Abstract

Women represent a significant portion of the global workforce, yet legislation and policy in companies do not fully consider their needs for health and well-being across the working life span. The transition into menopause is a natural process lasting as long as fifteen years and tends to be experienced when women are playing their most advanced roles in the workplace. This article focuses on a cross-country comparison of workplace legislation, policy, and discourse surrounding the menopause drawing on corpora in two countries: the UK and the US. We searched the electronic legislative databases for each country with the term “menopause” and its cognates. The earliest records meeting criteria dated to 1980 in the US and 2016 in the UK, with the most recent in 2024 for both nations. We inductively coded the twenty-one UK Parliamentary and thirty-nine US congressional documents for primary and subthemes. Among these, we found similarities and differences in the ways menopause was discussed and which features of this period of life merited legislative focus, as well as some shared challenges among issue champions—despite the differences both in governance structure and in national approaches to providing for public health. A common claim across both countries is that for decades not enough attention has been paid to this near-universal female experience, despite record numbers of women entering the workforce since the mid-last century. Other themes included lack of discrimination protections, need for generalized education around the life stage, and inadequacy of the workplace.