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A Man Looks At Midlife | Menopause In The Trenches
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Menopause in the Trenches
by Barbara Graves, M.A.

In 1991 Gail Sheehy predicted, "Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes." The more than half a million women projected to enter menopause each year until the end of the decade could create more of a forest fire than a light. With a psychologist-designed research project, we've set out to discover if the prophecy is coming to pass, and if so, exactly what's happening in all those newly illuminated boardrooms.

After having talked to over a hundred women working in various professions in San Francisco's south bay region, Dr. Gesine Schaffer and I learned that nearly everyone is ignorant about menopause. American society -- lost in the confusing issues of newly found longevity in a youth culture that still values a woman for her youthful beauty and child bearing -- cannot help women find meaning in the second half of life. The people in power, from managers to government, appear disinterested in the concerns of older women, so most women struggle alone.

The outmoded views of menopausal women that society carries combine with women's individual worries to make for a time filled with fears, large and small, justified and mythological. In general, loss of control is the career woman's greatest fear. "Can I continue carrying the same work load, producing at the same rate I always have, without a glitch?" she asks. Rarely does she ask, "Do I want to continue? Do I really need this work as I may have in the past?"

While we've found that some women and their managers have a high degree of fear surrounding negative myths about menopause, we have not found any evidence that these myths have any basis in reality; they're simply negative stereotypes. In fact, our study and other research on the effects of aging on job performance testifies to the older worker's increased stability, work motivation, involvement, and commitment. While it's ludicrous for women to assume that they can undergo a major change like menopause without changing, they should not assume that their symptoms have anything to do with mental disorders or decreased capacity. Any symptoms are temporary. Women may even be overcompensating during menopause, producing more than expected, trying to avoid these negative stereotypes.

There is a certain vulnerability some women feel about menopause. Partly due to being associated with the lesser valued and ridiculed "female stuff," this fear of exposure regarding menopause burdens women who may already feel less useful, more mortal, fatter yet more invisible than ever before. In a sadly typical pattern, women blame womanhood for any problems at work that women experience but men don't, so what might have been a health-leave issue or a simple management style problem becomes a source of deep shame for some menopausal women. Then they hide.

In more competitive environments, nothing is more seductive than someone hiding something. Few women have observed specific incidents of direct discrimination against menopausal women, although many acknowledge a work environment that diminishes them with daily demeaning behaviors and joking at their expense.

Ageism and sexism may be working together in the demographics of downsizing, as we've talked to a number of menopausal women who have been recently laid off, but the women themselves consider their cases isolated. Going to great lengths to appear non-emotional, non-personal and non-female, conscious that "unprofessional" equals "unmale" at work, few women take the chance to re-define professionalism.

Women who decide to make a new life from their menopause begin by educating themselves. They read books, seek good medical advice before making decisions, talk to other women and perhaps to a therapist. In general, these women feel surer of themselves and are more assertive than ever before, and they are fed up with taking care of others. Many say they are more content and freer than at any other time in their lives.

Having talked with women in various stages of their menopause, we've come to see the change as a process of developing a new kind of power. In the beginning, menopause can be a time of profound disturbance. Women feel overwhelmed and confused as their old ways of being in the world (or maybe the world's ways of being with them) no longer work. Creating new mechanisms can seem chaotic and frightening, but each time a menopausal woman asks for what she wants and gets it, we all feel a little bit more powerful.

©1996 by Barbara B. Graves