World Menopause Day 2026: the retention issue hiding in plain sight

When World Menopause Day 2026 is, and who runs it

World Menopause Day is held on 18 October every year. In 2026 that is a Sunday, which has a practical consequence worth planning around: anything involving colleagues has to happen on the Thursday or the Friday before, and anything involving a supplier or a diary slot with a management team needs deciding well ahead of that.

The day is run by the International Menopause Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness of menopause and of the support available, which for an employer translates into a fairly narrow question. Does anything about how this organisation works actually change, or does the day come and go.

The 33% is the number to look at, not the 43%

The obvious reading of those figures is that too few employers have a policy. That is true and it is also the least useful part of the finding, because writing a policy is the one step an organisation can take entirely on its own.

The group worth sitting with is the third who do not know. Some of them work somewhere with no policy. Others work somewhere that has one, wrote it carefully, published it on the intranet and has not mentioned it since. From where the employee is standing those two organisations are indistinguishable, and in both the person who needs support has to find out what exists before they can ask for it.

That is a different problem from the one most employers think they have, and it has a different fix. A policy nobody can name is not a support measure. It is a document.

Where the loss actually happens

CIPD surveyed 2,185 UK working women aged 40 to 60 and published the findings in October 2023. 73% had experienced symptoms related to the menopause transition, 57% currently and 16% in the past. Of those with symptoms, 67% said the symptoms had a mostly negative effect on them at work, and only 28% reported no effect at all.

Underneath that, the specifics are the things any manager would recognise as performance signals if they did not know the cause. 79% of those negatively affected felt less able to concentrate. 53% of those with symptoms had at some point been unable to go into work because of them.

Here is the part that makes it a retention question rather than a wellbeing one. Almost none of that is visible to the organisation as menopause. It is visible as a run of short absences, a dip in concentration, someone who has stopped volunteering for the visible work. In the sessions we run, what people describe is rarely a resignation. It is being quietly left off a shortlist, not encouraged to go for the promotion, moved sideways by a manager who thought they were being kind. Nobody in that story means any harm, and the organisation still loses 20 years of experience.

Five things worth settling before 18 October

None of these is a campaign and none of them needs a budget. They are the organisational half of the problem, which is the half a day like this one is actually useful for.

• Find out whether anyone can actually find the support. Ask someone who does not work in HR to locate it from the intranet homepage while you watch. If it takes more than a minute, the 33% who do not know includes your organisation.
• Check what your absence policy allows. Acas says: “When someone is off sick because of menopause, the employer should record these absences separately from other absences.” Recording them separately stops a run of short absences quietly triggering a formal process. Check whether yours does.
• Decide who reviews a capability conversation before it starts. The expensive outcome is a performance process opened against a cause nobody has been told about. One person asking “have we checked whether anything has changed for them” can stop that happening.
• Decide who the day is for. An event aimed at colleagues who are affected reaches people who already know what they are dealing with. An hour aimed at managers reaches the people whose behaviour is the variable. Both are defensible; picking by accident is not.
• Put one date in December to look at it again. Not a survey. Ask whether anyone has used the route since October, and whether three managers picked at random can say what they would do. Vague answers in December mean the day reached the intranet and not the management layer.

The manager side of this is a separate job, and it is the one that decides what actually happens in the room. Our menopause-confident manager guide works through the seven things a manager can do, including what to say in the first two seconds and the four phrases that end disclosure for good.