About a year ago I posted a piece titled, “A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap.”* “We pretend that differences between genders do not exist, or that they do not pertain,” I wrote. But they do. “Women’s minds, and their bodies, impact what they (we) want to do and can do their entire professional lives.” This includes both women’s ambition to lead – and their ability to lead.
How could it be otherwise? How could menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause, and the signs and symptoms associated with each, have no impact whatsoever on why still so few women are in top leadership roles? This is not, obviously, to suggest that other factors do not pertain. But it is to insist that having a conversation about gender and leadership without taking account of the physical and psychological differences between women and men is ridiculous.
Still, in general, the subject remains taboo. When I recently asked an ambitious young (in her thirties) woman friend if she would ever tell her boss that she couldn’t make a meeting because she had menstrual cramps, she looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. So out of the realm of possibility was the idea that she would provide what she considered personal, and potentially detrimental, information.
Nevertheless, I predict that in the next few years will be a cultural change – one more conducive to women speaking truth to power. To women being more open and honest about how they feel personally and how this affects them professionally.
How can it be otherwise when at least in America and Europe women are becoming less inhibited than they were about, to take one example, menopause. In the last few years menopause has gone from being largely a private matter to one more freely discussed. Among other signs a spate of new books that have joined an “expanding shelf of menopause-related publications, among them a pair of best sellers.”** Nor are most of these books by bystanders; they are by and about women who professionally are highly successful but who were “blindsided by the onset of an inevitable hormonal change.”
None of this is to say that discussing menopause is entirely new. Rather it is to point out that the context has changed: that our culture is far franker than it used to be, and that whatever is said can be amplified countless times over by social media.
The signs and symptoms of menopause, which range from minor to major, can last for up to a decade. This decade – let’s say between the ages of 45 to 55 – happens to coincide with when career trajectories reach their peak. How is it possible, then, for menopause and leadership to be in no way related? How is it possible, then, for women who want to lead menopause is never a factor?
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*https://barbarakellerman.com/a-radical-relook-at-the-gender-gap/
** All quotes in this post are from Rebecca Mead, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat” in The New Yorker, March 10, 2025.