The rest of the story

Can we please reframe the narrative about older women at work?

Imagine you are part of Gen Z, between the ages of 11 and 26. Now imagine that almost every article you read about people in your generation is about puberty. No one is talking about the work you do or the art you make, or what interests and engages you because they’re obsessed with what your body did, the thing that just about every body has done, forever.

It would be weird, right? Especially because most of the people in Gen Z are through puberty and onto the rest of their lives. You would no doubt wonder about the media’s fascination with a normal physical transition to the exclusion of everything else your generation is doing. 

I’m a sixty-one-year-old woman and almost every article I read about women my age at work is about menopause. This normal part of aging is often described as harrowing;  something older women need special accommodations in the workplace to survive.

Menopause is part of aging for people with two X chromosomes, and we all experience these changes differently. Why can’t menopause be personalized rather than pathologized, just like pregnancy? Menopause, like pregnancy, does end. But without post-menopausal women at work, we don’t hear about that part.

Advertising is a tough place to be over fifty

I’ve worked in and around the advertising industry for most of the last three decades. And I’ve experienced plenty of sexism and ageism along the way. I’ve watched many talented competent women be sidelined or fired after the age of fifty, and I’ve watched many others leave because they are sick of the hostile work environment.

Whenever I’m in a room full of advertising people I am the oldest woman there, and I have been for years. When I say my age, which I do on purpose, there is often an audible reaction, as if I have revealed a dirty secret. Because many women feel like they have to hide their age to keep a job. I know this because they’ve told me so, whether it’s plastic surgery or not mentioning a kid in high school.

Of course, anyone who needs an accommodation at work for any reason should get one. But a relentless focus on the ways in which some women struggle with hormonal symptoms at any age doesn’t serve us. Companies who tout their menopause benefits without supporting older women in tangible ways that fight ageism and sexism are cynically performative. Older women need more than nap rooms to stay and thrive in the corporate world.

I’m old enough to remember when managers talked openly about concerns that if they hired a young married woman, she would get pregnant and need maternity leave or quit her job to stay home with a new baby. If we were considering hiring such a woman, the male managers would look around the room and hesitate and then say, you know, pregnancy.

Personalized, not pathologized

Now, pregnancy at work has been normalized to some degree, with a general cultural understanding that people have different experiences with pregnancy and childbirth. We see pregnant people, they work with us, they are our dentists or bus drivers or surgeons or senators. Some struggle with morning sickness, some don’t. Some have easy labors, some have emergency C sections. Pregnancy is not pathologized, it is personalized, with a recognition that it’s a natural event and each body responds to it differently. I rarely hear that same elastic understanding of menopause, which is portrayed only as a consistent constellation of afflictions.

Those stories impact young women. I grew up hearing that menopause was debilitating. It would sap your intellect, drain your body of energy and sexuality. You would be plagued by hot flashes and sleep badly, waking up drenched in sweat, sheets sodden. A great aunt by marriage who was kindly referred to as a bit “dotty” was said to have been sharp as a tack until “the change.” But when I got to menopause, I was surprised that it wasn’t like that for me. While I know plenty of people have a difficult experience, mine was easy.

Menopause is, officially, when it’s been a year since a person’s last menstrual period. According to the Mayo Clinic, the average age in America for menopause is 51. (Information about menopause is in the “diseases” section of the Mayo Clinic website, by the way. Monetizing menopause is more effective if you make it a disease.)

No one ever talked about what happened after menopause, the experience of women over 51. While some women continue to have troubling symptoms, many don’t. There is this wide swathe of life after menopause, and for many of us being post-menopausal is great. Sex without worrying about pregnancy. No more menstruation. I can grab a purse I haven’t used in a while, and I won’t find the zip pockets bulging with tampons. I didn’t have brain fog, and don’t feel any change in my mental functioning. In fact, the greatest impact is that as the estrogen ebbed from my body, so did my concerns about what other people thought of me. I biologically give fewer fucks. It is fantastic.

Menopause and sex

The stories about our bodies matter. I visited my OB-GYN as perimenopause started and told her that I was worried that menopause would flip a switch and kill my libido, because that’s what I’d heard. She told me that studies show that women lose interest in partners they have had for many years. It’s not about age, it’s about boredom. And since that drop in sexual interest in long term partners often happens about the time women are in perimenopause, people conflated the two.

But, data shows, older women with new partners show no diminution in sexual interest during or after menopause. I was relieved to hear that. It reframed the narrative. Rather than admitting that their wives might be tired of them after twenty years, men made up a story that there was something wrong with their wives, and it was hormones.

Our corporate cultures are already rife with narratives about older women, and I worry that pathologizing menopause is now part of that portfolio of stereotypes. I worry that those of us with the temerity to still work and take up space will be considered problematic because our bodies, which are vaguely embarrassing for the young to contemplate anyway, are unreliable. Will we have hot flashes in the middle of a meeting? Will we need to lie down and nap every day because of insomnia? Will we have brain fog during a critical negotiation?

I don’t want anyone to look at hiring a woman in her forties or fifties and be worried that she won’t be able to keep up intellectually or physically because, you know, menopause. 

Stories about ways in which female bodies are weak and unreliable are used by men in power to cast doubt on our effectiveness. Stories in which we navigate menopause as uneventfully as many manage puberty are not marketable. I submitted a version of this article to fifteen publications, including all the major ad trades, some of which have published my work before. No takers. Which means I’d appreciate any and all sharing of this particular substack into the world.

I don’t want my daughter or granddaughter growing up with the narrative I did, that we all go off a hormonal cliff around the age of fifty and never recover. If we choose to talk about our experiences with our aging bodies, let’s expand the narrative to include those of us who experience menopause as freedom, who greet the transition away from menstruation and the possibility of pregnancy as a relief. We don’t need nap rooms. We need changed attitudes towards older women at work. We need policies in place to protect us from ageism and sexism. Which means we have to rewrite the story about aging at work ourselves.