As a 44 year-old woman I am constantly made aware by armies of presumably well-intentioned but frankly wearing women in later life with programmes to make and books to sell and brands that might otherwise be struggling for relevance, that my next challenge as a working woman will be an unedifying descent into a frantically sweating mood-swinging, forgetful hot mess. How long can it be I wonder, before I succumb to the death spiral, the worst thing of all that happens to women among many bad things – you guessed it, the Menopause.
The menopause has, among society’s demi-monde, now been torpedoed to totemic status of tragedy, yet another ghastly female flaw we must endure, a period of our lives which will be frightening, humiliating, and something our employers must be very, very afraid of.
Thanks to said women scaremongering, the prospect of hiring someone my age is about as attractive as walking headfirst into a lorry. So you can forgive my horror when I read this morning that thanks to Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance employers can now be sued for disability discrimination if they fail to make “reasonable adjustments” for menopausal women, such as allowing them to work from home or lowering the temperature in the office, or failing to provide a quiet rest area for these poor desperate women. It also states that menopausal women should be protected from discrimination on grounds of age and sex.
The EHRC said “if a worker’s menopause symptoms amount to a disability under the Equalities Act 2010, failing to make reasonable adjustments will amount to disability discrimination.”
Who could be so dim-witted, so mind-bendingly stupid, so blind to the laws of unintended consequences, to realise this will just give men yet another reason to write us off?
If there was ever a more harmful piece of legislation for older women I’d love to hear it. For who could be so dim-witted, so mind-bendingly stupid, so blind to the laws of unintended consequences, to realise that that far from encouraging professions to welcome women in their forties and fifties this will give men yet another reason to write us off.
And even if we can convince someone to hire us despite the farcical, but now credible threat that we could sue them for not turning the heating down, how much of a jump is it to wonder that if a woman is so delicate, hormonal and vulnerable during this decade that she can’t be trusted with the most difficult tasks in an organisation?
Even Mariella Frostrup, the high priestess of the Menopause said “we campaigned really hard for what’s a perfectly natural life stage not to be considered a disability. I think this feels in many ways like a step backwards.”
It’s yet another hurdle us women in the workplace can ill afford.
It makes me laugh to remember how competitive my female friends and I used to be with each other after university. I remember telling one that I’d decided to skip the journalism postgraduate course she had just taken and had landed in the cream straight onto a national newspaper. She never spoke to me again. When a girlfriend was made editor of a magazine at 28 I practically fainted from envy. But looking back, I needn’t have bothered. Most of those women retired at 30. Nothing ends a woman’s career faster than kids and a husband who earns significantly more than her. Even when that doesn’t happen, women simply disappear from the workplace. According to a recent McKinsey report the number of women in US in the C-suite is just 28 per cent. The number of female CEO’s running FTSE100 companies? 10.
When I started my career 23 years ago all the senior people were male. And guess what? So, if the moon isn’t made of cheese and if I want to progress in what is essentially a man’s world it’s highly unhelpful to keep on exaggerating my female frailties and difference.
Davina McCall and Meg Matthews et al have done good work putting the menopause on the radar in terms of heightening recognition of it on the medical agenda.
I don’t like to think of women suffering from brain fog googling Alzheimer’s symptoms because they don’t know what is wrong with them or doctor’s doling out anti-depressants to people who just need HRT. But we need to keep this in perspective – the experience of menopause varies dramatically and the vast majority of women experience no symptoms at all.
We women won the important battle which was the right to take a year off work after childbirth so we could spend important time with our children. Of course, we pay a price for that which men don’t – we are less attractive hires in our thirties. In my opinion that is a price well worth paying. What I’m not happy to do is pay the same price for something we gain nothing from and probably won’t even notice.
