Welcome to September

Your Calendar Has Reset. Has Your Menopause Strategy?

The new season does not need a new you. It may need a different operating system for the woman you have become.

There is something wonderfully optimistic about September. Summer begins to retreat, schools return, diaries refill, Q4 suddenly stops looking comfortably distant and organisations rediscover all the meetings they apparently managed perfectly well without during August.

Menopause, unfortunately, has no respect for the corporate calendar.

The hot flush that was merely annoying while answering emails at home becomes considerably less amusing when it arrives halfway through a board presentation. A restless night feels different when the following morning contains an investor meeting, performance review or difficult negotiation. Brain fog can move from mildly irritating to professionally unsettling when the woman experiencing it has spent decades being known as the person who remembers everything.

Then she gets home

There may be a partner wondering why she seems distant, children or ageing parents requiring attention, WhatsApp messages waiting for answers and domestic decisions nobody remembers assigning to her. If she is a founder, she may then reopen the laptop because the business does not care that she slept for four hours either.

Welcome to September.

Perhaps our question this month should therefore be less about how many menopause symptoms we can score and more about something considerably more useful. What happens when menopause meets a life built around high performance?

When High Performance Becomes High-Level Compensation

One reason menopause can remain hidden among successful women is that successful women tend to be exceptionally good at compensating.

When concentration becomes less reliable, they prepare more. When sleep deteriorates, they work later. When confidence wobbles, they research harder. When fatigue appears, they reach for caffeine, discipline and determination. When irritability follows them home, they may withdraw rather than explain what is happening. When their libido changes, intimacy can quietly become another difficult conversation postponed until another day.

From the outside, performance may appear remarkably stable. What nobody sees is that maintaining that performance has become significantly more expensive.

That distinction is supported by research. The Fawcett Society's landmark UK study of more than 4,000 menopausal and peri menopausal women found that 77% experienced at least one symptom they described as very difficult, while 44% reported three or more symptoms at that level. Sleep problems were particularly prominent, reported as difficult by 84%, followed by brain fog at 73% and anxiety or depression at 69%. Crucially for our conversation, 44% of menopausal women in employment said symptoms had affected their ability to work.

That changes how we should think about menopause at senior levels. The issue is not simply whether a woman can continue performing. She probably can. The more interesting question is what she is having to expend to maintain that performance and whether anybody notices before the cost becomes unsustainable.

Consider the executive who has always done her best strategic thinking late in the day but now experiences an afternoon concentration slump after repeated night waking. She continues scheduling important negotiations at 4pm because that is how she has always worked. The founder continues accepting evening networking events despite knowing that poor sleep now affects her for several days afterwards. The managing director doubles down on preparation because she no longer trusts the memory that once felt effortless.

None of these women has suddenly become less competent. Their operating conditions have changed while their expectations of themselves have remained exactly the same.

September provides an opportunity to change that.

The Meeting Room Is Only Half the Story

Workplace menopause conversations can also become strangely corporate. We discuss policies, reasonable adjustments, flexible working and line-manager training, all of which matter, while forgetting that the woman experiencing menopause does not cease having a family, culture, community or relationship when she closes her laptop.

Imagine spending a day regulating irritability through difficult meetings, managing a hot flush while presenting, compensating for poor concentration and making high-stakes decisions after interrupted sleep. By the time you arrive home, your emotional reserves may be considerably lower than your family realises.

A partner experiences the shorter answer without seeing the eight hours of self-regulation that preceded it. Changes in libido may be interpreted as rejection rather than physiological transition. Children may wonder why Mum suddenly needs quiet. Women caring simultaneously for children and ageing parents may discover that menopause has arrived at precisely the life stage when everybody else's needs appear to be expanding.

This is where menopause can quietly become a relationship issue without either person recognising it as one.

There is a leadership lesson hidden inside that problem. We spend enormous amounts of professional energy learning how to communicate organisational change while sometimes expecting the people closest to us to intuitively understand physiological change.

A September reset might therefore include a conversation before there is an argument. Explaining that sleep has changed, that concentration sometimes requires more effort, that intimacy may feel different or that you occasionally need twenty minutes of silence after work is not asking everybody to walk on eggshells. It is giving the people around you information with which they can respond intelligently.

For Founders, Menopause Can Become a Business-Risk Conversation

There is another gap that deserves considerably more attention.

Much workplace menopause research assumes there is an employer somewhere in the equation. What happens when you are the employer?

The founder cannot necessarily request flexible working from herself because she already works flexibly, usually everywhere and all the time. There may be no occupational-health department, HR director or sympathetic line manager. If she is the primary rainmaker, strategist and decision-maker, changes in energy, sleep or cognition can become concentrated business risks.

The response cannot simply be “push through”. It may mean protecting the hours in which your cognition is strongest for decisions that actually require it. It may mean moving routine operational work away from those hours, building greater capability around you, automating low-value administration or reconsidering the assumption that every important client relationship requires your personal involvement.

