September 9, 2025 (36 Min.)

Menopause at work? It’s the last workplace taboo. Women over 50 are the fastest-growing workforce, yet many feel dismissed, overlooked, or managed out due to menopause symptoms. That ends today.

💡 Attorneys Catherine Crider & Jack Tuckner are fighting for workplace fairness. What are your rights? Can you ask for accommodations? Let’s break the silence.

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FAbebT

Menopause at work—it’s the last workplace taboo. This is The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast.

This is Not Old Better Show, Workplace Roundup Interview Series on radio and podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by Acorns.

We talk about diversity, inclusion, equity… but when it comes to hot flashes in a board meeting, brain fog before a big presentation, or the exhaustion that hits like a freight train—suddenly, silence.

Women over 50 are the fastest-growing workforce demographic, bringing decades of experience, leadership, and skill. And yet, when menopause shows up, too many are treated like they’re slowing down, when really, they’re just heating up.

Dismissed. Overlooked. Managed out. Some even leave their careers behind—not because they want to, but because the workplace isn’t built to support them.

But today, we’re talking about it.

Because menopause isn’t a weakness. It’s not a reason to be sidelined. And it’s not a reason to lose the best, brightest, and most experienced people in the workforce.

Enter Catherine Crider and Jack Tuckner—two powerhouse attorneys who are fighting for workplace fairness for women at every stage of life. They’ve taken on pregnancy discrimination, equal pay, and now, they’re tackling menopause rights head-on.

What are your rights at work? Can you ask for accommodations? How do we shatter the stigma and get employers to step up?

This conversation is long overdue, and we’re bringing it front and center.

Because if men had menopause, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

This is The Not Old Better Show. I’m Paul Vogelzang—let’s get started.

Remember, today’s episode is brought to you by Acorns. Check out more at acorns.com/NOB

Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, the show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not older.

Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.

PV -

Menopause at work. It's the last workplace taboo. This is The Not Old Better Show Workplace Roundup Interview series on radio and podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by Acorns.

We talk about diversity, inclusion, equity, but when it comes to hot flashes in a board meeting, brain fog before a big presentation, or the exhaustion that hits like a freight train suddenly, and then their silence. Women over 50 are the fastest growing workforce demographic, bringing decades of experience, leadership, and skill.

And yet, when menopause shows up, too many are treated like they're slowing down, when really they're just heating up. Dismissed, overlooked, managed out, some even leave their careers behind, not because they want to, but because the workplace isn't built to support them. But today, we're talking about it, because menopause is not a weakness.

It's not a reason to be sidelined, and it's not a reason to lose the best, brightest, and most experienced people in the workforce. Enter Catherine Crider and Jack Tuckner, two powerhouse attorneys who are fighting for workplace fairness for women at every stage of life. They've taken on pregnancy discrimination, equal pay, and now they're tackling menopause rights head on.

What are your rights at work? Can you ask for accommodations? How do we shatter the stigma and get employees to step up?

This conversation is long overdue. Many in our audience have been communicating with me about it already. We are bringing it front and center today, because if men had menopause, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

This is Not Old Better Show on radio and podcasts. Let's get started.

Jack Tuckner, Catherine Crider, welcome to the program.

JT/CC -

Thanks for having us.

Thank you for having us, pleasure to be here.

PV-

Well, thank you for joining me. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. It's a fascinating subject, one that we have discussed quite a bit on our program, but we're gonna dive down a little bit into the weeds around this subject and have you both tell us a little bit about menopause in the workplace.

And it's a real issue. And of course it is to you both. It is absolutely to me and my audience, more of us kind of north of age 50 are working, particularly women.

They're the fastest growing group that are returning to the workplace or staying in the workplace. And so menopause and all of its ramifications will be an issue, is an issue, as opposed to pregnancy, which for many years has been the big issue for women and all of the circumstances that it brings along with it. Menopause has some circumstances and some issues that it carries.

And so let's kind of jump off there and give us a little bit of a distinction, both of you, as to why menopause is important today, especially for my audience. Why should we all care about this? And kind of what's the impact?

