Should I Take the Leave?

You’re exhausted. You’re barely sleeping, you can’t concentrate, and your confidence is shot. Things you’ve done easily for years now take twice the effort. Maybe it’s perimenopause, maybe it’s burnout, maybe it’s both. Your doctor suggests taking time away from work.

For some, the first thought might be “thank goodness.” But, for most, it’s “what is this going to do to my career?”

That was my first thought, and I didn’t take the leave because of it. As we get more open about peri/menopause, mental health and burnout at work, we tell people to use the support available to them. Take the leave. Ask for the accommodation. Tell your manager what you need. All of that is reasonable advice. But most of us in the corporate workplace make wonder whether they’ll still be seen the same way when they come back.

Just this month I learned of two women, mid-40’s who took the leave – one was let go while on leave, the other let go a week after she returned from leave. I don’t know all the details of each, and no one can say for sure whether the leave caused it. But I know what stories like that do. Women hear them, and they remember them. So, when they’re deciding whether to ask for help, they’re weighing more than the health benefit of stepping away. They’re weighing the career risk. Will people think I can’t handle pressure? Will my manager stop giving me the hardest assignments? Will I still be considered for promotion? Will it come up at performance review time, or in the next reorganization?

Those fears sit inside a workplace culture that has long rewarded the “ideal worker,” the person who always seems available, productive and unaffected by whatever is happening outside of work. A 2025 paper in Gender, Work & Organization looks at how those ideal worker expectations contribute to the silencing of menopause at work.

That makes “just take the leave” a lot more complicated than it sounds.

Sometimes leave is exactly what someone needs. When that happens, the organization has to answer another question: what happens when she comes back? Return to work should mean deliberately bringing her back in. Giving her meaningful work. Putting her back in the important conversations. Talking about what’s next and ask what she wants. Keep developing her. Keep investing.

I worry that we’ll build better leave and accommodation policies without changing the assumptions underneath them, and we’ll end up with workplaces that are technically supportive where women still don’t feel safe using the support.

I want women to be able to make decisions about their health based on what they need, not on fear of what asking for help might say about their ambition. And I want managers to understand that a season of recovery tells you very little about what she can do over the next five or ten years.

A season isn’t a ceiling. Maybe that’s the principle our leave policies have been missing.

If you’re debating a leave, let’s talk. If you’re worried about the upcoming performance review cycle, stay tuned for a free workshop I’ll be offering on how to keep yourself in the room.