Menopause? We need a REAL change of attitude...
SOMETIMES,’ sang country and western star Tammy Wynette, ‘it’s hard to be a woman.’ You’re telling me. Particularly a menopausal one. While I still have that biological treat to look forward to, you don’t have to look far to see that the menopause, and the symptoms and circumstances around it, are still one of women’s least understood burdens.
Take the 58-year-old shop worker in Dundee who was this week awarded £28,000 in compensation after her boss subjected her to a series of incidents in which she was ‘humiliated’ in front of staff and customers to the point where she felt she had no option but to resign.
one of them involved her boss refusing to adjust the temperature in the shop. Well, as any woman who has ever worked in an office will tell you, getting male colleagues to change the thermostat is harder than reversing the course of the Fifth Fleet. Throw in the menopause and I can imagine the situation would be even more highly charged.
So bad was the working environment that the judge declared that the woman – who is unnamed – is still suffering from stress and anxiety.
‘It was her position that she had been the subject of a lengthy course of conduct of harassment in relation to being menopausal,’ he said.
This is – how can I put this? – completely unacceptable. And yet it is also of no great surprise. Up and down the country, in all walks of life, the menopause is still being ignored, mocked and misunderstood.
This despite the fact that around onethird of the UK’s female population are either peri or post-menopausal, with one in four suffering debilitating symptoms that can last up to a decade.
In 2017, Kirsty Wark made a compelling documentary talking about her own experiences and explaining that for years she had ‘just coped’ with her symptoms.
‘It’s not so long ago that the hormonal changes that came with menopause were regarded as madness – the madwomen in the attic,’ she said. ‘Mythology has a lot to answer for.’ Meanwhile, former BBC reporting Scotland anchor Jackie Bird wrote about how she was brushed off by medical professionals when trying to explain her symptoms and, even worse, sniggered at by male bosses when she revealed she was suffering from the menopause.
So is it any surprise that cases like this one are still being heard? That a woman’s age, and the suffering that sometimes comes along with that, are still being mocked on a regular basis?
The claimant’s boss apparently called her a ‘dinosaur’ when she struggled to use an iPad to take online orders, but frankly, there’s only one dinosaur in this story, and it’s not the 58-year-old woman just trying to get through the day.
Yet despite the doom and gloom, there are odd rays of sunshine. Last year South Lanarkshire Council became the world’s first local authority to launch a ‘menopause policy’ for staff, with things like desk fans available for women having hot flushes, and counselling and flexible working on offer. We can only hope that more will follow suit.
BECAUSE you can bet your bottom dollar that if it were men who went through the menopause, workplace policies would have changed decades ago. Then there is the brilliant Pausivity campaign, launched by a former colleague of mine Elizabeth Carr-Ellis, which aims to break down taboos around the menopause and raise awareness of symptoms, and the difficulties getting treatment.
It has created a poster for GP surgeries and attracted celebrity supporters like author Marian Keyes and Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell. Most recently, it won the support of the Scottish Government.
Thank goodness, is all I can say. The menopause is an inevitability for most of us, and we must talk about it more. Because, sometimes, we need to make it a little easier to be a woman.