Give us kind of that broad sense and then we'll dive down even further. So long-winded question, my apologies for.

JT-

That's quite right. There's a lot to unpack there because, and I appreciate it Paul, because it is a huge issue that affects all of us. Half of us, listen, half of us are women.

And unlike pregnancy, by the way, all women will go through perimenopause and menopause if they live long enough. So, and again, in our culture, let's face it, we have a sexist culture that poo-poos and dismisses all things related to women's reproductive life cycle from menstruation through maternity through menopause.

You mentioned pregnancy. I've spent the last 25 years banging my head against the wall with pregnancy cases. This was the number one claim out of our office. And until June 27th of 2023, Paul, pregnancy was almost like not quite as bad as menopause right now, but there was no law to guarantee maternity leave, unless you happen to be covered by the FMLA.

There was no law that said when your water breaks, you have to be given X number of weeks to recover from childbirth. There was no law that said during your gestational cycle, you're entitled to flexibility and accommodations when you need them, or the natural limitations of pregnancy, the things that happen while you are gestating a human being. Finally, now we have the law, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, that makes pregnancy a protected status in itself.

Finally, but it took all these years, and I believe you mentioned in the outline of the question, that it took decades to get that to happen. So menopause is just the bookend stage of women's reproductive life. It starts with men's genes, right, and menstruation.

So the fact that everything is shame-based in our culture when it comes to women's biological issues, natural biological cyclical issues, shame-based, not normalized, taboo. So no one talks about it yet. 20% of the American workforce are women aged 45 to 64.

6,000 women enter menopause daily in the US. This year, supposedly, we're going to be hitting a billion women worldwide that are in menopause, which is a huge issue.

When companies lose billions of dollars annually to women who self-exile or get fired, many women experience this whole, “I'm in perimenopause and menopause, I don't know what to do. I'm thinking of leaving my job.” And part of the problem with our culture when it comes to education is that women often don't even understand or know themselves what they're going through when they start to feel, you know, “I just don't feel like myself”. But they don't really understand.

And much of the medical community, you know, there's zero training in medical school on menopause. I was representing a woman who was put on a performance improvement plan at work. At 48 years of age, because her manager said she was no longer managing tasks properly. And she said, even at that time, I went to my PCP who said, “I'm just going to prescribe a psychotropic med. I think it's in your head blah, blah, blah, blah.” She didn't know. It took a while for her to consult a menopause aware practitioner who said, no, you're in perimenopause. So all of the many symptoms, a lot of them are similar to what happens during pregnancy; but all of the symptoms that many women go through in perimenopause and menopause can be debilitating.

PV-

So Catherine, please jump in. You're a mom. So certainly, some of the pregnancy related aspects of this existing legislation covered you, I would imagine. Certainly, there were benefits for my wife. We have two children. But now, looking forward, the new law proposes some very interesting things.

Maybe give us a little bit of a brief on what’s new, because we've not had this passed yet. It did take 20 years to get the Pregnancy Act in place. Where are we in the passage of this? What is your work all about right now with respect to this?

CC-

Yeah. So basically, as Jack previously mentioned, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was passed. So we now have those protections for pregnant individuals.

But the bookend stage that he was talking about, menopause, does not have those same legal protections right now. So some of the things that are protected under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, we're still struggling to get those fully covered in the same ways. So what's important to note is that there are protections for menopause in the law right now.

It's just that the word menopause isn't really appearing. So you kind of have to piece together different parts of the law. And that's something that Jack does a lot with our clients, is showing them how there are legal protections out there to protect individuals going through menopause based on the facts that this is a sex-related issue, that this is primarily something that only impacts women of a certain age and stage of their life.

So we do have some protections around that. But the legislation doesn't specifically say menopause, right? So we're having to make some jumps and some leaps and convince people of this.

And so what the Menopause Workers' Fairness Act does is it basically takes the same parameters we're offering pregnant individuals and give them to people going through menopause. So now you're probably wondering, what are some of those protections, right? What are we trying to give people going through menopause?

