By Cheryl Guest – Part of the Women in Technology Series
I wrote recently about menopause in the workplace – about the silence that surrounds it, the symptoms that too many women are managing alone, and the very real cost to organisations that fail to take it seriously. The response I received was, honestly, humbling. It told me two things: that the conversation is long overdue, and that there is still so much more to say.
So this is a follow-on. Because right now, in the aftermath of a UK heatwave that broke records and pushed temperatures close to 39 degrees in some parts of the country, the issues I raised feel even more urgent.
Last week’s heat was historic. Red extreme heat warnings were issued across much of England. Overnight temperatures refused to drop below 20 degrees, leaving people exhausted before the working day had even begun. And while that particular peak has now passed, forecasters are already warning that it is not over. The Met Office has indicated that above-average temperatures are expected to persist through July, with another significant hot spell likely to develop from around 9 July. This is not a one-week story. It is the summer we are now living in.
And for women going through menopause, it is a summer that demands a proper conversation.
When hot weather meets hormonal change
Let us start with something that often goes unsaid: for women experiencing menopause, a heatwave is not simply uncomfortable. It is a compounding, cumulative, and sometimes overwhelming experience layered on top of a body that is already struggling to regulate its own temperature.
Hot flushes – one of the most commonly reported menopause symptoms – can raise body temperature significantly and arrive without warning, lasting for several minutes at a time. In an already overheated environment, that becomes something else entirely. Night sweats that have already stolen three or four hours of sleep mean a woman arrives at work already depleted before a single meeting has taken place. A nervous system in hormonal flux is less equipped to manage the physiological stress of sustained heat. Brain fog, which many menopausal women describe as one of the most distressing symptoms of all, is frequently worsened by heat and poor sleep in combination.
The result is a working day that, for hundreds of thousands of women across the UK right now, looks fundamentally different to the one their employer believes they are having.
I am one of those women. I said it in my last article and I will say it again here, because I think there is real value in senior women being honest about this:
I am going through menopause. And I can tell you that last week’s heatwave, on top of everything menopause already brings, was genuinely hard to navigate while showing up at full capacity professionally. It requires more than resilience. It requires understanding, flexibility and – frankly – employers who are paying attention.
The workplace has a heat problem it has not acknowledged
Last week, GMB wrote to the Department for Education calling for immediate action to protect staff and pupils when temperatures exceed 30 degrees. GMB National Officer Stacey Booth said:
“No pupil or member of staff should be expected to learn or work in unsafe levels of heat. Once temperatures exceed 30 degrees, schools should act quickly, use the cooler parts of the building, reduce physical demands, increase water breaks and make sensible adjustments to uniform and duties.”
It is a reasonable, proportionate position. Most people would read it and nod. But this conversation – important as it is – rarely takes the next step. It rarely asks what extreme heat means specifically for the millions of women in our workforce who are managing menopause at the same time.
There is currently no legal maximum workplace temperature in the UK. The Health and Safety Executive recommends a ‘reasonable’ temperature but sets no statutory upper limit. For an office worker experiencing hot flushes every hour, sitting in a building that reached 32 degrees last Tuesday, that guidance offers very little.
And with another period of elevated temperatures already being forecast for early to mid-July, this is not a conversation that can wait until autumn.
The numbers employers need to hear
Let me put some figures on the table, because they matter.
Research from Benenden Health earlier this year surveyed over 2,000 UK working women aged 40 to 65. Almost a third said they were considering leaving their jobs because of menopause symptoms, with 7 per cent having already done so. Half had changed how they work to cope – reducing hours, cutting responsibilities, or stepping back from promotions they would otherwise have pursued.
The Fawcett Society has estimated that 1 in 10 women have left work altogether because of unmanaged menopause symptoms – equivalent to around 333,000 women across the UK.
Three in five women reported losing motivation due to their symptoms. Just over half admitted to losing confidence. And 41 per cent had seen menopause treated as a joke in the workplace. These figures represent a sustained and significant drain on the female workforce at precisely the moment those women have the most experience and capability to offer.
The financial cost to organisations is equally stark. UK businesses are estimated to lose £2.88 billion a year to menopause-related absenteeism and presenteeism. Tribunal claims relating to menopause have tripled in the last two years, with payouts now frequently exceeding £60,000. Replacing a senior employee typically costs up to three times their annual salary.
And perhaps the most telling statistic of all: when Benenden Health surveyed 500 HR decision-makers alongside their employee research, 92 per cent of those HR professionals believed their organisations were meeting the needs of staff going through menopause. Yet 40 per cent of the women in those same organisations said they were unaware of any policies or support whatsoever. Only 45 per cent felt comfortable raising their symptoms with their manager.
