The Most Expensive Menopause Benefit May Be the One You Don’t Offer

When companies talk about menopause at work, they usually start with accommodations: flexible schedules, temperature control, remote work, time for medical appointments. Those things matter. I just think we’re starting the business conversation in the wrong place.

Rather than thinking through the lens of, “what will it cost us to support her?” let’s start with, “what will it cost us if we lose her?”

Think about who we’re actually talking about. Menopause happens at a mean age of about 52. These aren’t people at the end of their careers. They’re executives, team leaders, technical experts, operators, managers and mentors, with 20 or 30 years of experience behind them and often another decade or more of meaningful contribution ahead. These should be some of the most valuable years they have.

The cost is real. Mayo Clinic researchers estimated that menopause symptoms account for about $1.8 billion a year in lost work time in the U.S., and $26.6 billion once medical costs are added.

Those are big numbers, but how do you put a number on the executive who quietly decides not to go for the next role? Or the woman who stops raising her hand because her confidence took a hit, or the leader who leaves because she’s convinced she can’t do the job anymore? Or the employee whose manager sees a temporary dip and quietly decides she’s no longer “high potential”?

The Washington governor’s office, citing Society for Women’s Health Research data, points out that two in five women surveyed had considered leaving or had left a job because of menopause symptoms, and one in four had considered not pursuing or had not pursued a leadership opportunity. That isn’t just a wellness issue. It’s a talent issue, and probably a very expensive one.

Take a 48-year-old executive with 25 years of experience. She knows the business and the customers. She knows which ideas were tried ten years ago and why they failed, and she knows how decisions actually get made. She has relationships across the company that don’t show up on any org chart. She’s hired people, developed people, gotten through reorganizations, launched products and handled crises, and she has the kind of judgment you can’t get from a training program.

Then she has a hard 18 months. She isn’t sleeping, the brain fog makes work harder, her confidence drops, and she isn’t showing up quite the way she did at 44. The organization decides she’s not the same anymore.

In some ways she may not be. But the question is whether you’re looking at a permanent change in what she can do or a temporary change in how it’s showing up. Those are very different things, and getting it wrong is expensive. Companies put enormous amounts of money into recruiting senior talent, developing leaders, building succession plans and trying to hold onto institutional knowledge, and almost never connect any of that to menopause. I think they should.

Supporting a high performer through a hard stretch isn’t charity. It’s retention. And it takes more than a menopause policy on the intranet. Managers need to know what to do when someone suddenly seems different: how to separate what they’re seeing from what they’re assuming, and how to ask a useful question without diagnosing anyone. Organizations also need to make sure that getting support doesn’t quietly take someone out of the running for what’s next.

That’s where I think this conversation needs to go. Asking the question, “how do we keep experienced women contributing, advancing and leading through a stage of life we can predict?”

That’s a very different business question, and how a company answers it may decide whether it keeps some of its most experienced leaders or spends years trying to replace what walked out the door.