Manager Confidence Isn't Competence: Why Menopause Training Matters More Than Policy
Why manager capability - not policy - determines whether menopause support actually works.
Ask most HR leaders whether their organisation has a menopause policy and the answer is increasingly yes.
Ask them whether their line managers know how to use it - and the answer is almost always less certain.
That gap is where women fall through. Not because the policy doesn't exist. Not because the organisation doesn't care. But because the person the employee actually has to talk to - the line manager sitting three desks away - doesn't know what to say, doesn't feel equipped to respond and has never once been given the tools to handle the conversation properly.
A policy sitting in a SharePoint folder does not create a menopause-supportive culture. A manager who knows how to have the conversation does.
At its core, this is a performance conversation - not a personal one.
And most managers have never been trained to handle it that way.
What employees actually need
Women experiencing menopause symptoms at work are not, in the first instance, looking for a formal process. Research consistently shows that the most valuable workplace support comes through informal channels - a manager who asks the right question, a colleague who understands, a conversation that doesn't require filing a form to initiate.
One thing is clear from the research: women's willingness to disclose is shaped overwhelmingly by their read of the individual manager. Their perceived approachability. Whether they're likely to be embarrassed. Whether they'll take it seriously or make it awkward. The policy is irrelevant to this calculation. The manager is everything.
If you’re trying to understand the broader context of menopause at work - how it affects performance, confidence, and progression - this guide brings it together → Menopause at Work: How to Navigate Your Career with Confidence
And the reason most women don't disclose is not that they lack courage - it's that they don't trust the conversation will be handled well. Research by Griffiths, MacLennan and Hassard (2013; Maturitas, PMID: 23973049) found that the majority of women in professional and managerial roles were unwilling to disclose menopause-related difficulties to their line managers - particularly when those managers were younger or male. A Unite survey found that 83% of menopausal women reported zero access to support at work.
These women know their rights, or could find them out. What they don't have confidence in is the human on the other side of the conversation.
For a detailed view of what employees are navigating when they approach this conversation, read my article on How to Talk to Your Manager About Menopause (Without Undermining Yourself).
The problem with manager confidence
Managers, by and large, are not withholding support deliberately. They are operating without knowledge, without language, and without the normalisation that makes difficult conversations feel possible.
Most line managers have never been taught anything about menopause. They don't know what perimenopause is or when it starts. They can't distinguish between a concentration difficulty caused by sleep disruption and a capability issue. They have no framework for what a reasonable adjustment looks like in practice, or how to facilitate one without either making the employee feel infantilised or exposing the organisation to risk.
So when the conversation comes - or when the signs are there and a conversation is needed - many managers do one of two things: they avoid it entirely, or they handle it badly.
Both outcomes carry consequences. And both are entirely avoidable.
What research consistently identifies as the single most important determinant of whether menopause support works in practice is not policy sophistication - it is manager capability. A CIPD study of nearly 1,000 public sector employees found that, across all support measures evaluated, management training was ranked most important by participants. More important than information sessions for employees. More important than flexible working policy. More important than written guidance.
Managers who know what they're doing change everything for the women on their teams. Managers who don't - regardless of what the policy says - change nothing.
The cost of getting it wrong
Poor manager handling of menopause conversations is not just a cultural problem. It is a legal one.
Employment tribunal claims citing menopause more than tripled between 2022 and 2024. Many of the cases that organisations have lost involved not dramatic acts of dismissal or deliberate discrimination - but the quiet accumulation of poor management decisions made by people who simply didn't know any better.
A manager who initiates a capability process without considering whether symptoms might explain a performance change. A manager who responds to a disclosure with embarrassed silence or an inappropriate comment. A manager who approves adjustments informally and then forgets to follow up, leaving the employee without the support that was promised. These are the mundane failures that generate legal exposure - and almost all of them are products of training gaps, not malicious intent.
The Lynskey v Direct Line Insurance Services tribunal awarded £64,645 in compensation for a disability and discrimination claim arising, in part, from a line manager's failure to consider the claimant's menopausal symptoms before issuing a formal written warning. The Thomas v Bibimoney Global case turned on a comment a CEO made attributing a professional concern to a woman being menopausal. Neither of these organisations set out to discriminate. They failed because the people making decisions in the moment were not equipped to make them well.
For the full legal picture, including what employment tribunals are finding and how the Equality Act protects employees have a read of Your Legal Rights at Work During Menopause (UK Guide).
This is where most organisations realise they don’t have a policy gap - they have a manager capability gap. If your managers aren’t confident handling these conversations, the risk doesn’t sit in policy - it sits in day-to-day decisions.
→ Book a menopause training session or request a proposal
What training actually changes
The evidence on manager training for menopause is clear and direct.
A peer-reviewed UK study by Griffiths et al. (Maturitas, PMID: 30583770) - the first of its kind to develop and evaluate an online menopause awareness training programme specifically for line managers - found that even a 30-minute intervention produced significant improvements in manager knowledge, attitudes, and confidence in discussing menopause with employees. Critically, it measurably reduced the embarrassment managers reported at the prospect of having menopause conversations - identified in the same research as a key barrier to employee disclosure.
The mechanism matters here. It is not that training gives managers a script. It is that training changes the internal experience of the conversation - making it feel normal, manageable, and professionally legitimate rather than awkward, risky, and best avoided. Once a manager is no longer embarrassed, the employee no longer has to fear that they will be. Once a manager has language and a framework, they can respond rather than react.
