World Menopause Day

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hollobone. I am delighted to be in the Chamber with this very fine group of women and men to speak in this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) on having secured it. The hon. Member for Swansea East’s opening speech was outstanding, and exemplified her approach to this issue, which—unusually for this place—is something we can all agree on. That is quite refreshing.

It is also refreshing to be in the Chamber talking about this issue. It is very slowly—far too slowly—getting better, but as the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) said, we do not speak about it enough. That is what needs to change, and we in this place have a big role in pushing for that to happen. We all know what I am talking about, don’t we? My hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) referred to it: that unspoken sense of “This is not quite proper to discuss”, that it is maybe wrong, or a bit unspeakable. Well, it is not. It is absolutely normal; it will affect more than half of us. Not to put too fine a point on it, I suspect that if it was the other half of us who experienced menopause, we might hear a good deal more about it, and we might see better provisions at work and in wider society.

There are some important voices out there who are doing a brilliant job of keeping the issue on the wider radar and making sure that these conversations about menopause are not unspeakable—that they do happen. We have heard about Liz Earle, and I also want to mention Davina McCall. Her work—I am very grateful to Carolyn McCall for drawing my attention to it—is really helpful in getting people talking. My hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw talked about Nicola Sturgeon, and I think the First Minister of Scotland discussing menopause and her own feelings about it is really powerful and important. It does not matter who you are or what your job is: menopause is something that will affect all us women.

Locally, too, I would like to mention some of the wonderful work that goes on in East Renfrewshire. My friends and colleagues Councillors Annette Ireland, Caroline Bamforth and Angela Convery are great advocates for women, and are practically supportive as well; they are the ones who champion information sharing and practical steps to support women going through the menopause. Councillor Ireland shared a great graphic from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on World Menopause Day. It was really helpful—I did not know all those facts, and I think about this issue quite a lot, for personal as well as work reasons. We should know these things.

The average age for a woman to reach the menopause is 51. One in 100 women reaches menopause before the age of 40. Some 70% of women—as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referenced—experience some form of mental health impact during the menopause, and 38% of partners feel helpless when it comes to supporting their other halves through the menopause, as we heard clearly just now. This one gave me the heebie-jeebies: menopause symptoms can last for 15 years. I am not sure I can cope with that. I did not know that until recently and I have not quite come to terms with it. I heard that fact, and a lot more, at the Menopause Café at The Bank in Neilston, which I went along to recently. It was absolutely brilliant. It was utterly reassuring, informative and full of smashing women having really frank conversations and supporting one another. If someone is at the point in their life when they are able to go along to something like that, please do so.

We cannot do all of this ourselves. Even those of us in this Chamber cannot do all of this ourselves, nor should we think we can. We need structures put in place to support and inform women, and create the space to talk. Women’s health issues should be a topic of conversation any and every day. The polite silence that surrounded things for far too long needs to be consigned to history. I mention the voice of the hon. Member for Strangford in that; he speaks up about those issues, and it is very helpful.

I really appreciate the work that has been done in Scotland on free period products. I mention that because, as well as appreciating the practical support that provides, we need to be comfortable talking about periods if we are going to be comfortable talking about menopause. I also appreciate the free prescriptions that we have in Scotland under our SNP Scottish Government. That is a bit of a game changer in terms of HRT provision. As the hon. Member for Swansea East said, menopause is not a choice and HRT is not a luxury. She is absolutely right. It sounded to me a wee bit like women in England are facing a menopause tax. That is really challenging in the context of the current cost of living crisis, as the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) raised.

Women’s health matters here, it matters in Scotland and it matters all over the UK. In Scotland, as the first country in the UK to publish a women’s health plan last year, I think it is important that we are constantly looking at those things, as we need to be. We have got a specialist menopause service in health boards. That is important because it needs to be a subject that we are focused on.

Why does it matter? We have heard about the really challenging situations that some menopausal women face. There is a 16% increase in the suicide rate of women aged between 45 and 55; that is a really stark statistic. We do not talk about that. That is a taboo that we need to address. The silence, inability or lack of knowledge about some of those facts means that many women—most women, I guess—should know more. There is an awful lack of knowledge among women generally about what menopause can mean. My hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw spoke very powerfully about the silence and the unknown, and the problems they can cause. That lack of knowledge damages lives. We have heard about what that means in reality, whether that be for family life or work. We must remember that this affects more than half the population.

I welcome the Women and Equalities Committee report. The right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North spoke very powerfully about why it is important that we consider looking at making menopause a protected characteristic—that we look at reasonable adjustments. From my point of view, bravo to the Scottish Government for their focus on fair work. There will be another action plan shortly, focused on fair work—with focus on women and those over 50. It would be interesting to hear where the UK Government are on that.

I know it is perhaps unfair to ask this Minister, but I would like to know where he thinks the employment Bill is—I certainly cannot see it anywhere. It is really important. The employment Bill would be the appropriate vehicle to deliver a lot of the structures in relation to work and the menopause. Menopause support in the workplace will not happen by magic; it is our job here to facilitate some of that. Things like the right to flexible working from day one, for instance, might be the very thing that helps a woman who is going through menopause cope and sustain.

The graphic that I mentioned had a couple of really interesting statistics about work, which I thought were important. Nearly half of women—45%—feel that menopause symptoms have had a negative impact on their work. That should terrify us. We have heard repeatedly today that 10% of women have given up work or thought about giving up work because of their symptoms. That is a huge chunk out of the labour market. I appreciate that, despite the lack of an employment Bill—and I continue to hope one appears—there are employers out there that are doing great things on the menopause anyway. Well done to them; they will be the employers of choice, they will be the ones who retain the talent in their workforces and they are the leaders—we will all know who they are.

I appreciate that dealing with menopause in the workplace might not always be completely straightforward. Menopause is not linear, and that is before I even get into my questions about the huge gaping holes in knowledge about how menopause interacts with polycystic ovary syndrome and other medical conditions. Even at the most basic level, the symptoms, duration and physical and emotional impact are very individual and variable, but women need us in this place to get a grip on the issue, because at the moment many of them feel unable to seek support for the menopause at work. That could be the same for any one of us, or for our friends and family members. We will all know—perhaps we are—women who have experienced uncertainty, misery, confusion and symptoms of all kinds.

The hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) spoke eloquently about the groups who are even more disadvantaged in all this. Some of us might sail serenely through the menopause, but it is still far too often the case that women’s troubles—I really, really hate that phrase—are not to be spoken of or dealt with. The reason that we have not done that is simply sexism. That is all there is to it. Let us decide that we are not going to accept that anymore, because this issue matters. Let us talk and share, as the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) said, and let us push for improvements in education and employment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw spoke eloquently about why younger people need to know about the menopause. We should not suddenly need to know about it when we reach middle age. Let us talk about the menopause and how we can practically improve things, because women’s health should be part of normal, everyday conversations. We should make sure that the conversations relate to our work and our families, and to people of different age groups and different backgrounds, because the menopause is absolutely normal and we need to talk about it as if it is.