Why is No One Taking Menopause Seriously?

I turned thirty this year, and until recently, menopause felt like a distant concept – something I wouldn’t need to think about for a while. Statistically, most women begin menopause between the ages of 45 and 55, with the average in the US around 51. But lately, it’s started to feel closer to home. A friend of mine, at 36, was recently diagnosed with perimenopause. My gynecologist advised me to think more seriously about family planning, citing how many patients now wait “too far” into their 40s. And while I recall my mother and other women quietly navigating menopause, I also remember how they spoke about it: in hushed tones, with euphemisms, or not at all.

It’s only now, with awareness and conversation slowly gaining traction, that I’ve begun to ask: why is no one taking menopause seriously?

Mordern healthcare often fails women, but especially during menopause

Like many health issues affecting women, menopause has long been underdiscussed, under-researched, and misunderstood. The statistics speak for themselves. According to a 2022 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, only about one-third of US women aged 40–64 have ever discussed menopause with a healthcare provider. A 2023 national survey found that 37.4% of perimenopausal and postmenopausal individuals reported feeling shame around their symptoms, and a striking 82.7% experienced stigma tied to those symptoms.

Beyond shame, the medical system itself is failing. Only 31% of OB/GYN residency programs in the US include menopause-specific training, meaning many doctors are ill-equipped to recognize or treat the symptoms faced by millions of women annually.

In her book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause, actor Naomi Watts shares how she was misdiagnosed multiple times before realizing perimenopause was the cause. “So many doctors have since told me that there’s an epidemic of misdiagnosing women with everything from fibromyalgia to chronic fatigue to clinical depression when, in fact, they were just perimenopausal,” she writes. “Each year, two million American women enter menopause. That’s almost six thousand women a day. And yet, I felt completely alone.”

At one point, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was a common preventative measure for menopause, believed to stave off heart disease, osteoporosis, and dementia. But in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative published findings linking HRT to elevated risks of stroke, heart disease, and breast cancer. Use of HRT dropped sharply, and public conversation dwindled.

Today, fewer than 5% of American women use HRT, a statistic unchanged despite recent research calling into question those initial findings. Most women who feel benefit from it discontinue in under five years, often out of fear. 

In Menopausing, Davina McCall and Dr. Naomi Potter assert that by age 45, every woman should at least have access to an open conversation about menopause. “If a woman feels that she, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to take HRT, she shouldn’t have to,” McCall writes. “But I just want us all to come together and talk about it sensibly, with an option for the women that really need it.”

How menopause symptoms impact careers

Menopause doesn’t just affect people on an individual basis, it affects how society operates, working life and daily tasks. A 2021 Forbes article found 40% of menopausal women reported negative impacts on their jobs. Yet few companies offer any formal accommodations. A Catalyst report found 84% of menopausal employees wanted more workplace support, and 72% admitted to hiding symptoms at work.

Symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, and brain fog can disrupt performance. When workplaces offer no understanding or policies, women feel they must hide their struggles – this mass silence, enforced by stigma, meaning nothing changes or gets better.

However, some countries are making small but important changes: Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the Philippines have introduced menopause leave. While the US lags behind, advocacy is growing and progress feels possible.

It’s time to challenge outdated ideas about menopause

Menopause is still too often framed as an ending or decline we should bear quietly. Author Helen Paris speaks often about the invisibility that comes with menopause, “It’s like you hit middle age and someone turns the light off. Midlife invisibility is something so many women experience, the sense that people are suddenly looking through us rather than at us, interrupting or ignoring what we say, giving us the restaurant table at the back by the toilets instead of the one in the window.” She adds that “Much of this feeling of invisibility is directly linked to the perimenopause and menopause, as if visibility is somehow connected with fertility.  Men, potentially always virile, remain ever visible. We might be able to take these daily slights on the chin, but things take a different turn when we switch to the workplace and see how consistently middle aged and older women are looked over for promotion.”

But menopause does not mark the end of a woman’s life, and it shouldn’t confiscate us into obscurity. The patriarchal ideals that dub women as ‘past it’ when they are no longer fertile are misogynistic, and heavily linked to other oppressive power structures. It's a life transition deserving recognition, resource, and respect. “How radical it has been to realise the ways in which I’d silenced myself because of sexism,” Watts writes. “We can take up space. We can say what we need. We can assert ourselves.”

If most men had hot flashes…

Menopause is not a personal weakness. It’s a feminist, workplace, mental-health, and public-health issue. For too long, it’s been treated as a part of life women have to just get on with, no complaining aloud. I’d put money on the fact that if a majority of men experienced menopause, there would be advanced medical research and treatment options galore, with a better-than HRT alternative sold at every drug store.

Even if menopause feels distant to you, like it does me, learning about it earlier in life empowers both you and those you love. We need medical training, treatment access, workplace accommodations, and honest media coverage, because every conversation chips away at stigma.

It’s time we all took menopause seriously. Not as a state of decline, but as a powerful stage of life deserving care, attention, and celebration.