A nationally representative study of more than 8,000 midlife women found no association between menopause and poor work function — including absenteeism, presenteeism, productivity loss and work ability — directly challenging the evidence base for the UK's mandatory workplace menopause policies taking effect in April 2027.

For HR leaders at employers with more than 250 staff, the stakes are concrete. Voluntary menopause action plans launched in April 2026 under the Employment Rights Act 2025 and become mandatory from April 2027, published alongside gender pay gap reports. Required initiatives include menopause "champions" in every workplace and menopause awareness training for all employees, with guidance issued by the Office for Equality and Opportunity.

The new research, presented by Professor Susan Davis, an endocrinologist and clinician-researcher at Monash University Melbourne, at the International Menopause Society's World Congress in Rio de Janeiro, is still undergoing peer review. It comes from the Australian Women's Midlife Years (AMY) Study.

What did the study find?

Premenopausal women (average age 44.7) and perimenopausal women (48.2) had similar socio-demographic profiles, held similar jobs and gave similar reasons for leaving work. Among those currently working, menopause status showed no link to any measure of poor work function.

Instead, the factors most associated with poor work ability were job dissatisfaction, comorbidities, and moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms — variables that cut across genders and life stages.

A 2025 systematic review by Davis and her team, published in the journal Menopause, reached a similar conclusion: menopausal status alone was not consistently associated with work outcomes, and evidence for an adverse impact of symptoms on work ability was mixed and possibly confounded by other factors affecting middle-aged women's careers.

Where did the 900,000 figure come from?

The policy push traces back partly to a 2022 Women and Equalities Committee report, which recommended menopause become a protected characteristic and cited Bupa research claiming almost 900,000 women in the UK had left their jobs because of menopausal symptoms.

Davis told The Times that figure was extrapolated from a survey of just 1,000 women — a sample that included women leaving their jobs because they were pregnant.

"That's not menopause," she said. "People were going to politicians and saying, 'Oh, there's this terrible problem about menopause in the workplace. All these women are leaving work.' There's no evidence."

Davis called the UK government's measures "ahead of the knowledge," adding: "The policies have been driven by emotion and insufficient fact. I believe in evidence. I am all for health policy based on data. And if you have a health or workplace policy not based on data, there is the potential for long-term harm."

Why earlier studies may have overstated the problem

Dr Jen Gunter, a gynaecologist and author who attended the Rio congress, writing on her Substack The Vajenda, flagged a methodological point HR teams evaluating menopause research should note: the AMY survey was advertised as a midlife survey, not a menopause-at-work survey.

"If women had known this was a menopause-and-work questionnaire, it would have affected who responded," she explained. "There is a well-known phenomenon called topic salience bias... in which people for whom the advertised survey topic is personally relevant are more likely to respond, distorting the sample."

Topic-salient surveys, Gunter wrote, tend to overestimate the prevalence and severity of the advertised condition — which may explain why smaller earlier studies linked menopause to worse work outcomes.

What are the risks for employers?

The AMY research concluded that "over-attribution of work difficulties to menopausal symptoms risks widening workplace gender inequalities." Davis raised the sharpest concern in her Times interview: "I'm strongly against this whole focus on perimenopause in the workplace. This is the concern: it will stop people wanting to employ women between the ages of 45 and 55."

"People worried about employing a 35-year-old woman because they're going to get pregnant. They used to think a 50-year-old woman was reliable. Now they're going to seen as dynamite," she said.

Gunter added a measured note: the study "suggests that midlife is not a single variable experience governed completely by menopause, and we need more data before we attribute workplace difficulties to perimenopause or menopause." She said she hopes follow-up data will emerge as the full paper publishes.

UK employers face a compliance deadline of April 2027 regardless. How they frame menopause support — targeted at symptoms, or embedded in broader midlife health and job-quality interventions — may now be the more consequential design decision, and one the peer-reviewed AMY findings could reshape before the mandate takes full effect.