Speaking during a virtual panel event on September 13, Stacy London was in a sharing mood. “Do you remember your first hot flash? I remember mine, and I was so embarrassed,” London recalled. Explaining that she was in the middle of a photo shoot at the time, she didn’t hold back in detailing her sudden, intense experience. “I guess maybe it was a nervous reaction, or whatever. I started sweating. It looked like I took a shower. My hair, my scalp, everything was soaking wet.”
Her co-panelists, TV host and comedian Samantha Bee, and policy expert (and Flow Space Advisory Council member) Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, nodded in recognition. They had come together for this public conversation in honor of Perimenopause Awareness Month to, at least in part, help other women understand that they are not alone in experiencing drastic physical, mental and emotional changes during the roughly 10-year transition period women go through before hitting menopause.
Hosted by perry, an app community focused on menopause tools and resources, and the National Menopause Foundation, the panel was a lead-up to tomorrow night’s Perimenopause ROAR event in New York City, designed to raise awareness about perimenopause, of which far too many women remain unaware—a fact Bee finds infuriating.
“We are at the height of all that we can accomplish. We’re at the height of earning potential. Our brains are as big as they’re ever gonna get,” Bee said. “And then you have people who tell us they want us to tiptoe around the subject… because it makes them feel weird? I’m like, ‘Yeah, please get out of our way.'”
‘We have to get over the fear and shame’
The three panelists stressed that if women are going to be able to successfully navigate their health throughout their 40s and 50s, they have to start being more open about what they experience. Bee told a particularly horrifying story about a time she started bleeding so heavily, “I thought I was dying,” she said.
London, meanwhile, emphasized the importance of moving past stigma so we can stop treating perimenopause and menopause like taboo topics.
“I think we forget that we have to inform our partner, our coworkers, or our families and our children about what is happening to us so they can be a safety net,” London said. “I feel that we have to get over the fear and shame of this whole conversation and also about aging. We have to be able to ask for help from people who are not going to experience this.”
And it’s particularly important for women of color to be a part of the conversation, Weiss-Wolff stressed, because “not everyone experiences menopause and perimenopause in the same way. There’s actual science that shows that for women of color and for black women in this country, menopause and menopause symptoms start earlier, are more severe—and that leads to disparate impacts over time.”
Advocating for systemic change
Weiss-Wolf, who is the executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at New York University’s School of Law, went on to emphasize that there is only so much impact that can happen at the individual and grassroots levels. She called for comprehensive public policy that addresses menopause care, including research funding, medical education, insurance coverage and workplace accommodations. “This is an issue that has not received the attention and care that it should,” Weiss-Wolf said.
According to a recent McKinsey Health Institute report, women spend, on average, nine years of their lives in poor health—25% more time than men do. If this health gap was addressed, the report concluded, it would add not only the equivalent of seven days each year to a woman’s life but also as much as $1 trillion annually to the world economy by 2040.
There are signs of progress when it comes to addressing these gender health care disparities. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to ensure women’s health is “integrated and prioritized” in federal research, as well as to create new research on a range of topics like women’s midlife health.
But to effect real change, women need to start getting “pissed off, which we should all be about the state of affairs we’re living in,” Weiss-Wolf said. “We are in a political moment right now. There are real policy opportunities to read, rewrite and to correct.”