and ageism, managers should never inadvertently ‘out’ someone as menopausal or ask questions that are viewed as overly personal or intrusive. The difficulties around talking about menopause also mean that in the UK and other countries in Europe, the issue of specific ‘menopause leave’ has emerged. Advocates such as the UK government’s Women and Equalities Committee have emphasised how this is a fundamental right that would prevent women permanently leaving the workforce. Others have argued that managers may use this as a way of avoiding their responsibility to consider more creative solutions and support mechanisms that enable employees to keep working through what can be a lengthy menopausal transition over a number of years. The example of working from home gives us an insight into this; while some employees find this helps them to manage symptoms and continue to work, others feel it exacerbates symptoms through a lack of ergonomic working conditions, or by increasing a sense of anxiety through isolation. More cynically, working from home and menopause leave may also mean managers are able to have an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach to this biological process. Women’s health is central to a thriving and productive economy and inclusive world. Alongside healthcare and policymakers, business schools have a vital role to play in mainstreaming menopause as an area that should be on every organisation’s agenda. Part of this involves ensuring that discussions of employee health and wellbeing are not consigned to options or elective courses around equality, but rather are seen as an area of strategic importance to business success. Business education and research is also vital for understanding some of the market dynamics that operate around menopause and its ‘sister’ experience, menstrual health,
up in 2003 by Colin Duncan and Wendy Loretto from the School of Management at the University of Edinburgh, women at work are “never the right age”, with middle-aged females facing being either problematically stereotyped as cranky old women, or invisible and overlooked for promotion. They are also often delegated to ‘mothering’ roles that carry little formal organisational recognition or reward, as noted by Leanne Cutcher at the University of Sydney Business School in her study of maternal managing and older women at work. Workplace environments and structural factors can often have an accidental or inadvertent impact on the experience of menopause. This can be as a result of excluding the phenomenon as an explicit and legitimate reason for accessing flexible working practices, or management systems not allowing employees to cite menopause as a reason for taking time off, triggering absence management processes. Elsewhere, symptoms may become more bothersome due to hotdesking or a lack of localised temperature control that intensifies fluxes in body temperature. Alternatively, defaults of one-hour meetings leave little time in between for bio breaks or working out the most comfortable place to sit, stand or locate oneself should symptoms manifest. Not only is the experience of menopausal support different across organisations and sectors, but it can differ depending on where in the organisation you are situated. One recent study of NHS workers revealed that whether your line manager was male or female made a difference to perceptions around menopause. Moreover, those who were on higher job grades were more confident in disclosing menopausal symptoms, with only 27 per cent feeling their manager would require medical evidence to support absences or request a change to working practices, compared with 42 per cent of those earning £30,000 or less. Given that menopausal healthcare suffers from an unholy trinity of under-diagnosis, late diagnosis and misdiagnosis, the need for corroboration from a third party has a significant effect on employees in terms of feeling heard and recognised. A variety of workplace mechanisms can have a positive impact. For example, one study led by Emily Bariola, senior research manager at Orima Research in Australia, suggested that higher levels of supervisor support were independently associated with reporting less severe menopausal symptoms. Elsewhere, there is evidence that the ease of accessing low-cost but high-impact solutions to support menopause, such as fans, has a positive effect not only in terms of practically supporting symptoms, but also symbolically signalling a solutions- orientated and supportive workplace. The good news is that when beginning to implement menopause support at work, organisations rarely have to start from scratch. There is now high-quality and freely available advice about how to support menopause at work that centres around five key areas, summed up as MAPLE in one study we conducted. This stands for micro-accommodations through low-resource, high-impact solutions; allyship through
24 | Ambition | NOVEMBER 2024
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