The February Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF) podcast featured guests Lucinda Pincott, menopause awareness advocate and Louise Colley, head of retail protection at Zurich.
Colley shared her experience, saying: “I didn’t know what the perimenopause was until I had it.”
She said a couple of years ago, she lost her confidence and was experiencing frequent panic attacks, especially while driving which made her symptoms more dangerous.
Colley said: “I was very fortunate enough to have an annual MOT – as I call it – with a doctor. And she asked, ‘Is there anything else that you want to talk about?’ I raised the point of just feeling low, I was having panic attacks when in the car, and obviously through that MOT I’d put on a fair bit of weight as well. She started to talk about perimenopause and she said these are classic symptoms.”
Colley said among her friendship circle, menopause and perimenopause had not been discussed so at the age of 47 she was unaware that this was what she was going through. Eventually, her GP confirmed it.
Pincott said she went through a similar realisation, adding: “It’s slightly ridiculous that everyone goes through perimenopause, yet so few people have even heard of it, let alone the women who it’s affecting.
“And I actually found it more upsetting to discover after four years of being affected, that I was normal.”
The perimenopause can start around the age of 40 for women and last for about 10 years before the end of their periods.
“For most women, they’re affected for four to six years, but it can actually last up to 15 years. So really, most women in their 40s are in some way affected by perimenopause.
“It’s a bit like puberty in reverse, it has no fixed start. And because most women don’t even know that perimenopause is a thing, they don’t know what’s wrong with them as they enter into the early stages,” Pincott added.
The symptoms and recognising them
Symptoms of perimenopause include body aches, weight gain, brain fog, mood swings, changing menstrual cycle and interrupted sleep.
Pincott said: “Most women put the symptoms of perimenopause down to lifestyle.
“It is only when it gets too bad that somebody might join the dots and work out that there’s an awful lot of things going wrong with them… over the course of three or four years.”
She said there were officially 35 symptoms, broken down broadly into psychological and physical categories.
Pincott said brain fog was the most common symptom and while people thought of it as forgetting the odd word, it ranged from “not being able to decide what to wear in the morning to work” or “driving down a road for 20 minutes with no idea where you’re going”.
She said many women believed they were experiencing dementia which made them even more reluctant to seek help either at work or with a doctor.
How firms and leaders could help
Colley said Zurich was an open and transparent firm, which made it easy for her to discuss her symptoms. She said all leaders at the company were encouraged to discuss perimenopause and the menopause, the symptoms and how to be more understanding to colleagues going through it.
“Ultimately, if it’s not managed correctly, that can impact the individual,” Colley added.
She also said she was happy to see she no longer came across colleagues who assumed women were on their period if they seemed irritable.
Colley added: “You should never ever, as a male leader make any reference to that, I’m pleased to say that doesn’t really happen anymore.
“But if you were to see mood swings, or you were to see hot flushes in a meeting, or starting to see these signs, it’s your obligation as a leader to read up on that and understand how you can help.”
Pincott said it was also important not to attach women’s health issues to changes in mood, especially if there were genuine criticisms between senior staff and junior staff.
“25 per cent of women are relatively unaffected by menopause. So not everybody having a slightly bad day can put it down to hormones or should have it attributed to something being wrong with their stage of life,” Pincott added.
She said there should be official channels for junior team members to raise concerns about how they’ve been treated by a senior member instead.
Pincott also said it was important to have people in HR that women staff could go to in order to disclose any symptoms they were having.
“At the moment, there is a big drive for HR and people officers to go on training to understand this stage of life and what can be done, where they can suggest help. If a staff member comes to them and says, ‘I’m out of sorts, I need to work from home’, find out if there’s any more information they can be given, such as supporting going to a GP, and addressing the flexible working from home, for example, if needed.
“Having a person you can contact in HR, who knows what they are going through or understands it is crucial to being able to pass messages on for example, because a lot of females do not want to ring up their male boss and explain their personal discomfort of the day or the week in any great detail,” she added.
Colley said this was particularly important in the financial services sector as the percentage of women declined at senior levels.
Pincott agreed, saying a third of women considered leaving their jobs during the perimenopause and menopause and 10 per cent actually quit.
She added: “The cost of losing those women in a large company is enormous when you’re trying to increase diversity and have women leaders.”
Listen to the podcast below [28.12].