And to put it really simply, all we're trying to give them is reasonable accommodations. And what that means is if you go to your boss and you say, “you know what, these hot flashes I'm getting are really debilitating at work. And is there any way we can get me an air conditioning unit?” Or, “I can have five minutes every few hours to step out of the office to go to a cooler space”.

If that's reasonable and it's not going to cause the business to crumble, you should be allowed to have that. And so that's what the Menopause Workers' Fairness Act at its heart is really trying to get to, is the opportunity for reasonable accommodations for people who need them because they re going through a biological process.

PV-

You really hear an awful lot about the subject of ageism in the workplace. And I would imagine the Disability Act might even overlap with some of the menopause issues. But women tend to kind of shrink back during this period in the workforce.

And whether that's age-related or whether that's the symptoms for menopause, we're losing experience in the workplace. We're losing some of that organizational knowledge base that then leaves. It's in employers' best interests to embrace some of this.

Are they? Are they doing that, Jack?

JT-

No, they're not doing it. But let me, if I may, given the limited time, just kind of get down to brass tacks and give some actionable tips. Here's the thing.

There is no Menopause Workers' Fairness Act. After the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act was finally passed, which was like a hallelujah moment, like watershed, probably the last women's rights and civil rights landmark legislation we're going to see for a long time, given our political climate. That just happened.

And it also happened at the same time as the PUMP Act, which stands for, it's an acronym, providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers, now allowing nine million more women to express milk safely, legally in the workplace postpartum. Those sister statutes are probably it for a while. But once we accomplished that, it was like, this is what I’ve spent my career on.

We started looking to perimenopause and menopause. Catherine and I and other stakeholders drafted legislation that we presented last July to Congress. A couple of Congresswomen, Democratic Congresswomen, expressed interest in it.

We have been working, including up till yesterday, with this Congresswoman and the EEOC on drafting this legislation, except in this current climate, we're not exactly... Listen, when it comes to women's issues, like the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would plug loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, it's been pending since 1997. Why?

There's one party that always objects to anything, that's why minimum wage hasn't been raised from $7.25 since 2009. Right?

PV-

Catherine, when Jack brings up this idea of kind of the when, and even the if this passes, menopause just has such debilitating impacts on women in terms of their productivity, but their confidence too. How do they really get to a point where they can bring this up to their employer in a positive way so that we can start making some progress on this? And what advice do you give for women to kind of step into that role of self-advocate?

CC-

That's a great question, Paul. And one thing we're starting to see more and more in our office, which I would really encourage, is people are almost bringing class action suit type things against their employer, where they're joining with other women going through menopause if they're no getting their reasonable accommodations. And I think that, while not everyone needs to be searching out a class action by any means, the idea of joining with other women going through menopause, whether in your workplace or similar workplaces, is really important to feeling confident enough to go into your employer and saying, “there's a group of us, we all have needs, how are you going to accommodate us? Because it's not just me.”

And I think sometimes there is power in the group. So I definitely encourage people to look around their workplace, see who you might wanna touch base with, who might be an advocate with you.

Sometimes, and Jack is a great example of this, it doesn't just have to be other women too. There are and can be men in the workplace who support women going through menopause. And so something you might want to think about is, who in general in your workplace is seeking accommodations or is supportive of females trying to reach higher echelons in the workplace, all those kinds of things.

I also think that it's really important to point out that while the research still needs to grow, we are starting to see some research that proves how productive women later in life can be for businesses, the amount of money that these women are impacting businesses with. So you might want to come to your employer not just with the fact that you need accommodations, but also information about “here's what I’ve done for the business so far, here’s where it can go”. Also look big picture, “if I have to walk away or I have to take another job, how is this going to impact your business?”

Not just your business, but businesses everywhere as we seek to try and get this bill passed. So these are all important things we need to think about are, who can you align yourself with, who are going to be good support systems for you both at home and at work, and also, what evidence can you bring to show your value to the table to help give you an extra boost of confidence when you go in to have tough conversations.

