Menopause in Education

Where it all started?

In 2021 the Adecco Group launched their menopause policy on World Menopause Day. This was something I was passionate about, not for myself but for every woman. 

I was one of about 44% of women who experienced prolonged and heavy menstrual periods during perimenopause. I had a hysterectomy which put me straight into menopause, which was tough but I still didn’t experience many of the symptoms associated with perimenopause & menopause. However, working with and understanding the workplace, I could see the struggles many women suffer during perimenopause. This started a project which turned into a passion, to create a fairer playing field for women so they can work in environments which can adapt to their changing needs. 

After lobbying the then Government for 18 months, they created the voluntary role of Menopause Employment Champion and I could finally start to make a difference. I vowed to use the role to be an advocate for women who didn’t have the platform to voice their experiences, implement change and to ultimately create a level playing field for all. 

As part of the role, I was tasked with creating a menopause policy targeting sectors with a high turnover of staff, with a focus on retaining talent in the workforce and helping women reach their full potential. As part of this, I wanted to create support mechanisms, toolkits, allyship and sharing of best practices. It was important for me that all of these were free of charge and accessible to everyone. 

Where to start? 

I started working with the retail, hospitality, care sector, manufacturing, professional and technical sectors. Though I was particularly interested in the education sector, I trained as a primary school teacher in the early 90s but never went on to teach. I am still friends with many of the wonderful people I did my teacher training with and who are still teaching today. Many of these friends are in perimenopause or have gone through the menopause and we often speak about how challenging that is in a classroom environment. I asked myself the question, what could I do in my new role to make a difference for them and the countless others like them?

When working with different sectors, what I soon realised was that the challenge came with nonautonomous roles. The roles where you cannot elect to work from home or work flexibly, or which allow you to work outside of your normal working hours.

I personally found I could manage my physical symptoms of menopause because I had the ‘luxury’ of an autonomous job which meant I could work from home when I needed to. What I neglected to do was support my mental health and my psychological symptoms, this resulted in me becoming anxious and losing confidence. It is so important to consider when allowing people the autonomy to work from home to manage physical symptoms, what the impact on the psychological symptoms can be. According to the CIPD, 69% of women leave their jobs because of the psychological symptoms of menopause and not the physical symptoms.

But what if like so many women and especially those within the education sector, you’re in a non-autonomous role, with little flexibility and autonomy over how and when you work? How do you manage the physical symptoms of perimenopause such as heavy periods or flooding, hot flushes, temporary incontinence and vaginal problems confidently and comfortably in a classroom where you cannot just leave immediately? How do we retain talent when this is the reality for so many? 

When I was appointed to this role, I went to buy a new outfit for a series of interviews. I was chatting to the lady who was serving me in the shop and explaining what I was aiming to do. She told me that she was an ex-headteacher of a local girls’ school, she had left because of the physical and psychological symptoms of perimenopause. She now works part-time in a shop. It had a huge impact on her professionally, personally, financially and on her family.

The four pillars of cultural change 

I knew I needed to create something which would help employers and in turn their employees, so I created the four pillars of cultural change. Underpinning the four pillars is the notion of supporting organisations in embedding change, it is more than creating a menopause policy and leaving it for people to access occasionally. 

Education – creating the culture of change by educating your leaders, your workforce and colleagues not just about your policy but about symptoms and terminology. 

Allyship – creating an open safe space in which people feel empowered to challenge appropriately. Some organisations I have worked with have run men-only sessions as male allyship is important in any organisation. 

Lived experiences – encouraging everyone to share their experiences, this creates an open environment for people to talk about what is happening for them or the people they know. 

Leadership – to embed cultural change, this needs engagement from the leadership to embed that it is more than just a policy and what it means in practice.

The four ‘I’s’ 

Cultural change does not happen overnight, it is something everyone needs to support and feel a part of. I saw a quote in Harvard Business Review which said ‘Culture is like the wind. You can’t see it if it’s blowing. If it’s pushing you along behind you, it’s a real benefit. If it’s blowing towards you and holding you back, it’s not.’ 

To support this, organisations can embrace the four ‘I’s’. 

Interaction of factors

Individual

Inclusion

International

Interaction of factors is the combination of the following factors. A person’s health journey, including the changes which come as part of perimenopause, are individual, if you then consider individuality in terms of ethnicity, culture, disability and socio-economic background, it makes a very unique journey. It is therefore important that all voices are heard as part of the conversations in the workplace. That includes the ally voices mentioned previously. 

Intergenerational inclusion is important, we currently have broadly five generations in the workforce. When generation alpha starts work, we will have six because 

traditionalists may still be in the workforce, so it’s important that you engage across all generations. When the British Standards Institute brought out the Standard in 2020, it talked about menstrual health, menstruation, and menopause in the workplace and that allowed the conversation to broaden across the whole of the workforce. With hormonal health and menstrual health being the thread that held it all together. If you think about some of the challenges in a non-autonomous environment during menopause that I’ve already mentioned such as heavy erratic periods and flooding, those are also some of the challenges around endometriosis, PMDD, polycystic ovaries and general heavy periods in the workplace. How do you manage them in a classroom setting? 

The third aspect is impact and thinking about women’s health in a wider context. It isn’t just the person who is experiencing the symptoms, it’s the people around them as well, colleagues, partners, children, friends and wider family. An open environment and allyship will allow conversations, many feel they cannot talk about the impact but in non-autonomous roles it is important. For example they should feel empowered to say ‘my partner is not sleeping due to menopausal symptoms which is impacting me and my cognitive health.’ 

And then finally, it’s about the international piece. I am interested to see what other countries are doing to support both menopause and more broadly Women’s Health in the workplace. A lot of the time I see that in the UK we are in a good place, but there is still a long way to go. My advice is that it’s a conversation for everybody. Women over 50 are the fastest growing demographic in the workplace, particularly in the education sector where we need to consider that it is a non-autonomous environment. When thinking of your menopause policies and what is in place for your staff, ask yourself these questions. How do you cover for people if they need to leave the classroom very quickly? How do you normalise that somebody may need to leave the classroom quickly? How do you provide access to free sanitary products? What more can we do? How can we start the conversation?

Article by Helen Tomlison, Menopause Champion and Head of Talent and Inclusion at the Adecco Group for The Edword.

Still Human recently ran a webinar, Talking Menopause: For the Education Sector with Helen, you can sign up to receive your copy here.