Teaching through the menopause: A flexible work paradox

While there is an increasingly vibrant conversation around menopause and work, there remains a paucity of evidence on teachers’ experience of menopause at work. During the recent pandemic, most occupations, including teachers, worked in a substantially different way than ever before. While working from home presented challenges, it highlighted that flexible work is one of the preferred methods for women to cope with menopause at work. Against this backdrop, this chapter explores how teachers experience menopause and how lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly around flexible work arrangements, can help teachers cope with menopause symptoms. This aim is addressed by drawing from a mixed-methods longitudinal study on how women experienced menopause at work before, during, and after the pandemic-related working-from-home restrictions. Findings provide strong support that the teaching profession has insufficiently ‘seized the opportunity for change’ from the experience of COVID-19 in supporting teachers’ experience of menopause symptoms. Findings report a flexible work paradox: teachers are expected to be flexible workers and yet are not provided with adequate flexible work options to support menopause symptoms. Practical solutions, as lessons from working through a pandemic, are exemplified in how teachers experiencing menopause can be better supported at work.