Why So Many Menopausal Women Are Leaving the Workplace

There is a quiet exodus happening in midlife.

Highly skilled women ~ experienced, capable, resourceful are stepping away from roles they’ve spent decades building. Not because they’ve “lost ambition.” Not because they can’t cope.

But because the thought of doing this, in this way, until retirement age feels unbearable.

For many women in menopause and midlife, it isn’t the work itself that becomes the problem. It’s the cost of staying.

The “Squeezed Middle”: The Invisible Load of Midlife

By the time a woman reaches her late 40s or 50s, she is often carrying far more than a job description accounts for. Many are part of the so-called sandwich generation, balancing multiple, often competing demands:

• Physiological shifts: Hormonal changes affecting sleep, energy, concentration, and emotional resilience.

• Cognitive impact: Brain fog, anxiety, and loss of confidence, frequently misread as incompetence rather than a transitional neurological state.

• Caring responsibilities: Supporting ageing parents while still being emotionally or practically available to adult children or grandchildren.

• Years of “coping mode”: The cumulative weight of emotional labour, people-pleasing, and holding everything together at work.

The workplace often hasn’t changed. But she has. And instead of space, she meets pressure. Instead of adaptation, she meets silence.

“I Can’t Do This Until I’m 67”

For many women, menopause coincides with a stark realisation: I cannot live like this for another 10–15 years.

That dread isn’t laziness or weakness. It’s a nervous system saying: enough. It’s the body’s way of signalling that the pace,  emotional, cognitive, and physical is no longer sustainable.

To survive, many women make difficult, pragmatic choices:

• Stepping down from senior leadership into roles labelled “easier.”

• Moving to part-time work or taking positions far below their capability simply to reduce pressure.

• Starting small businesses not to hustle or scale, but to create room to breathe.

• Powering through in silence because bills still need to be paid and options feel limited.

These are not strategic career moves. They are acts of survival.

The Hidden Cost to Business: A Loss of Wisdom

When menopausal women leave the workforce or quietly shrink themselves within it, the system absorbs the loss and often labels it a “personal choice.”

But organisations lose far more than they acknowledge:

• Deep institutional knowledge and steadiness earned over years.

• High-level emotional intelligence and relational skill.

• Mentorship and modelling for the next generation of women leaders.

What disappears is not just labour - it is wisdom.

This Is an Identity Shift, Not Just a Career Issue

What many women are navigating at this stage is not a career problem that can be solved with a CV workshop or confidence training. Menopause often brings an internal reckoning an embodied questioning of identity, values, and limits.

Questions such as:

• Who am I now, if I stop pushing?

• What am I no longer willing to sacrifice for a paycheck?

• What parts of myself have I ignored or overridden to survive?

These are not logistical questions. They are emotional, relational, and deeply human ones.

How Therapeutic Coaching Helps

Therapeutic coaching does not tell you what job to take next. It does not offer career advice, business plans, or quick fixes. What it offers instead is a confidential, supportive space to slow things down and make sense of what is happening internally.

Through therapeutic coaching, women are supported to:

1. Deconstruct the dread: Understanding what is truly driving the urge to leave, separating burnout, fatigue, and nervous-system overload from genuine desire for change.

2. Regulate the system: Moving out of constant “emergency mode” so thinking becomes clearer and less reactive.

3. Explore identity: Reconnecting with who you are beyond productivity, roles, and responsibility.

4. Rebuild trust in yourself: Learning to listen to your own signals, honour limits, and set firmer boundaries.

From that steadier place, decisions tend to become less reactive and more self-led. Sometimes that leads to change. Sometimes it leads to staying but doing so in a way that no longer costs your health.

A Moment for Reflection

If you are currently feeling that sense of dread, consider this question:

Is it the work I’ve lost heart for or is it the way I’m having to do it?

You don’t need to have the answer today.

Many women I work with aren’t looking for another plan to follow. They are looking for space to steady themselves, to feel less alone, and to understand what this stage of life is asking of them.

If this resonates, you’re very welcome to explore working with me in your own time, and at your own pace.