Flashing at work
Browsing for an empathetic “cheer up” card for a friend having a tough time with hot flashes at work, I came across this one: “Why did the menopausal woman cross the road?” the card read. The answer? “To kill the chicken.”
After one unseemly snort, I bought and mailed it immediately — without writing a soft-focus “This too shall pass” or a boosterish “You go, red-hot mama” message on the enclosure. I figured a good laugh was what she needed. Because humour, as many perimenopausal and menopausal women know (we’ll just say “menopausal” from here onward to save on word count), is a key coping mechanism. It’s partly why so many women laugh about something that isn’t, frankly, all that funny, particularly when it affects their ability to function in the inner sanctum of daily life: the workplace.
Indeed, humour may be essential if your office culture makes talking about menopause about as welcome as talking about digestive difficulties. Even though an estimated 2.7 million Canadian women will reach menopause over the next decade, the stigma about this life stage pervades many places of business.
Meno-discrimination at work
Lila Nachtigall, a reproductive endocrinologist and past-president of the North American Menopause Society, views meno-discrimination as a holdover from eons of prejudice against aging. Furthermore, she believes that the “menopause-equals-old-equals-unappealing, so let’s not talk about it” attitude is at its worst in the upper echelons of some traditionally male-dominated professions, such as in the following example.
“Recently, a patient who is the only woman partner in a very large architectural firm told me about being at an important meeting with a lot of architects,” Nachtigall recounts from her New York office. “She had a hot flush, then sweated all over the architectural plans. No one said anything. Everybody looked at one another and she just tried to move on and wiped off the plans.”
Yowsers. But not all workplaces stand by and silently mop up the evidence. Shannon MacFarlane, director of the Winnipeg English Language Assessment and Referral Centre, found menopause came on like “a roaring train,” including “great discomfort, crankiness, mood swings and hot flashes.” But the 50-year-old discovered one thing that helped in her 95 per cent female workplace: frankness about what she was going through. “As long as one has a sense of humour about things, the situation doesn’t have to be difficult — like simply admitting to everyone that you are having a hot flash in the middle of a meeting as you grab your fan for some relief,” says MacFarlane.
