There is a particular kind of quiet a lot of us know well. The quiet of sitting at your desk, losing the word you needed mid-sentence, feeling the heat rise up your neck in a meeting, and saying nothing. Carrying it alone. Certain, somehow, that you are the only one.
A new study put that quiet into words. Researchers at a UK university sat down with eleven women going through perimenopause and menopause and asked them, plainly, what their working lives actually felt like, and whether their workplace menopause policy made any difference. What came back was three honest themes. The first named the toll. The second named the gap between paperwork and reality. The third named the thing that genuinely carried these women through. And it was not the policy.
"I thought I was going mad"
The researchers' first theme is a direct quote from one of the women, and it lands because so many of us have thought exactly the same thing. The early signs of this season can be disorienting, especially before you know what you are looking at. The women described memory lapses, hot flushes, broken sleep, and emotional ups and downs, all of it arriving without a name.
One woman said she genuinely thought she had early dementia, putting her pens in the fridge and leaving her keys in the front door. Another described standing up to lecture and finding the word simply would not come, then the spiral of "what if they think I don't know what I'm doing." A third said her resilience just went, that she could not manage the pressure anymore, and she had no idea it was menopause. She thought it was her.
That last line is the heart of it. When you do not know what is happening, you assume the problem is you. At work, where so much rides on seeming sharp and steady, that assumption gets carried in silence. None of this is decline. It is a transition arriving without warning, in a workplace not ready to meet it.
"It reads like it's been written for HR, not for us"
So surely the answer is the company menopause policy. That is what it is there for.
Here is where the study gets quietly damning. Several of the women did not know their workplace had a menopause policy at all. "I didn't even know we had a menopause policy until this session," one said. "I've worked here for years." When the group read the document together, the verdict was the study's second theme, word for word: "It reads like it's been written for HR, not for us."
Their critiques were specific and fair. The policy felt generic. It leaned heavily on going to your line manager first, which one woman noted was little comfort when your manager is, in her words, a thirty-year-old man who has never been near this experience. It did not flex: there was no recognition, as one put it, that what she needs this month might be completely different from last month. And it overlooked whole groups of women, including those whose menopause was triggered by surgery. "It doesn't even mention surgical menopause," one said, "and yet that's my reality."
None of this is an argument against having a policy. The women welcomed the fact that one existed. It is an argument that a document on the intranet is not the same as feeling supported. A policy can be present and still be missing.
"Not the policy, not HR, just knowing you're not alone"
Then the researchers asked what actually helped. The answer became the study's third theme, and it is the line the whole paper is named after: "It's the chats with colleagues that get me through. Not the policy, not HR, just knowing you're not alone."
It was each other. The corridor conversation with someone who gets it. The WhatsApp thread. The quiet coffee where somebody says me too. One woman put it perfectly: "Just knowing someone else is crying at toilet roll adverts makes me feel like I'm not going mad. You start to realise it's not just me."
That is the moment the toll lifts. Not because anything was solved, but because it stopped being carried alone.
The women described these informal connections as a lifeline, more meaningful than any formal provision, especially in teams where menopause was misunderstood or never mentioned. They lit up talking about low-pressure spaces to gather: monthly drop-ins, a virtual menopause café where you could keep your camera off and just listen. One described a version that "made it OK to not be OK."
The researchers' conclusion is the part worth pinning up somewhere. Menopause at work is not only a biological event. It is a deeply social and professional one. Recognition and connection did the work that no document could.
What this means for you
This is one study, and it is honest about its size. Eleven women, a single two-hour workshop, themes rather than statistics, and a fairly similar group of mostly white, highly educated women at one university. The researchers say plainly that women in other kinds of work may face this very differently. But qualitative research is not trying to count. It is trying to name something true, and this one names a feeling a great many of us recognize on sight. Here is what to take from it, during perimenopause, menopause and beyond.
Find your people. You do not need a committee. You need one or two colleagues you can be honest with, the person you can catch in the corridor and roll your eyes at. If the workshop in this study did one thing, it was prove how much relief lives in a single "me too."
Start the conversation. Someone has to say the first sentence, and it is often the bravest thing in the room. Naming your own experience out loud gives the woman two desks over permission to exhale. The silence only holds because everyone assumes they are the only one.
Know what good support actually looks like. If you are shaping policy, or asking for better, the study is a quiet blueprint. Make the policy visible and put it in the induction, not buried where nobody reads it. Build in flexibility, because needs shift week to week. Offer a route that is not just your line manager, like a trained menopause champion. And protect the informal spaces, the drop-ins and the cafés, because that is where the real support was already happening.
We are stronger together. That is not a slogan here. It is the finding.
Source
Owen A, Taylor J, Burton A. "It's the chats with colleagues that get me through. Not the policy, not HR, just knowing you're not alone": women's experiences of menopause at work and reflections on a workplace menopause policy. Menopause. 2026;33(6):719-726. doi:10.1097/GME.0000000000002715
Read it on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41401248/
