How Perimenopause Can Affect Your Career and Earnings, and What to Do About It
Perimenopause symptoms can disrupt work performance, promotions, and career progression. Learn how to protect your earning potential during this transition.
The Career Cost of Unmanaged Perimenopause
Research from the British Menopause Society and other organisations has consistently found that a significant proportion of women in perimenopause report that symptoms have negatively affected their work performance, confidence, and career trajectory. Some women reduce their hours, turn down promotions, or leave roles they valued because they feel unable to perform at the standard they previously met. This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable result of managing a significant hormonal transition, often without adequate medical support, in a workplace that may not recognise what is happening. The financial consequences can be long-term and substantial.
How Specific Symptoms Affect Work Performance
Brain fog, which affects memory, concentration, and the speed of complex thinking, is one of the most professionally disruptive perimenopause symptoms. It can affect performance in meetings, reduce the quality of written work, and make tasks that were previously straightforward feel effortful and slow. Fatigue compounds this, reducing the stamina needed for a demanding day. Anxiety can affect confidence in public-facing roles, presentations, or client interactions. Hot flashes can be distracting and cause self-consciousness that reduces engagement. None of these are character flaws. All of them are treatable or manageable symptoms with the right support.
The Promotion and Visibility Gap
Career progression often depends on visibility, and perimenopause can reduce visibility in subtle ways. Women who feel less confident may volunteer less for high-profile projects. Those managing fatigue may pull back from networking or after-hours work events. Brain fog can make it harder to recall achievements and articulate them confidently in appraisals. These patterns accumulate over time into a gap between where a woman's career could be and where it actually is. Recognising this pattern is not pessimistic; it creates the opportunity to address it directly, whether through medical treatment, workplace accommodations, or deliberate advocacy for your own progression.
Protecting Your Earning Power
Managing perimenopause symptoms effectively is the most direct route to protecting career earnings. For women whose symptoms are significantly affecting their work, speaking to a GP about treatment options, including hormone replacement therapy, is a practical career decision as much as a health one. HRT is effective at reducing hot flashes, improving sleep, and alleviating brain fog for many women. Beyond treatment, requesting workplace adjustments, such as flexibility around start times, remote working options, or a cooler workspace, can reduce the daily friction that costs energy and performance. These are not demands; they are reasonable accommodations that employers are increasingly expected to provide.
Having the Appraisal and Promotion Conversation
If perimenopause has affected your performance over recent months, you may be navigating an appraisal process that does not reflect your actual capabilities. You do not have to disclose your health situation in detail, but a brief acknowledgement that you have been managing a health condition and that support is in place gives useful context. If you want to be more direct, framing perimenopause as a recognised medical transition that affects cognitive and physical function, rather than a personal lifestyle issue, often lands better with managers and HR teams. Prepare for appraisals by documenting achievements specifically and noting where your performance has returned to its previous level.
Tracking Your Symptoms and Their Impact
One of the practical challenges of managing perimenopause at work is that the connection between symptoms and performance can be hard to see in real time. A difficult week can feel like a permanent decline rather than a temporary symptom cluster. Keeping a brief symptom log over several weeks using an app like PeriPlan can reveal patterns that are not apparent day to day. Seeing that your worst work days coincide with poor sleep nights, or that performance improves when hot flash frequency reduces, can both motivate treatment-seeking and help you communicate the situation more clearly to a GP or occupational health adviser.
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