PV-

If you're nodding along thinking, this sounds like my work day, you are not alone. Coming up, Catherine Crider and Jack Tuckner share exact words to email HR, what to document to protect yourself, and how to ask for flexible schedules, temperature control, brief breaks or remote days without fear. We'll also cover what to do if you're put on a PIP, and why the sex, age, disability protections already give you leverage.

For employers listing, we'll talk simple, smart moves, manager training, a clear menopause policy, and small fixes that keep great people. This is The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast. Please stay with us for more.

Our guests, Jack Tuckner and Catherine Crider, are both attorneys working on menopause legislation that impacts women and men too. Absolutely. In the workplace, so many women over age 50 are returning to the workplace, are extending their lives.

We're hearing all about social security cuts, potential Medicare cuts, Medicaid cuts, of course, coming out of the Congress.

The dreaded DEl, the Diversity and Equity and Inclusion acronym, comes up related to some of the work that you're doing. How do you overcome some of these issues to kind of push this forward so that we're able to embrace the subject and not, you know, have women be so embarrassed? I don't mean to personalize this, but, you know, some of what I watched my wife go through with regard to this subject has made me more aware.

And I think that's where we need to be with this, not embarrassed. And yet so many of these acronyms do, they're no help in furthering this cause.

JT-

No, but it's a terrible time for DEL. And, you know, obviously, DEl, if we include that, and it's not only diversity, equity, and inclusivity when it comes to marginalized communities we're talking about women. Women are the largest minority marginalized community.

And we are a lot. We presented a paper in the end of January at the Society for Women's Health Research in DC. And all of us stakeholders, we're still talking about reaching out, for example, to the men, congressmen and senators, male, because they, they're of a certain age and they’ve wives, they might actually also understand, even though politically and economically, they're not inclined ever to do anything that may cost us money, if it's going to help women, not business and billionaires. So it's, it's not, it's a depressing time.

I mean, we all expected, listen, I live in a bubble, we're at California, San Francisco, New York City, we live in a bubble. I obviously, I expected Kamala Harris to win. I don't, and again, if we had done, if we were going, we were still on kind of a progressive forward march, this would all happen.

Do I think in the next four years we're going to have a Menopause Workers' Fairness Act? I don't want to jinx it, but all signs point to, forget about it. That's what all signs point to, because we'll be lucky if we're still standing as a democracy.

It's a challenging time, but all we can do is put one foot in front of the other, and here's the thing, even with all these executive orders and the DEI retrenchments and all of the things that this administration is trying to do through Project 2025, the laws are the laws. Right now, they're not changing. We still have, especially in places like New York and California, we have our own laws.

Women, it is sex or gender discrimination to be treated differently, and if you add it in, it's an intersectional claim, sex, age, and disability, which it is. Again, I could repeat this over and over. It's not that menopause is a disability.

It's not. Any more than pregnancy is a disability. It's the symptoms that are disabling, that are entitled to flexibility and compassion.

The legal word for compassion is reasonable accommodation, that term. So, we have to be willing to, before we just say, I'm going to quit, I don't want to bring this up to work. We have this experience with clients.

If they are willing to put in writing what they need, it really can't be, it can only be better because if you don't ask for it, if we don't demand it, that's what we're doing here on all quarters. If you don't, how will we ever expect to make progress? Corporations don't, they're all profits over people and they would have more profits if they cared more about their people, particularly women, but it seems to be a major sort of Sisyphean uphill battle.

You keep rolling that boulder up the hill and when we get there, it rolls back down and we start again. So, I mean, I'm optimistic that eventually, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice and we're going to get back to it, we'll get there. But right now, we all have to take ownership of this, unfortunately.

If you're someone struggling with this and you reach out to me or Catherine or a plaintiff side employment lawyer that knows what they're doing, you can get assistance from behind the scenes. What you need to say, what you need to write, protect your job, protect yourself.

