By Thea O'Connor -
There are big reasons why your workplace should be menopause-friendly.
It’s the missing life stage in workplace culture, policy and training, even though it affects more than one million women in the Australian workforce each year.
We are talking about menopause. Despite it being a natural stage in the life cycle that affects 50 per cent of humanity, it’s a taboo topic – especially in workplaces.
I have interviewed 25 Australian working women at various stages of menopause and these women said there was a stigma in their workplaces about menopause and they felt they needed to remain silent on the topic, which made them feel isolated.
They agreed that the main thing they wanted to change was to normalise the life stage they were at.
“If we could bring talking about menopause into the mainstream, and see it as a normal part of the cyclical nature of life, then women could feel much more empowered,” one woman told me.