There is an intriguing parallel with research from financial services. Fawcett Society research involving more than 2,400 women and men across over 100 organisations found that only 22% of those currently experiencing menopause disclosed it at work. Nearly half said menopause made them less likely to want to progress in their role, while a quarter said it made them more likely to retire early.

For organisations, that is a talent-retention problem. For a founder, the equivalent question is different “could the business continue performing if the woman who built it suddenly needed to operate differently?”

That is not simply a menopause question. It is a succession, systems and resilience question.

The Research Tells Us Something We Should Not Ignore

There is also an important cultural dimension to this conversation.

The long-running US Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, known as SWAN, has followed a large multi-ethnic cohort through the menopause transition. Among women experiencing frequent vasomotor symptoms such as hot flushes and night sweats, the median duration was 7.4 years. African American women in the study experienced the longest median duration at approximately 10.1 years.

More recent SWAN research has continued examining why Black women experience a disproportionate burden. A study involving 2,377 women examined the relationship between everyday discrimination and vasomotor symptoms against a wider body of evidence showing greater frequency, severity and duration of those symptoms among Black women.

That deserves our attention because menopause does not arrive in a social vacuum.

A senior Black woman may already be navigating racialised expectations about professionalism, competence, emotional expression and resilience. Now introduce interrupted sleep, hot flushes, changing concentration or anxiety into an environment where she may already feel that mistakes carry a different reputational cost.

“Just tell your manager” sounds remarkably different when viewed through that lens.

There is also an intergenerational dimension. Many women grew up in families where menopause simply was not discussed. Their mothers and grandmothers “got on with it”, which can easily become the inherited benchmark against which today's woman judges herself.

The irony is that silence can masquerade as strength. Understanding more than the previous generation did does not make this generation weaker. It gives us the opportunity to make better decisions.

Do Not Allow Menopause to Explain Everything

There is one final gap in the playful symptom scorecard that matters enormously.

Once a woman knows she is peri menopausal or menopausal, there is a danger of interpreting every change through that single lens. Fatigue becomes menopause. Low mood becomes menopause. Palpitations become menopause. Memory difficulties become menopause. Weight changes become menopause.

Some may indeed be associated with menopause. Some may not.

That is why persistent, new, severe or worrying symptoms deserve proper clinical assessment rather than self-diagnosis from an Instagram infographic. NICE's menopause guidance, updated again in April 2026, emphasises individualised assessment and discussion of treatment according to a woman's circumstances and risk factors.

Current guidance includes HRT as an option for vasomotor symptoms, menopause-specific CBT for certain vasomotor symptoms and menopause-associated sleep difficulties, alongside specific recommendations concerning genitourinary symptoms and individual cardiovascular and other health considerations.

This matters particularly for high-performing women because competence can hide deterioration remarkably well.

If you are still delivering the presentation, closing the contract, making payroll, supporting the family and answering everybody's messages, people assume you are fine. Eventually, you may assume it too.

What Is Menopause Costing You?

So perhaps we need a different scorecard for September.

Instead of awarding yourself one point for every symptom, pay attention to the consequences surrounding those symptoms. Notice whether:

• Poor sleep is changing how you make decisions. 

• Brain fog is causing you to over-prepare. 

• Fatigue is making you decline opportunities you would normally pursue. 

• Irritability at home is actually the residue of spending an entire working day holding yourself together. 

• Intimacy has changed without conversation. 

• Your business remains unnecessarily dependent upon your physical presence. 

• You are calling something “coping” simply because nobody else can see how difficult it has become.

The goal is not to medicalise every uncomfortable day or make menopause the centre of your identity. It is to become sufficiently curious about your changing body that you stop asking it to operate according to an outdated specification.

There is something quite powerful about that idea for women accustomed to being in charge.

You have spent years developing the ability to read markets, people, organisations, risks and opportunities. September may simply be asking you to apply some of that intelligence inward.

Move the meeting if your concentration is better earlier. Protect your sleep rather than wearing exhaustion as evidence of importance. Have the conversation with your partner before distance becomes resentment. Ask for an adjustment before performance deteriorates. See your GP or an appropriately qualified healthcare professional when symptoms warrant investigation. If you run a business, build systems capable of supporting the woman you are now rather than depending indefinitely upon the energy you had at 35.

Keep the fan nearby too. We are being strategic, not ridiculous.

Same Ambition. Better Intelligence.

Menopause does not erase the woman who built the career, organisation, reputation, family or business. It may expose where her life has become too dependent upon her ability to absorb everything without consequence.

That may be the real opportunity hidden inside this season. Instead of asking, “How do I get back to the woman I was?”September gives us permission to ask a much more interesting question“what would I change if I stopped treating my changing needs as an inconvenience and started treating them as useful information?”

So, welcome to September, ladies.

We are starting the month with a little humour, but we are going to have some serious conversations underneath it.

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Looking at the menopause scorecard, which symptom would you happily leave behind with the summer and which one has had the biggest unexpected impact on your leadership, business, relationships or home life?

Share your experience in the comments. Someone else may recognise herself in what you say. Like, comment and share so we can make the conversations women were once expected to endure silently considerably harder to ignore.