Author: Pat Duckworth

Imagine if every woman sailed through their menopause, it was talked about openly with no embarrassment and it didn’t get in the way of life. If 3 out of 4 experience symptoms, 1 in 4 don’t. So why can’t we all to sail through it? We hope that with the right awareness and education, we can.

Back in my mid-40s I struggled so much with period pains I ended up in hospital.  It wasn’t just the pain, I had crashing fatigue and would spend at least a weekend a month in bed. The doctors prescribed painkillers which ‘zombied’ me out even more. Then acne flared up, which apparently a lot of menopausal women get.

To top it all it was getting hard for me to manage at work. I had a senior job, with long hours, busy teams reporting to me, and grueling deadlines.

After a year (and redundancy) something had to give. Instead of masking the problem with painkillers, I reluctantly went private and got to the bottom of what turned out to be hormone problems. I know it now as perimenopause, something I knew nothing about then.

The thing that upset me most was that I thought I was handling it but my husband told the doctor that I was a nightmare to live with and my relationships were struggling. News to me and it goes to show that you sometimes need others to tell you the things you can’t see yourself.

Hormone replacement therapy changed my life in a month and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t had this offered to me before by my own GP. I was mid-40s so a prime age for menopause symptoms.

How much of a difference would awareness and education have made to me then, and how much of a difference can it make to us all if we all know about menopause, its symptoms and how to manage them?

In 2013 I founded Henpicked.net and then we joined together with T4W in 2016. Henpicked focused on the menopause when we noticed that whenever we published an article, traffic to the website spiked and there were loads of comments on social media. The struggle, lack of awareness and understanding was shockingly clear and we decided to do something about it.

We have the website, and now we’ve written a book Menopause: The Change for the Better, with clinicians and natural practitioners giving clear guidance and information, and women sharing their menopause stories.

But we want to change the culture of the UK for good and we needed to find a way to reach even more people.

ITV asked me if I knew any companies who had menopause policies so I asked the HR Directors I know. Resoundingly, the answer was ‘no’, but some wanted to know more. We talked to the University of Leicester team who were researching the Government Report. Their evidence-based research made the reasons why organisations should take menopause seriously clear. It’s good for their colleagues, good for an inclusive culture and ultimately it’s good for their bottom line.

It became clear to us that while many companies were willing to introduce menopause policies, not many knew how to start. We decided to use our expertise to educate organisations about what types of support they could introduce, and how.

We created Henpicked: Menopause In The Workplace to help make it easy, to provide the support and training that those organisations need.

Our target was to talk to 100 companies in a year and we did more than that. It may be just the start but when you add up how many employees were reached, it’s a good one.

We held our second annual Menopause in the Workplace conference in January 2018, where the fantastic companies we’ve worked with shared their case studies, helping educate other organisations on what they did, how they did it and the results they’ve seen.  The results are brilliant.

We’ve now increased our target to 1,000 organisations in a year, kicking off our Menopause In The Workplace events across the whole of the UK will help us do that. We really enjoyed our first on in London on the 5 December and we’ve now organised events in Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, Edinburgh and York. Other locations and dates are being confirmed.

In changing the culture of the UK we all have a role to play. We love working with organisations because by educating their support functions, line managers and colleagues – men and women – we can achieve this faster.

The pay off for businesses is healthier, happier more productive staff, less time off, avoiding women leaving because they can’t cope with their symptoms and of course – the stick – if they don’t do it, they risk employee relations’ issues and being taken to tribunal.

Surely it’s an easy decision to make.

Deborah Garlick, Founder of Henpicked