Cambridge, 16 October 2026 – Only one of 198 organisations active in global health has made a standalone menopause policy publicly available, according to new research from Global 50/50, the independent gender justice think tank. The findings are published ahead of World Menopause Day on Sunday 18 October.
The review, Working through it?, found menopause provision of some kind at 37 of the 198 organisations (19%), up from 21 in 2023. Five have a standalone menopause policy, 17 offer adjustments, flexible working or structured conversations, 14 offer sick leave and 5 offer personal leave. For 161 organisations, no provision was found.
Most of what exists is out of public view. Only 8 of the 37 organisations with provision had made it public, with the other 29 sharing information with Global 50/50 directly. Of the five standalone menopause policies found, just one was published online. A woman considering a job offer has no way of knowing what support is on offer.
‘Menopause is a justice, equality and rights issue that has been overlooked for too long, treated as embarrassing or private,’ says Lynsey Robinson, Health Lead at Global 50/50. ‘It’s a workplace and economic issue too. The costs aren’t coming from symptoms, they’re coming from workplaces that leave people to manage them alone. Many of the organisations we reviewed help set the standards for the world’s health, yet we couldn’t see what they offer their own staff, and in many cases, nor can their staff. It should be a normal, accepted part of working life.’
Why it matters: as societies age, workplaces have not yet caught up
Across the OECD, the employment rate of women aged 55 to 59 rose by 18.5 percentage points between 2000 and 2024, roughly double the rise among men of the same age, and UK women now leave the labour market at 65.1 on average, the highest on record. More women are therefore working through menopause, and the costs of workplace inaction fall first on women.
In the UK, 1 in 10 women aged 45 to 55 who had worked through menopause left a job because of their symptoms, and register data from Norway and Sweden show a persistent fall in earnings after a menopause diagnosis, reaching 7.4% in Norway by the fourth year.
Costs reach employers and economies too: a Mayo Clinic study of employed US women aged 45 to 60 put menopause-related lost work productivity at USD 1.8 billion a year – a figure which does not include the costs of direct medical expenditure, reduced working hours, switching to a lower paid job, lost earnings or taking early retirement. And the OECD names older workers and women as the labour that must be mobilised to sustain growth as working-age populations shrink.
‘It’s one thing having an announcement to say you’ve got to have a menopause action plan by 2027. What does that actually look like for an organisation that’s probably never even mentioned the word before?’ says Helen Tomlinson, the UK’s Menopause Employment Champion from 2023 to 2024. ‘Employers should think more about cultural change than completing an action plan. Education, Advocacy, Lived Experience & Leadership are the cultural changes that define a business & reduce the reliance on action plans & policy.’
The law is beginning to catch up
Binding duties remain rare. Rhode Island signed a reasonable accommodations law in June 2025, and laws in Illinois and Philadelphia take effect in January 2027. In the UK, employers with 250 or more staff must publish an equality action plan that includes menopause support, voluntary from April 2026 and mandatory from spring 2027 subject to secondary legislation, though this is a duty to plan and report, not a right an individual can enforce.
What employers can do now
Global 50/50 believes organisations should act now rather than wait to be compelled by law. The brief urges employers to name menopause in the policies they already have, publish what they offer, train managers to listen and not assume, and count the results, disaggregated by age and contract type. The more organisations show what they offer, the more others will feel able to follow.
‘A policy is great, but it’s how you bring it to life and how it feels meaningful and how you reach everybody in the organisation that actually makes the difference,’ adds Deborah Garlick, founder of Henpicked, which works with employers on menopause.
Ends
Notes to editors
- Working through it? is available at https://global5050.org/accountability-organisations/working-through-it/ with the data, figures and policy examples. Interviews with Lynsey Robinson are available on request, as are edited video clips with Helen Tomlinson and Deborah Garlick.
- Global 50/50 assessed each organisation’s publicly available policies and asked organisations to share internal documents. The 198 organisations are those Global 50/50 tracks across 37 countries; the figures describe this sample, and organisations can appear in more than one category of provision.
- External figures: employment rates of women aged 55 to 59, OECD, Employment Outlook 2025; average age women leave the UK labour market, Department for Work and Pensions, September 2026; earnings after menopause diagnosis in Norway, Conti, Ginja, Persson and Willage, The menopause ‘penalty’ (IFS Working Paper W26/01, 2026); women leaving the workforce due to menopause in the UK, Fawcett Society, April 2022; lost work productivity in the US, Faubion et al., Mayo Clinic Proceedings 98(6), 2023.
- Working through it? is the first of four releases in Bodies at Work, Global 50/50’s 2026 series on whether workplaces accommodate the working body across the whole working life. The first full report, The Unaccommodated Body, follows in the coming weeks, followed by The Body at Risk (December) and The Caring Body (January 2027).
- Global 50/50 is an independent gender justice think tank.
- Media contact: Anna Purdie, anna.purdie@global5050.org, +447707606126
Find out more
Read the full report, explore the data behind the findings, or contact the press office to arrange an interview with Dr Lynsey Robinson.
