Imagine you are around 45 years old. You wake up tired because you have been sleeping poorly for weeks. You find it hard to concentrate in meetings you used to handle without problems. Sometimes you forget words, lose track of a conversation, or feel your patience runs out faster than usual. You get home and there are still household chores pending, children to support through various life challenges, a mother or father beginning to need support, and a workday that seems unaware that your body is going through an important transition.
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Now imagine that, in addition to all that, you must continue proving that you are as “competent” as ever. For millions of women worldwide, this is not a hypothetical situation. It is the experience of going through the menopausal transition while continuing to work, care, maintain family ties, and respond to demands that rarely consider the physical and psychological changes typical of this stage of life.
A recent study led from Chile analyzed more than 2,000 women from twelve Latin American countries and found that the severity of menopausal symptoms is associated with poorer work quality of life, lower job satisfaction, and greater difficulties performing daily tasks. These results align with research conducted in other parts of the world, such as Ireland, where 65% of working women reported that menopause affected their job performance; or in the United States, where it was estimated that more than one in ten women had experienced negative work-related consequences associated with this transition, including absenteeism, reduced performance, or difficulties fulfilling their responsibilities.
At first glance, these findings seem to confirm something relatively simple: that certain menopausal symptoms can affect work performance. But a deeper reading suggests something different. Perhaps we are not only observing the effects of a hormonal transition but also the way gender inequalities accumulated over a lifetime manifest at this stage.
Because menopause does not arrive on a blank slate. It comes after decades of accumulated inequalities. It comes to women who have had to prove their professional ability again and again in work environments historically designed by and for men. It comes to women who continue to perform most of the unpaid domestic and care work. It comes to women who often find themselves in the so-called “sandwich generation”: supporting the growth of their children while beginning to take on caregiving responsibilities for aging parents.
From this perspective, it is difficult to maintain that menopause is solely a biological phenomenon. Rather, it seems to act as a kind of magnifying glass that makes visible tensions and inequalities that have been accumulating for years. It is no coincidence that the symptoms that most affect work quality of life are precisely those linked to psychological well-being. Various international studies show that sleep disturbances, persistent fatigue, concentration difficulties, memory problems, and mood changes are among the most frequent and disabling manifestations. When a person sleeps poorly for months, feels exhausted, or must make an extra effort to maintain attention, the impact inevitably goes beyond health and reaches work, personal relationships, and daily life.
And yet, there is a worrying tendency to interpret these findings from an individual perspective. Women are described as “performing less,” “having difficulties,” or “seeing their productivity affected.” In other words, the problem seems to lie with the women.
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But what if we are looking at the phenomenon backwards? Perhaps the question should not be how much menopause affects work, but how much current working conditions affect women going through menopause.
After all, we still expect women aged 45, 50, or 55 to maintain exactly the same levels of performance, availability, and energy, regardless of the physical and psychological changes they may be experiencing. We continue to organize work under the implicit premise that life trajectories are linear, bodies are unchanging, and caregiving responsibilities occur outside working hours.
Maybe that is why the debate about menopause should not focus solely on symptoms. We also need to talk about psychological well-being, shared responsibility in caregiving, work flexibility, and the social conditions that determine how this transition is experienced.
Because the underlying question is not how to help women better endure menopause, but why we continue to build societies and workplaces that force women to go through it practically alone. And perhaps there lies the main lesson this growing body of scientific evidence leaves us: the problem is not that women age. The problem is that we continue to organize work, caregiving, and social life as if women did not. Menopause does not create the inequalities we observe at this stage of life. It simply makes them impossible to ignore.
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Agnieszka Bozanic is a research academic at UNAB Viña del Mar campus, young researcher at MICARE, and president of the GeroActivism Foundation.
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