Early in the pandemic, a colleague at the London university where I teach film and media asked me how my research was going. Despite us all navigating a climate of crushing uncertainty, I told her I was toying with a new direction. Having written for many years about gender and aging in the media, I was used to noting and pursuing trends in that field. But I was seeing something that felt novel and increasingly visible: it felt like more and more people were talking about … menopause?
Where it had once been shrouded in shame and silence, it seemed the word was popping up everywhere, among publishers, in celebrity profiles, and news reports. Was I imagining this because my algorithm placed me as someone who would be interested in these stories? The more I looked the more it seemed it was not a case of my concocting a new vogue. The U.K. had entered what I went on to call, “the menopausal turn.”
The spaces of the menopausal turn were and continue to be manifold across the U.K. From activist initiatives such as Diane Danzebrink’s pivotal 2018 #MakeMenopauseMatter movement and campaigning, among various issues, on amending school curricula and medical training to include compulsory menopause education; to politicians lobbying for greater support for those in menopause, including Carolyn Harris’ Private Members’ Bill to end Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription charges in England; to retail initiatives such as the 2021 U.K. launch of the GenM “MTick,” designating “the world’s first universal shopping symbol to signpost menopause-friendly products”; to one of the UK’s most popular TV presenters, Davina McCall, fronting a documentary charting her own debilitating menopause transition and challenging the devastating impact of the 2001 U.S. Women’s Health Initiative on HRT usage, the menopausal turn has lifted menopause out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
‘Why this cultural shift, in this place, at this moment?’
The scattering of instances just highlighted can’t begin to capture the change and growth in conversation and debate. Fortunately, here, U.K. news analysis in 2023 carried out by researchers Catherine Rottenberg and Shani Orgad confirms that this impression of a “menopausal turn” is not imagined. Tracing newspaper coverage of menopause from 2001–2021, they have demonstrated the extent and speed of this shift, finding a major rise in reporting took place in 2021, with 1,220 articles appearing that year—a 67% increase on the previous year, and more than three times the average of 393 in the preceding years between 2001–2020.
So, a logical question might be—why this cultural shift, in this place, at this moment?
There are myriad interwoven contexts that have facilitated the environment fostering the U.K.’s menopausal turn, gathering pace in the 2010s and subsequently flourishing in the pandemic. It can be understood as an evolution and extension of an established neoliberal and postfeminist political climate, and the rise of well-being discourse, all of which share a preoccupation with rising to the challenge of better “managing the self.”
Relatedly, it is linked to the rise of greater candor about mental health, where popular mantras like “it’s OK not to be OK” have meant less stigma attached to speaking about anxiety, insomnia or palpitations as some of the common symptoms of perimenopause and menopause.
In the U.K., all this has come, too, as a certain generation of women celebrities “come of age.” With careers dating back to the 1990s, they were part of a movement of more frequently outspoken and “bolder” women public figures than the generation before them—and they have used their platforms to disclose their personal, often difficult experiences of menopause, as seen increasingly in the United States also with stars like Naomi Watts and Halle Berry speaking up.
Linked to these narratives also, is the fact that the working lives of women across all classes and professions, in the U.K., United States and globally, are changing due to increasedeconomic pressure to keep women in the workplace longer and retiring later. By tackling menopause, which the U.K.’s Fawcett Society estimates prompts 1 in 10 women to leave their jobs, the government and employers may make a dent in this attrition.
And it doesn’t look like any of this debate or new consciousness is going anywhere soon. Prior to the election in 2024, the U.K. Labour Party announced that if elected they would implement a new policy mandating any employer with more than 250 employees is to introduce a “Menopause Action Plan.” In their Employment Rights Bill passed in October 2024 this was moderated to the implementation of “Equality Action Plans”—but these are nevertheless going to necessitate employers demonstrate they are attentive to specifically supporting employees through menopause.
‘Any employer with more than 250 employees is to have an “Equality Action Plan” that includes menopause.’
No wonder, then, this era has also been called a “menopause revolution” in both the U.K., and, by Oprah Winfrey no less, in the United States. Looked at in this light, the menopausal turn has increased awareness and knowledge of menopause, of its possible symptoms and ways to help alleviate them. In the U.K. at least it has facilitated discussion of workplace discrimination and how to make workplaces better environments for those experiencing menopause. And it has arguably alleviated some of the stigma and shame around menopause by making it part of a public conversation, as befits a natural part of the life course that 51% of the population will undergo.
But “revolutions” are never painless, nor universally welcomed. While the menopausal turn may have been enthusiastically embraced by some, others remain skeptical and have sounded alarms. First, there is disquiet that in both the U.K. and United States we are witnessing the fabrication of a menopause industrial-complex (Note, Naomi Watts’ menopause solutions brand, Stripes, features an “Ectoine Hydrating & Plumping Facial Serum” retailing at $85.).
This burgeoning marketplace allegedly works to expatiate women’s health concerns, then commercialize and profit from them, as seen in the proliferation of questionable “menopause-friendly” products. Second, we must remain vigilant about who this “revolution” addresses and encompasses, ensuring new initiatives understand and approach menopause as an inherently intersectional experience, impacted by class, race, culture and more—and not as a simply biological, or “One-Size-Fits-All” phenomenon.
Additionally, not everyone agrees new workplace imperatives for “Equality Action Plans” and the like will entirely support the interests of menopausal employees—rather, they fear they are part of a climate of escalating agitation that may lead to what I call the “restigmatization” of menopause. Hence some midlife women have expressed fears that “menopause policies” will mark them as potentially troublesome employees, liable to patchy performance and requests for accommodations their younger and/or male colleagues don’t need.
In research on the experiences of menopausal women working in the screen industries in the U.K., United States and Ireland, which I have undertaken with Susan Liddy from Women in Film & Television International, several of our respondents told us they wouldn’t draw on menopause policy provisions even if they were available for fear of outing themselves as “old” in a famously ageist industry.
Finally, in light of all this attention, there are concerns, too, that the menopausal turn risks counterproductively amplifying fears of aging and menopause among younger women, who may be left unduly dreading menopause because of the prevalence of worrisome coverage.
In both the U.K. and United States, then, the menopausal turn has done invaluable work in challenging the long history of secrecy and shame surrounding menopause. But it would be a mistake to think it has in any way begun to solve an issue inextricably bound up in ongoing histories of ageism, misogyny, and underfunding women’s health.
What it has enabled is an unprecedented moment to address a fundamental question: what will it take to ensure not only a better menopause but more equity in menopause, for all?
Deborah Jermyn, PhD, is an associate professor in Film & Culture at the University of Roehampton, in London, co-investigator on the AHRC funded ‘MAUSI Net: Menopause Artivism in the UK, Sweden and India’ project and author/editor of 11 books on popular film and media.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/maruco
