Leading Through the Transition: Menopause in Senior Roles
- Editorial Team
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
Written by the Editorial Team.
How do women at the top of organisations actually get through menopause while carrying everyone else? The editorial team examines new research on senior women leaders in the transition, and what their strategies teach.
Menopause at senior level has a particular texture. The stakes of every symptom are amplified by visibility: a lost word happens in front of the executive committee, a flush arrives on stage, a short night precedes a day of decisions that affect hundreds of people.
And the culture of leadership, which rewards composure and continuity, offers almost no script for saying that anything is happening at all.
The women studied were running organisations while their own operating system was being rebuilt.
Until recently, research had very little to say about this specific experience. That has begun to change.
What the Leadership Research Found
In 2025, Mallory Decker and Professor Alicia Grandey published research in Harvard Business Review studying 64 peri- and post-menopausal women in senior leadership positions, looking for common threads in how they navigated the transition while holding significant roles.
Grandey, a distinguished professor of industrial-organisational psychology at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of Emotionally Charged, has spent her career studying emotional labour: the work of managing one's visible emotions to meet professional expectations.
Menopause at senior level, in this frame, is an emotional labour problem of unusual intensity. The leader is managing genuine internal turbulence while producing the calm the role demands, and the gap between the two is itself exhausting.
The value of studying women who have done it is practical: their strategies are transferable, and they cluster into recognisable moves.
The Strategies That Recur
The first recurring move is selective disclosure. The leaders who fared best rarely broadcast their experience, and they equally rarely carried it entirely alone.
Most identified a small circle, a trusted peer, a coach, a partner, sometimes one colleague, where the truth could be spoken plainly. The disclosure decision was treated as strategy: chosen audiences, chosen framing, chosen timing.
The second is designing around symptoms. Senior roles carry more schedule control than any other, and the effective leaders used it: demanding work placed in strong hours, recovery built around known hard points, meetings restructured when concentration was unreliable.
What middle managers must request, executives can simply do, and the studied leaders did.
The third is converting experience into culture. A number of the women found that the transition changed how they led: more honest about human limits, more attentive to what their people were quietly carrying, more willing to build the workplace conditions they themselves had needed.
Support in organisations tends to follow what senior people model, and a leader who handles her own transition with informed pragmatism gives everyone beneath her permission to be human.
The Cost of the Alternative
The alternative strategy, pure concealment plus endurance, is common and expensive. Emotional labour research is clear that sustained surface acting, performing a state one does not feel, drains the same reserves that leadership judgement runs on.
A leader spending her margin on concealment has less left for the decisions that are actually her job.
Across the wider workforce, the endpoint of unsupported symptoms is well documented: women reducing hours, stepping back, or leaving roles entirely, a loss of senior female talent that organisations can least afford at the level where it is scarcest.
Leading the Transition, Both Meanings
The research points to a conclusion with two layers. Individually, the transition is manageable at the top, and more manageable than at most levels, because senior roles carry the autonomy that symptom management needs.
The leaders who do best treat it as they would any significant operational challenge: assessed honestly, resourced properly, shared with the right people, and designed around.
Organisationally, senior women passing through the transition are, whether they choose it or not, defining what their culture believes about midlife women. Those who choose it consciously leave something behind them: workplaces where the next generation will not have to perform quite so hard while their operating system rebuilds itself.
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What's next
Continue with When Being Capable Becomes Exhausting: The Hidden Cost of Overfunctioning, where Dr. Soha Emam examines the carrying pattern that senior women so often bring into this transition.
Then explore our Midlife series for more evidence-based perspectives on this decade.
For the studies behind this series, browse our Lifestyle Medicine Research Hub, where each study is summarised in plain language.
FAQ
Should I tell my board or team that I am going through menopause?
Research on senior women in the transition suggests treating disclosure as strategy: most effective leaders shared with a small, chosen circle where honesty was safe, and made deliberate decisions about wider framing. There is no obligation in either direction, and the right answer depends on your context and culture.
Practical step: identify one trusted person, inside or outside your organisation, with whom the unedited version can be spoken this month.
How do I manage symptoms during high-visibility moments?
Preparation and design. Place demanding commitments in your reliable hours where possible, build recovery around known hard points, use written support for memory-sensitive content, and have simple practical measures ready for flushes, from room temperature to clothing layers. Senior roles carry more schedule control than most; use it.
Practical step: review next month's three highest-stakes commitments and adjust timing, preparation, or format for each while you still can.
Is it a weakness for a leader to adjust her working pattern for menopause?
Adjusting resources to conditions is management, applied to oneself. Emotional labour research shows that concealment and endurance drain the same reserves leadership judgement depends on, which makes unmanaged endurance the genuinely costly strategy.
Practical step: name one adjustment you have been resisting because of how it might look, and test it for a fortnight.
What can I do as a leader to support other women through this?
Model informed pragmatism. Support in organisations follows what senior people demonstrate. Ensuring managers are educated, policies are real, and the topic is speakable does more than any single programme, and leaders who have been through the transition carry particular credibility.
Practical step: ask what menopause provision your organisation actually has, and whether anyone below senior level knows it exists.
When should I seek medical advice?
When symptoms are affecting your work, decisions, or wellbeing, and ideally before they do. Senior women are notably prone to deferring their own care while managing everyone else's conditions. Effective treatment exists, and a leader's judgement is worth protecting properly.
Practical step: book the assessment you have been postponing, with the same decisiveness you would apply to any other critical system showing strain.
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