- Evidence shows that symptoms associated with menopause can have measurable effects on women's income.
- Access to adequate health care and information, along with supportive work environments and flexibility, can help mitigate these effects.
- Responding adequately to the effects of menopause represents an opportunity to promote well-being, labor participation, and the full utilization of female talent.
Throughout our working lives, women face different circumstances related to reproductive health and care responsibilities that can affect their work trajectories. Motherhood is perhaps the most studied, but it is not the only one: towards the end of fertile life, perimenopausal symptoms can also have effects on women's well-being and working lives, including employment, hours worked, and income.
Talking about the labor and economic effects associated with menopause does not mean adding one more reason to consider women less productive, but rather to better understand a stage of life that still receives little attention in the workplace. Recognizing these effects opens an opportunity for health systems, governments, and workplaces to develop responses that allow women to go through this stage with information, appropriate care, flexibility, and support, without limiting their professional development.
To understand why this stage can have implications for working life, it is useful to start with some definitions. Perimenopause is the period before menopause and can last for several years, usually from the age of 40. During this time, many women experience symptoms such as fatigue, hot flashes, sleep disturbances, mood swings, or concentration difficulties, which can affect different areas of daily life, including work. Menopause, on the other hand, is confirmed when twelve consecutive months have passed without menstruation and marks the end of a woman's reproductive years. A blog post by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) addresses these and other concepts in greater depth.
The so-called "maternity penalty" has been widely documented in the economic literature. It refers to the effects that motherhood can have on women's employment trajectory and income. Recent economic research extends this look to another stage of reproductive life and analyzes the labor and economic effects associated with menopause. Their results show that these effects can be significant.
Using data from Norway and Sweden, the study estimates a significant reduction in labor income associated with menopause; on average, it decreases by 7.4% four years after the first menopause-related diagnosis recorded in the medical record. This reduction is accompanied by lower employment rates and fewer hours worked, as well as greater receipt of social assistance in these countries, which have extensive social protection systems.
Complementary research conducted in Great Britain documents up to a 10% drop in labor income. These results provide additional evidence on the relationship between perimenopausal symptoms, quality of life and women's laboar market outcomes.
An interesting finding of this research is that, when medical follow-up during perimenopause is carried out by a female doctor, the economic losses observed are lower than when accompanied by a male doctor. This result suggests that adequate health care, which offers relevant information and treatments for women experiencing perimenopausal symptoms, can contribute to mitigating these economic and social impacts.
Health policies are not the only area from which the economic effects associated with menopause can be mitigated. Workplaces can also play an important role:
- Work culture can contribute to generating more favorable work environments, through the training of management teams and the adoption of practices that provide support and flexibility to female employees.
- A supportive community has also been identified as a factor that can contribute to mitigating the effects of menopause. The workplace is part of that supportive community and can offer an environment of understanding and flexibility that allows women to manage the symptoms associated with menopause without unnecessarily limiting their well-being, participation, or professional development.
- Access to information is a common theme in these spaces. Having timely information allows women to be better prepared for this stage, understand their symptoms and know where to look for the supports they may need, without stigma. The media, including series and soap operas, can be effective mechanisms to disseminate this type of information and reduce taboos at scale. Information is also key for health providers to be able to more effectively address symptoms that can affect quality of life and work performance, and for workplaces to know how to support, with flexibility and empathy, their employees, many of them with many years of experience and in leadership positions.
Just as motherhood has gained space in the conversation about public policies and labor practices, incorporating menopause allows us to broaden this perspective to other stages of women's lives. Recognizing and better understanding its effects opens an opportunity to develop responses that contribute to their well-being and, at the same time, favor their permanence and participation in the labor market, taking full advantage of their experience and talent.