Get what you need to get through this stage. Make sure you consult with a menopause aware practitioner. On the national menopause society’s work website, there’s a list of menopause aware practitioners throughout the country. That might be a start.

PV-

That's a good idea. Jack, thank you. I appreciate your remarks.

I share many of your sentiments, so thanks very much. Let's talk about some of these cases and perhaps, Catherine - what’s your audience be thinking about if they've got a potential issue? They're feeling somewhat marginalized. They may be a bit embarrassed about all of this. They are of that certain age.

What's a quick checklist, maybe, and maybe give us an idea of what a case looks like that you're seeing that might be successful in pursuing, that our audience can take away?

CC-

Yeah. I do want to reiterate that the idea of reasonable accommodations and everything behind this is that it's a two-way dialogue between you and your employer. When we're talking about what makes a good successful case that Jack and I can really get behind and help you with, it does have to start with notifying your employer that you are going through menopause and you are having these issues and you need reasonable accommodations.

You have to put your employer on notice. For some people, that actually means you have to figure out what's going on with you first. Whether you have to go to a doctor and figure that out, or you've just realized it because biologically it's clicked for you.

You have to come to that realization and you have to notify the other side that, hey, this is starting to impact my job performance. Ideally, you're having that conversation before they come to you saying, hey, we've noticed you're really struggling these days. Because it's much better to get to them with that information before they come to you with a performance improvement plan or start having tough talks during your reviews with you.

It's better if you get there first. If we can have that conversation first, you're in a much stronger position. Then, if you've notified them and they refuse to talk to you about it, well, that's when you either can get stronger yourself with them and say, hey, I have legal rights or you come to someone like Jack or I and we'll help you write a firm letter and be like, hey, this individual has rights.

Most of the time, that's going to be sufficient. Many times, that's enough for employers to get the idea in their heads that, oh, hey, wait, we do have to have conversations here, we do have to accommodate. If for whatever reason, there's always a few bad apples in every barrel, you happen to be in a situation where that's not sufficient, then we start to elevate the chains and, hopefully, it doesn't get to that, but sometimes it will lead to severance agreements or trials or various other things.

We don't wish that upon anyone that drags it out. It's much more intense. Ideally, we can just have some good conversations around reasonable accommodations long before that and save the marriage.

But every once in a while, we do have to end the marriage. And in those cases, you just want to get reasonably compensated for the fact that you should have had exposition and now you're not able to because they won't reasonably compensate you. They won't come up with reasonable accommodations.

So that's kind of the trajectory that it can sometimes take. But when you're thinking about what really makes a strong case, it's putting them on notice, continuing to do your job, not making one-sided unilateral decisions to not show up or to change your wardrobe or to add additional breaks to your day. And really trying in a good-hearted effort to have those conversations around reasonable accommodations.

We always want to come from a part of doing our side as well as asking others to do theirs.

PV-

It is such a great conversation. I just so appreciate you both being here, Jack and Catherine. I could talk to you for a long time.

Let's wrap up positively, though. And one final question for both of you. Maybe in your experience, what's the one thing, because short of passage of this, short of taking this all the way to a lawsuit, what's the one thing that maybe we can do to be proactive, get some of these accommodations in place immediately?

What's the fastest thing that a woman over age 50 can do with her employer who's starting to get this sense that she's being discriminated against or she's got a performance improvement plan before? What's the one thing that they can do to really head this off?

JT-

Put it in writing. You have to, by the way, verbal conversation, people say, I told them, I told them. You didn't tell them a thing.

It's circling the sun now with the other etheric spirits. Put it in writing, not adversarially. Dear HR person, you know, in an email, and you're going to respond to it, you'll have a thread.

When you say, I've been struggling with these issues, they're disabling issues. I'm a woman of a certain age having these issues. But if you've taken, anyone who's taken HR 101 hears that and knows, uh-oh, we now have to do something on our end and it can't be retaliatory backlash.

