Abstract
AbstractThis article explores how older women experience and manage menopause at work by asking how female workers construct their work identity around their experiences of menopause at work. Based on qualitative data from 21 women in Edinburgh, UK, findings suggest that women engaged in conflicting behaviors to manage and make sense of their menopausal bodies at work. On the one hand, women engaged in a highly resilient, neoliberal discourse around controlling and managing the symptoms at work. Conversely, data emerged reflecting a negative and self‐deprecating identity talk in how women described themselves in relation to the menopause. This article responds to the call for more nuanced empirical work on factors affecting extending working lives and experiences of menopause at work. While research output generally acknowledges the need for organizations to better understand individuals’ needs at work and not to be blinded by anti‐ageing discourses, this article recognizes that individual women themselves must also heed this advice to more effectively navigate the menopause through continued labor force participation. This article also concludes that menopause management at work must consider that individual women face their own unique cocktail of menopause symptoms, as such blanket human resources policies on their own might be inadequate to improve employment outcomes of women challenged and interrupted by the menopause.
Highlights
The ways that women in this study spoke about the menopause fell into two categories: performing a neoliberal identity of menopause endurance; and a form of identity talk coined in this article as menopause talk
All of these 15 women spoke about managing their menopause symptoms at work through a predominately neoliberal discourse of resilience and self‐help
There appeared a neoliberal discourse, which positioned a centrality of self in isolation— women felt very much alone through the menopause process and how it impacted them at work
Summary
Identity is said to bridge the gap between the individual self and society or social structures where identity is constructed through discourse—discursive articulation of identity is seen as an ongoing iteration between what is projected and what is perceived (Ybema et al, 2009) This form of “identity talk” is viewed as inherently positive, used to present the self, or the organizational agent in a positive light in relation to what is appropriate, desirable, or valued within the world of work (Schein, 1975). This article analyzes experiences of older female workers from an Edinburgh‐based study into broader experiences of the appearance of bodily ageing at work It emerged that female participants engaged in negative identity talk in relation to menopause symptoms at work. There is a growing literature around menopause at work (Atkinson, Beck, Brewis, Davies, & Duberley, 2020; Grandey, Gabriel, & King, 2020; Jack et al, 2016), there exists a paucity in empirical studies that explore how menopause is experienced at work
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