Menopause masking (and the cost of pretending everything is fine)

I read a BBC article this week about something called “menopause masking” and I had to stop for a moment. Not because it surprised me, but because it put a name to something I’ve been living inside for a while without quite knowing how to articulate it.

Here’s the uncomfortable conversation nobody really wants to have. Menopause isn’t niche, and it isn’t optional.

Around one in three women experience symptoms that genuinely affect their ability to function day to day, often starting from their mid-40s. For me, it started at 47. This isn’t theory or opinion, it’s my lived experience. And it’s unfolding right in the middle of a career I’ve worked hard to build.

This isn’t rare. It’s just rarely named

Menopause masking, as the article described it, is the quiet effort women make to ensure nobody notices what’s really going on. The compensating. The over-correcting. The pretending that nothing fundamental has shifted, even when it clearly has. And the more I thought about it, the more I recognised how deeply this shows up in my work, particularly in marketing, where your value is tied so closely to thinking, clarity, energy and momentum.

What menopause masking looks like at work

For me, it shows up in the moments where I’m staring at a blank page and feeling a genuine sense of panic. I used to be able to knock out a full campaign strategy in no time at all, pulling ideas together quickly, spotting patterns, feeling that familiar buzz that came from good thinking and forward motion. Now there are days where I know the experience is there, the instincts are there, but I can’t access them in the same way. The ideas don’t land. The confidence wobbles. And instead of saying that out loud, I stay later, work harder, and hope nobody notices the shift.

There’s also the memory loss, which we’re all far too casual about.

The part we joke about, but shouldn’t

We’ve all laughed at the woman who can’t remember someone’s name, or who loses a word mid-sentence and makes a joke of it. I’ve done that too. But this feels different. This is the moment where your brain goes completely blank. Not fuzzy, blank. You know the thing you’re trying to say. You use it every day. It might be something as trivial as the word “printer”, or the name of the person you speak to constantly. And suddenly it’s gone. The panic that follows is hard to describe, because it’s not just embarrassment, it’s fear. It feels like a gradual erosion of something fundamental, and what makes it so unsettling is the not knowing. You don’t know if it will come back in the same way, or when.

When capability doesn’t disappear, but access does

It shows up in the quieter, more confronting comparisons too. I used to be up at 5am for a run, still in work before 7.30, and capable of achieving more in three hours than some people managed in an entire day. I wore that as a badge of honour, even if I didn’t question it at the time. Now there are mornings where just getting up feels heavy, and the internal dialogue is unforgiving. You don’t look unwell. You’re just tired. Get on with it. Other people cope.

And then there are the moments nobody sees at all. The absolute inability to sit in a meeting, smile, nod and function when all you want to do is sit and cry. The feeling that you’re holding everything together so tightly that you might actually burst open and scream if one more thing lands on your desk. The emotional rollercoaster that seems to come from nowhere and refuses to settle, even when you can’t fully explain why it feels so relentless.

From the outside, this still looks like high performance. The work gets done. Deadlines are met. Leadership remains intact. But internally, it feels like running a constant background process just to stay upright. You double-check everything. You second-guess decisions you would once have trusted instinctively. You quietly step back from opportunities you would previously have grabbed without hesitation. Not because you don’t care, but because coping has become its own full-time job.

The BBC article referenced research suggesting that one in ten women aged 40 to 55 leave their jobs because of menopause symptoms. I don’t find that statistic surprising at all. What feels more invisible is everything that happens before a woman gets to that point. The gradual shrinking. The self-editing. The way ambition is quietly recalibrated in private because survival has started to outweigh progression.

Leadership makes this harder, not easier

For women in leadership roles, this experience can be deeply isolating. You’ve spent years building credibility, resilience and trust. You don’t want menopause to become the unspoken explanation for anything that feels slightly off. You don’t want it to undermine everything you’ve worked for. So you mask. You push through. You tell yourself you’re fine, even when you’re not.

And because so many of us are doing this quietly, it creates the illusion that everyone else is managing just fine. Which makes it even harder to speak.

We don’t need fixing. We need space.

What frustrates me most is that women aren’t broken. We don’t need fixing. What we’re missing is space. Space for more honest conversations, more understanding, and more humanity in how we talk about menopause as part of working life, especially in demanding, performance-led environments like marketing.

So many women are carrying this quietly, making adjustments behind the scenes, doing everything they can to keep showing up without drawing attention to what it costs them. Not because they want to be martyrs, but because they care deeply about their work, their teams and the careers they’ve built.

If this resonates, I want you to know you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. Even if it feels that way most days. There is nothing weak or wrong about acknowledging that this is hard.

Maybe the first step isn’t fixing anything at all. Maybe it’s simply stopping the pretending.