So as Catherine said, if they say, forget it, no, no, no, we're not even going to engage with you in this. That's definitionally already retaliatory. So if some woman is saying, you know what, I'm not going to make it, this is unsustainable. And I don't want to wait to be fired. And I don't want to quit. Why would I, should I throw myself on my sword? Why should I throw out the baby with the bathwater?

The only thing you can do is put it in writing and request what you are entitled to. That's what we're saying. We used to, I did TikTok videos on this. They were the most viral of any of the videos. Women saying, WTF, what? You mean I don't have to suffer alone? Yeah, no, I'm telling you that your employer was going to scratch their head and say, Over time, when enough women do this, it becomes a thing because it is already a thing. There's no way to say that if you're a 42-year-old woman going through disabling symptoms of menopause or perimenopause, you are in an intersection, the whole is greater than the sum of the part. It's an intersectionally protected claim. Sex plus age plus disability. It's actually a very strong claim.

It's just that we play stupid. You're like American businesses, just like, no app law. Until there's a law, just like with pregnancy, until we're spanked, until somebody tells us, you can't do this anymore, we're going to keep doing it. But the fact is, those laws are there.

Paul, we could come back another time and talk about this because there are facts. We used to do this with pregnancy. I would have to explain to opposing lawyers why telling my client that she wasn't entitled to maternity leave because she didn't qualify for the FMLA. This used to happen all the time.

Say to a woman, your water is going to break on June 6th, your baby is going to be born. How many accrued days of vacation do you have? Because you haven't been here a full year.

That's what the FMLA required. You haven't been here a full year, so you don't get 12 weeks of unpaid leave. And by the way, we're the only country in the civilized world that still doesn't think it's important enough to pay for parental leave, pay for maternity leave.

The only country left, except for Swaziland. So, I don't know, I just lost my train of thought, but you know.

PV-

I like your sense of humor. I like the spirits surrounding the sun. I think that was great.

Catherine, please tell us.

CC-

Sorry, Paul. So Jack used to have a viral hashtag for a while that was “don't quit”. And I would say that that's my exact same advice for women going through menopause.

Because if you want a successful trajectory, the best advice is to not quit your position. It is far better for you legally, positionally wise, socially wise, confidence wise, all kinds of things. Don't quit your job when the going gets tough.

Whether that means you find a support system at home, at work, through a legal representation, counseling, whatever you need, hang in there while you're getting assistance and help, but don't quit because quitting is just going to make the situation so much worse for you, 99% of the time.

JT-

And just to maybe put a little finer point on this, what we're talking about, that opens the door to, I mentioned this earlier, to severance. What does that mean? The employer is going to say, you know what, maybe we should separate, but without a divorce, without maintenance, without alimony, without severance, we're going to get sued.

So that's one way that women can feel empowered. You could ride off into the sunset and say, if I got six months, nine months, 12 months of a severance package with the company's agreement, not to contest my unemployment, maybe healthcare benefits atop, this is how you could transition to your next, you know, next position or next phase in life, feeling that you taught your employer a lesson and you got something out of it.

PV-

This has just been so helpful. Jack Tuckner and Catherine Crider, lawyers on the complicated subject of menopause in the workplace and the legislation that potentially could improve this for many women.

We talked about this at the outset. Selfishly, I would love to have you come back and talk about this again.

——

As we wrap up today’s episode, I want to leave you with this. The workplace has changed, but some barriers remain stubbornly in place for aging adults, for women in menopause and for anyone who’s ever felt unseen, unheard, or underestimated. The message is clear.

We are not done advocating, not by a long shot. Whether it’s ensuring dignity through workplace policies, or just making space for conversations that were once taboo, we are together pushing the needle, and you are not old better show audience are part of all of that. But listening, sharing and showing up, you are raising awareness, challenging stigma, and demanding change.

So let’s not stop here. Start that conversation with a colleague. Bring these issues up in your HR department.

Advocate for yourself, for your partner, for your daughters, sons, and grandchildren, because every time we speak up, we clear a little more of the fog and let a little more light in for the next generation. I am Paul Vogelzang. This is The Not Old Better Show.