A quasi-experimental study of a workplace educational intervention on menopause (Stocker et al., 2023; PMID: 37364541) found that educational interventions improved knowledge and confidence, and that communication from management was essential for creating an environment where menopause could be openly discussed. The cultural message that matters most is the one that comes from the management level - not from an intranet page.
What good manager training produces, in practice, is a manager who can do four specific things:
1. Open the conversation without making it awkward. Not waiting for the employee to raise it. Noticing when something has changed and finding a professional, human way to ask. "I've noticed things seem harder for you recently - is there anything I should know about, or anything that would help?"
2. Receive disclosure without overreacting or under-responding. Neither making it a bigger deal than the employee wants it to be, nor brushing it aside. Treating it as the professional health conversation it is.
3. Facilitate adjustments practically and promptly. Knowing what's available, knowing how to access it, following up in writing, and checking back in. Not requiring the employee to fight for what has been agreed.
4. Maintain appropriate confidentiality while staying legally compliant. Understanding when to involve HR, how to record conversations, and what not to do - including not discussing the employee's situation with colleagues without consent.
For the full range of adjustments a trained manager should be able to facilitate, see Menopause Workplace Adjustments: What You Can Ask For (UK Guide).
Most organisations don't have a policy problem. They have a manager capability problem. That's what I solve.
I run practical menopause training sessions that give managers the confidence and language to handle these conversations properly - grounded in both the evidence base for what works and the real experience of what these conversations look like from both sides of the desk.
Sessions cover: what menopause and perimenopause actually involve and why they affect work, how to initiate and receive disclosure conversations, what adjustments are available and how to facilitate them, the legal framework managers need to understand without needing to be employment lawyers and how to build a team environment where women don't have to reach breaking point before getting support.
Training is available as a standalone half-day or full-day workshop, as part of a wider wellbeing or inclusion programme, or as a leadership briefing for senior teams who need strategic overview rather than operational detail.
Book a workshop or request a proposal
The Equality Action Plan obligation makes training non-negotiable
From April 2026, employers with 250 or more employees can voluntarily publish Equality Action Plans under the Employment Rights Act 2025 - including at least one action on menopause support. From spring 2027, this becomes mandatory.
The Government's own guidance identifies manager training as one of the core evidence-informed actions for the menopause element of an Equality Action Plan. Organisations that include training in their plan will need to be able to demonstrate, when scrutinised, that it was substantive, practical, and evaluated - not a 20-minute e-learning module ticked off once and forgotten.
An Equality Action Plan that lists "manager awareness training" as its menopause action and delivers nothing more than a webinar is not going to hold up to employee scrutiny, trade union review, or the accountability that public publication creates. The shift the Act makes - from passive reporting to active accountability - means commitments made in action plans will be tested.
The organisations that get ahead of this by building genuine manager capability now will be in a fundamentally different position from those retrofitting a training programme in late 2026 under deadline pressure.
What good looks like at an organisational level
Organisations where menopause support works - where women stay, where they progress, where they don't quietly step back from leadership tracks - share identifiable characteristics. They are not necessarily the ones with the most elaborate policies.
They are the ones where managers have been trained and feel equipped. Where the cultural signal from senior leadership is clear - this is taken seriously here. Where adjustments are facilitated promptly and without bureaucratic friction. Where the conversation between a woman and her manager doesn't feel like a risk she's taking.
That culture is not built by policy alone. It is built, conversation by conversation, at the manager level.
And it starts with giving managers what they need to have those conversations well.
If you are an HR leader, L&D professional, or people manager responsible for building menopause capability in your organisation, I'd welcome a conversation.
Whether you are preparing for Equality Action Plan compliance, responding to a specific team need, or building a longer-term inclusion programme, I can work with you to develop something that fits your organisation's context and delivers measurable change in manager confidence and behaviour.
Get in touch to discuss training and workplace sessions
For the full context on what the Employment Rights Act 2025 requires of your organisation, see: What the Employment Rights Act 2025 Means for Menopause at Work.
This article is written within the scope of evidence-based health and nutrition coaching practice and draws on peer-reviewed research, CIPD guidance, and UK employment law. It does not constitute legal advice.
References
Griffiths A, MacLennan SJ, Hassard J. (2013). Menopause and work: an electronic survey of employees' attitudes in the UK. Maturitas, 76(4):391–5. PMID: 23973049
Griffiths A, Hunter MS, MacLennan SJ, et al. (2019). Development and evaluation of online menopause awareness training for line managers in UK organisations. Maturitas, 124:1–7. PMID: 30583770
Stocker RA, et al. (2023). Evaluation of a workplace educational intervention on menopause: a quasi-experimental study. Maturitas. PMID: 37364541
Owen A, Taylor J, Burton A. (2025). "It's the chats with colleagues that get me through": women's experiences of menopause at work and reflections on a workplace menopause policy. Menopause. doi: 10.1097/GME.0000000000002715
CIPD Ireland. (2023). Navigating menopause in the workplace: insights from the Irish public sector. Study of 986 participants across five public sector organisations. cipd.org
CIPD. (2023). Menopause in the Workplace: Employee Experiences in 2023. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
CIPD. (2023). The Menopause at Work: Guidance for Line Managers. cipd.org
Unite. (2023). Survey of members: access to menopause support at work.
UK Government. (2024). Menopause in the Workplace Literature Review.
Government Equalities Office. (4 March 2026). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers — the 18 evidence-informed recommended actions. gov.uk
Employment Rights Act 2025. UK Government Legislation.
Lynskey v Direct Line Insurance Services. Employment Tribunal (2022–2023). Compensation awarded: £64,645.
Thomas v Bibimoney Global. Employment Tribunal. Age and sex discrimination; menopause comment.
