‘Patronising’ Avanti offers female staff menopause bag

AVANTI, the train company, is offering its female staff “menopause bags” that include a jelly baby “if you need to bite someone’s head off ”.

A pink bag handed out at staff training sessions about the menopause contained items intended to lift the spirits of menopausal staff.

It included a single tissue “in case you’re feeling emotional”, a paper clip “to help you keep it all together” and chocolate, which came with the tagline “hey, great excuse to eat chocolate”.

The bag has been ridiculed as “patronising”, “obnoxious” and called an “unutterably dire piece of infantilising tweedom”. A spokesman for Avanti insisted the train operator had “not had a single complaint” over the bags, which were made available from last summer at menopause drop-in sessions attended by both men and women.

It comes as Avanti struggles to run its trains on time. Over the past three months, 65.3 percent of its trains arrived within three minutes of its advertised time, compared to a national average across all train companies of 86.4 percent.

Kate Muir, author of the book Everything You Need to Know About the

Menopause, branded the Avanti bag “a wildly patronising waste of money”.

Commenting on the inclusion of a fan in the menopause bag, labelled by Avanti as “handy for the hot sweats”, Ms Muir said the attempt at humour trivialised the risk of developing serious health problems.

“The more hot flushes you have, the more risk you have of cardiovascular disease, the more risk you have of building up the plaques that lead to Alzheimer’s,” she said. “So it’s not a joke, you know, and it’s just not funny, the fan.

“Really, if Avanti were intelligent – and I’m sure they have other staff menopause processes! – they should be helping women with education and medical information and not this.”

Women are more likely than men to develop Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Society, which says the condition may be linked to oestrogen levels in the body. In women, these levels decline after the menopause.

The disease is caused by plaques, or collections of proteins, building up in and around brain cells.

Menopause symptoms typically occur between the mid-40s and early-50s and can include hot flushes, sweating, muscle aches and anxiety.