The gap between what organisations think they are doing and what women are actually experiencing is significant. It is also, right now in the middle of a record-breaking summer, costing people their health and their careers.
What a menopausal woman’s working day looks like in a heatwave
I want to make this tangible, because I think it is easy for those not living it to underestimate what the combination of menopause and extreme heat actually feels like as a working reality.
Consider this: it is a Tuesday morning last week. Overnight temperatures did not drop below 20 degrees. You have had perhaps three hours of broken sleep. You get up, and the heat is already thick. You travel to work – on public transport that was not built for this, or in a car that takes ten minutes to cool down. You arrive at an office where the air conditioning is struggling, or does not exist, and the thermometer on the wall reads 30 degrees by 9am.
Then, at 9.15, you have a hot flush. Your temperature spikes. Your face flushes. You feel the sweat. You are in a glass-walled meeting room with four colleagues and a client on a video call.
By lunchtime you have had three more. The brain fog that has been hovering since you woke up is now a significant presence. You are trying to recall a figure you know you know. You are trying to hold the thread of a conversation. You are also trying to appear entirely fine.
And then you do it all again the next day. And the one after that.
Dr Cheryl Lythgoe, Nurse Consultant at Benenden Health, put it well:
“Menopause affects women differently and can bring a wide range of physical, mental and emotional symptoms that are hard to manage while working. Yet many still feel uncomfortable discussing it in the workplace, meaning essential support is often missed.”
That discomfort is not irrational. It comes from a working culture in which women have learned – correctly, in many cases – that raising health issues related to their biology risks changing how they are perceived. That they may be seen as less capable, less committed, or simply as more complicated than they are worth. That fear has kept this conversation quiet for too long.
What good employers are doing differently
The good news is that meaningful support does not require a complete overhaul of how an organisation operates. The employers who are getting this right are not doing anything complicated. They are making a small number of practical commitments and following through on them.
On the heat specifically: they are taking workplace temperature seriously as a health issue, not just a comfort issue. They are ensuring adequate ventilation and cooling, and not treating a desk fan pointed at a ceiling as an acceptable solution. They are flexible about where and when people work on the hottest days, particularly for those who they know are managing health conditions that heat exacerbates.
More broadly, they are training managers to have these conversations with care and without embarrassment. They are signposting occupational health, employee assistance programmes and GP access clearly and visibly – not buried in an intranet that nobody opens. They are making it explicit, through their culture and not just their policy documents, that taking time away because of menopause symptoms is treated with the same respect as any other legitimate health need.
And for organisations with 250 or more employees, there is now a legislative prompt to act. From April 2026, employers have been encouraged to publish menopause action plans alongside their gender pay gap reporting. These plans become mandatory in spring 2027. The guidance from the Office for Equality and Opportunity is clear: employers should choose at least one meaningful, substantive action, not a token gesture.
Getting ahead of that now is not just good compliance. It signals to every woman in your organisation that this matters to you. In a summer like this one, that signal carries more weight than usual.
A note to the women reading this
If you got through last week on very little sleep, in an overheated office, managing symptoms that nobody around you could see – I want to say this plainly: that was hard, and you did well to keep going.
But you should not have to keep going alone, and you should not have to pretend that everything is fine when it is not. Please talk to your GP if you have not already done so. The conversation around treatment options, including HRT, has shifted significantly in recent years and there is more support available than many women realise. You also have every right to ask your employer for reasonable adjustments – whether that is flexible hours, the ability to work from home on the hottest days, or simply a workspace that is properly cooled. That is not a special request. It is your right.
And with forecasters already pointing to further hot spells through July, now is exactly the right time to have that conversation – before the next wave arrives, not in the middle of it.
This is the summer to get it right
The late June heatwave was not an anomaly. It was, according to the Met Office, consistent with a broader pattern of hotter summers that the UK should expect to see more of. The next significant hot spell is already being forecast. This is the context in which every employer in the country is now operating.
For menopausal women in the workforce – and there are millions of them, at the height of their professional experience and capability – that context matters enormously. The question of whether their employer will support them through it is not abstract. It is immediate, it is live, and in many cases it is the difference between staying in a role and walking away from it.
I started writing this series because I believe that honest conversations about the real experience of women at work are more powerful than polished versions of it. The heatwave we have just come through, and the one on its way, is part of that real experience. It deserves to be talked about seriously.
The conversation is happening. Let us make sure it leads somewhere.
Read Cheryl’s previous article on menopause in the workplace, or explore the full Women in Technology series at uniqueiq.co.uk