A line from Gracie Abrams' new single, "Look at My Life", made me think about how many women recognize this in their own lived experience: "Got what I wanted, it doesn't sit right."

The seat at the table, the title, the visibility - all finally here. And at the same time, so much feels out of control. The body underneath it is changing shape. Sleep is fractured. Words go missing mid-sentence. A hot flush arrives mid-meeting. Being seen, right when you feel least comfortable in your own skin, can feel genuinely icky.

What if it could be both, the perimenopause and the seat at the table, without having to feel uncomfortable in either? Yes and, instead of yes but.

I attended a webinar yesterday with Adecco and Helen Tomlinson , the UK's first government menopause employment champion, and she referred to a quote: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." You can write the best policy in the world. If nobody feels safe enough to say the actual sentence out loud, it changes nothing.

That's the cracking open I mean. A willingness to let the topic exist in the room. Without it, masking becomes habit, habit becomes silence, and silence calcifies into culture: Layer upon layer, year upon year, until an organisation simply isn't built to hold an experience that touches a substantial part of its workforce.

This is where it gets sharper in male-dominated industries. Think manufacturing plants, maritime and offshore crews, 24/7 production lines, women in white uniforms designed with zero thought for the body wearing them, frontline and non-autonomous roles where you can't just log off for an hour to ask a question. There's often no language for this because the workplace was never designed with these bodies, this stage of life, in mind. The cracking open doesn't get a chance to happen.

We know the cost shows up in the numbers: in the UK, and increasingly reported elsewhere, one in ten women have already left a job over unmanaged symptoms, and employment tribunals citing menopause are up 83% in a year.

It's also not one experience to crack open, it's many. That lived experience is intersectional: Menopause starts at different ages, shows up differently, and is shaped by race, disability, neurodivergence and socioeconomic background. Some women experience medically induced menopause, some enter perimenopause before 40, even before 30. Treating it as a single, uniform story is its own way of keeping people quiet.

I love cracking this open now. I'm not afraid of the conversation, because I've watched what happens when even one senior leader says the sentence out loud first - the room exhales, and other people find their own words. The "fit" gets better for everyone, not just the people it was already built for.

What would it take for one more uncomfortable truth to get said out loud in your workplace this quarter  and who needs to say it first?

In the UK, from April 2027, a designated leader will need to say it.

Do we want to wait to change culture when it concerns 50% of the population? There's no better time than now, and launching your menopause action plan in October, on World Menopause Day, seems like a pretty good place to start.

Not sure where your organisation actually stands? Take the Are We Menopause Ready? quiz , a few honest minutes to find out before you build toward October.