Peri/Menopause is having a moment, and I’m here for it (whether I want to be or not). While I’m glad to suddenly feel like I don’t have to hide in a stall of shame, I can’t help but wonder, why now?
The volume of peri/menopausal aged women in the US workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Women’s Bureau, is over 37%. That translates to over 32 million people experiencing peri/menopausal symptoms at any time, in any workplace. Due in part to people working longer, the slight reduction of this perimenopausal class by the end of the decade will be replaced by an increase in the number of women 65 and older, proportionately, still actively walking the earth. Net-net, at the end of the day, to synthesize the data: the percentage of those of us in the workplace who ‘just can’t with you’ anymore will noticeably increase. Starting now.
Fifty-year old women in a 2023 workplace were born after Roe was legalized (RIP), birth control available (though it had just been legalized for unmarried women), and the ERA passed by Congress (but not ratified). Even if we don’t agree on all of these topics today, women in the US have been raised in a country where the limiting assumptions made about us due to our gender were diminishing in power. Despite myriad challenges, we have grown in a society that advertises at least the illusion that, ‘we could do anything we want to, if only we put our minds to it.’
Quite simply, the face of menopause has changed. As was broadly noted when And Just Like That (the latest Sex and the City installment) was released, those cocktail-slugging, sexually-cavorting fashionistas were now approximately the same age as the loveable yet granny-like Golden Girls were when they graced our small, square TV screens in the mid-1980s. As much as I adored Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy, I much prefer to think of myself in a peer group with Samantha, or, in the land of reality, Angela Bassett, Sandra Bullock, Michelle Yeoh, Naomi Watts, Erykah Badu, Cindy Crawford, Michelle Obama and the new Charlie’s Angels – Cameron, Lucy Liu and Drew – and now that they are all peri/menopausal, I can. (Don’t judge!)
Half these women have also recognized, and invested in, our market value. A 2022 Bloomberg article identified the value of the global market for menopause products at 15 billion US dollars, and with a full 25% of the female population expected to be of menopausal age by 2030, that number will rise to $24 billion – equivalent to the GDP of the entire country of Colombia. That’s bound to get us some attention, and we will benefit from it, even if it means that we have to hear more than we can stomach about what Gwyneth is doing to keep her vagina supple.
Market value aside, it wasn’t just P&G switching focus from their ‘family-friendly,’ “Thank you, Mom” Olympic adverts to developing Pepper & Wits, their peri/menopausal product line, that turned what used to be murmurs of peri/menopause into an actually articulate voice in the last couple years. It was us.
Before Covid, we could send our pubescent children to school each day, put on a figurative cloak of normalcy and walk into a workplace to focus (through sweats, brainfog, migraines, and unexpected torrential bleeding) on our professional lives before going home to let it all out.
Starting in March 2020, we were stuck at home,* trying to balance our work life surrounded by everyone we usually spent the day away from, because no one could go anywhere, and we were weighed down by the additional stressors of uncertainty related to…everything.
Physical health, employment security, child development, family relations, whether or not to wipe down our groceries, how to get kids to focus on a screen we usually tell them to stop looking at, how to wear masks to make sure they work, what is the black-market rate for toilet paper this week, what is the right percentage of alcohol to have in my hand sanitizer and is making hand sanitizer now considered an arts and crafts project?! Oh yeah, and work.
Enter mental health. The anxiety of it all. If you were a lassez-faire parent before, that was over. You roll the dice on this Covid thing without thinking at least 763 times about everything, kids could die. Your kids. Also, you.
Add that to the mix of what may have already been a biologically stressful time for a large number of women, and I would posit that many of us simply decided some things weren’t that important to hide. Now that we were all being more open with just how stressful life is, maybe it was time to talk about the other things we hadn’t been previously comfortable admitting?
It’s possible this was the PMS before the perimenopausal storm. The perfect demographic combination of our age, our representation, and our circumstances meant something had to give, and what broke free was we peri-people, and what we broke free of were the sounds of silence that for so long had been muffling our shared experience.
And like I said, I’m here for it. I’m here for you. Let your voice ring out. Bring. It. On.
*Very Important Footnote: Being home during Covid was a torturous privilege, but a privilege nonetheless. There are a huge number of humans whose work requires them to be on site, and this group of people, the majority of whom were at a socioeconomic disadvantage to begin with, was placed at significantly higher risk than the rest of us who hid out from the world. My personal favorites of these essential workers continue to be the humans at the grocery store, and the post office, and I salute them. I recognize a privilege when I see one (even if I cannot spell that word to save my life).
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