Sophia Bush, widely celebrated for her activism and advocacy, is using her platform to shed light on an issue every woman faces but few openly discuss: the challenges of perimenopause. During a live taping of the Hello Menopause! podcast with Stacy London at the SHE Media Co-Lab at SXSW, Bush shared her frustration with the lack of accessible, adequate scientific resources for navigating this transitional stage of life.
Perimenopause, the phase leading up to menopause, can bring a host of physical and emotional symptoms, from hormonal fluctuations to mood swings, fatigue, and changes in overall well-being. While Bush has yet to experience perimenopause herself, she expressed her disbelief at how ill-prepared women are before they go through this inevitable life stage.
“People talk about it and they’re like, ‘Sometime between 40 and 50,’ and I’m like, is that the metric for us?,” she said. “Then I called Stacy and I asked, ‘Well, how do you know?,’ and she goes, ‘If you’re asking, then it’s not happening yet.’ So I called my doctor, thinking there has to be a way — what do we need to prepare for as women? And my doctor said, ‘If you’re asking if it’s happening, it’s not happening.’ It’s 2025. Isn’t there better science for this?”
Unfortunately, it’s a tale as old as time for women to feel underserved by current healthcare systems. Despite the increasing focus on women’s health in recent years, there remains a glaring gap in education and innovation in women’s health, especially surrounding midlife hormonal transitions.
However, the actress is still optimistic about the future. “I promise you that even more than I am frustrated, I am hopeful because I have seen the resilience of our communities again and again and again,” she says. “I think of the people who got us here, what they were up against and the fact that my mom could not have leased an apartment by herself when she was my age, or gotten a credit card without my dad to sign for it.”
She credits the efforts of feminists and activists such as Gloria Steinem, Marsha P. Johnson and Audre Lorde. “We stand on the shoulders of these incredible giants,” she says. “It’s bad, but they’ve literally given us instruction manuals for how to build a more equitable society.” She continues, adding that if we worked together as a society, life would be better for everyone, not just a specific group.
“The math and the morals meet here,” she says. “If right now in this room, I could snap my fingers and every woman in America was paid equitably to every man in America, America’s GDP would raise by 12 points. Everyone would have more money! We wouldn’t be taking the money from the men.”
And while women often don’t get the support they need, Bush says it will only come from our own efforts. “It’s really important for us to lean on each other, but to also pay attention to facts and science. We can do this if we actually remember that we’re in it together and that certain things really are true, and that if we lean on truth and we lean on each other, we come out the other side of this as a society.”
Bush suggests getting together with four or five of your friends and simply having a vulnerable conversation. “Those kinds of reciprocal conversations can be immensely healing, and I find that in those spaces, women often solve incredible problems, not just personal ones, but often political ones as well.”
The last piece of advice came from London who has acknowledged her own mid-life personal transformation. “Don’t forget that part of yourself, whether you are losing confidence, feeling like you are going through a reckoning to a renaissance, take care of yourself so you can take care of others.”