The ‘Menopause Penalty.’ When biology meets broken work systems

After 50, too many women reduce their working hours, become trapped in lower-quality jobs, or exit the labor market altogether. Part-time employment becomes more prevalent as women age. The gender gap widens. For women, this means lower lifetime earnings and significantly smaller pensions. Many are calling this phenomenon the “menopause penalty”—a midlife equivalent of the motherhood penalty. And indeed, research suggests that women’s earnings drop in the years following a menopause diagnosis.

But while menopause clearly plays a role, there is a risk in attributing these economic setbacks too narrowly to biology. Doing so not only oversimplifies women’s lived realities—it also medicalizes what are fundamentally social and organizational problems. Menopause matters. But it rarely acts alone.

A convergence of pressures and setbacks

Midlife is often the most demanding phase of women’s lives. Menopause tends to coincide with a series of other “life shocks” that disproportionately affect women. Caregiving responsibilities intensify: aging parents begin to need support, while many women are still helping children or even grandchildren. The “sandwich generation” is squeezed between upward and downward care.

Meanwhile, serious health risks increase—including breast cancer and chronic illness. Divorce is also common in midlife and comes with major financial and emotional consequences. The death of a parent is another major shock that frequently occurs in midlife and is largely invisible in workplace thinking—grief doesn’t fit into a few days of leave but often brings lasting exhaustion and difficulty concentrating.

Overlay all of this with growing exposure to ageism in the workplace and it becomes clear that menopause is rarely the only culprit. Yes, symptoms such as fatigue, hot flashes, or brain fog can make work harder to sustain. But menopause comes at a moment of cumulative strain. It does not create the inequalities. It amplifies those that already exist.

When work refuses to adapt

Many jobs are still designed for a worker who is endlessly available, physically resilient, emotionally stable, and largely free from caregiving responsibilities. Menopause symptoms collide with these unrealistic expectations.

Instead of redesigning work—adjusting schedules, reducing unnecessary presenteeism, offering autonomy, improving ergonomic conditions and workplaces, or recognizing fluctuating capacity—organizations implicitly ask women to adapt their bodies. And when they cannot, the “choices” available are reducing hours, stepping back from responsibility, refusing promotions, accepting less visible roles, or leaving work altogether.

From the outside, this looks like individual preference. That’s why the menopause penalty looks exactly like the motherhood penalty. Neither is caused simply by biology. Both result from the collision between life stages and rigid work systems built around male, uninterrupted career norms.

The penalty is also reinforced by stereotypes. Menopause is still associated with emotional volatility, decline, and loss of competence. Many women fear being perceived as less reliable or less ambitious. Some avoid high-visibility projects. Others turn down leadership roles or client-facing positions simply because they fear exposure. Menopause stereotypes are like sexism on steroids.

Economically, the menopause penalty represents a massive loss of human capital. Women in their late 40s, 50s, and early 60s often hold their highest levels of skill, institutional knowledge, and professional experience. When they reduce hours or leave work prematurely, organizations lose leadership potential, mentoring capacity, and expertise.

The danger of medicalizing inequality

There is an increasing push to frame menopause primarily as a health issue requiring medical solutions—more awareness campaigns, more diagnoses, more treatments.

Don’t get me wrong: better healthcare really does matter. Too many women suffer unnecessarily because of lack of information, poor medical support, or lingering fears around hormone therapies. For those with severe symptoms, treatment can be life-changing.

But there is a real risk in making menopause the central explanation for midlife economic inequality. When reduced earnings or stalled careers are blamed mainly on hormonal changes, it obscures the role of workplaces, the gendered division of unpaid work, insufficient care infrastructure, ageism, and broader social, political, and corporate issues.

It suggests that if women simply managed their symptoms better, the problem would disappear. We often medicalize social problems. For example, we prescribe antidepressants without addressing poverty, violence, overwork, or isolation.

Hormone therapy may ease hot flashes and prevent osteoporosis (and that’s a lot). But it won’t pay the rent, restart a stalled career, restore lost pension rights, or compensate for years of unpaid care work. Pills don’t fix ageism. They don’t erase structural inequality.

Let’s redesign work for long lives

1. Design work for sustainability. Most jobs are still built around an ideal worker who is always available, endlessly energetic, and free from responsibilities outside work. This model breaks down over long working lives. Companies should rethink workloads, hours, and performance expectations to allow for fluctuating capacity over time. Focusing on outputs rather than presence, reducing unnecessary urgency, and normalizing lower-intensity periods would make careers more sustainable.

2. Make flexibility the norm. When flexible working is treated as an exception, it carries invisible penalties (slower progression, reduced visibility). To avoid turning flexibility into a career trap, companies should offer autonomy over hours and location by default and ensure flexible workers are not sidelined.

3. Confront ageism head-on. Many midlife career setbacks for women are inseparable from age discrimination. Employers should track pay, promotions, and evaluations by age and gender, challenge stereotypes in leadership cultures, and ensure development opportunities exist throughout careers.

4. Recognize caregiving as a normal life-stage reality. Midlife is often when care responsibilities peak—for aging parents, ill relatives, or extended family—yet workplace policies remain focused on early parenthood. Companies should expand support to include eldercare flexibility. When caregiving is ignored or treated as a personal inconvenience, many women quietly reduce hours or exit.

5. Address menopause openly. Raising awareness and training managers can reduce stigma and improve support. But if rigid schedules, long hours, and unforgiving performance models remain, women are left to manage symptoms within broken systems. Menopause initiatives must go hand in hand with reforms in job design, flexibility, and inclusion—or risk becoming symbolic rather than effective.