We Stopped Whispering About Menopause at Work. Here’s Why.

Everything says it’s business as usual. Your calendar says you have a presentation at 10 a.m. It doesn’t say you’ve been wide awake since 3 a.m. Your Slack status shows you as active. It doesn’t show the brain fog making you read the same message three times. The conference room is set to 72°F. Your internal thermostat strongly disagrees. This is menopause at work. The workday may seem normal, but what you’re carrying through it is anything but. The invisible experience of menopause has another consequence: We don’t talk about it nearly enough, especially at work. Nearly half the workforce will experience menopause, yet its symptoms don’t keep business hours (so inconvenient, in our opinion). They can affect sleep, energy, memory, concentration, mood, and so much more, often during pivotal phases of a person’s career. Revathi, Global VP, Slack Success, knows that silence well. She went through perimenopause “quietly, without a name for what I was feeling,” which made her realize “how much I didn’t know about my own body.” But even when something is shared by so many, that doesn’t mean everyone experiences it the same way. How it shows up, when it starts and what someone needs vary…