Canada has a long way to go on menopause benefits, and the UK remains a distant benchmark, argues menopause coach Aimee Debow (pictured), founder of Menovate. Menopause is nowhere near the top of most Canadian employers’ benefits priorities, even as other markets push further ahead on support for women in midlife.
“Canada, unfortunately, is behind other countries on the topic of menopause. [It] is behind in training doctors, making menopause treatment accessible, and talking about menopause generally,” she told Insurance Business.
That shortfall, she said, runs straight through to the workplace, where employers reflect the same lack of focus and investment.
As a result, progress inside corporate plans has been patchy at best. Debow said that “only a handful of corporations have begun to include menopause-related benefits into their plans,” leaving most women to navigate symptoms and treatment largely without targeted support from their employers.
When asked whether Canada has a model to follow, she did not see much room for ambiguity. “Yes, the UK is years ahead of Canada,” she said.
For Debow, the policy gap is not abstract; it runs through her own career. “I have never, not one time, heard the word ‘perimenopause’ or ‘menopause’ at work, throughout my entire time,” she said.
She spent years in senior corporate roles while wrestling with symptoms she did not yet have language for, let alone workplace support to manage.
The experience, she argued, was not about performance failing but about an avoidable lack of infrastructure around women at the peak of their careers.
“I did a great job. I’ve overcome it, but it could have been so much easier if I had had the support of my company or if I had known what was happening to me in my life,” she said. That gap between individual effort and institutional backing is where she now locates the core risk for employers, who may see capable women pushing through but never see how much strain it takes to stay in the game without clear benefits, clinical routes, and cultural permission to speak openly.
Debow pushes back on any framing that treats menopause as a marginal issue affecting a small subset of staff. “Remember, it is 50% of us that is going through this transition. So, I'm not alone in this, and neither are you,” she said. For employers, that means menopause is not a boutique diversity topic; it is a structural reality baked into the demographics of their own workforce, pipelines, and leadership teams, she said.
The scale becomes even more stark when you look at symptoms rather than just headcount. She said that an average woman will suffer seven symptoms, and 95% of women will have symptoms. Those symptoms range from sleep disruption and brain fog to musculoskeletal pain and severe mood swings, and they rarely arrive in isolation. When a woman is dealing with multiple overlapping issues, while also shouldering senior responsibilities and often caring for children and aging parents, the absence of targeted support stops being a wellness nuance and becomes a hard operational drag.
That drag is already showing up in exit data, according to Debow, and the numbers are not small. “Ten percent of women quit their job for menopause. Think of the implication to a company – of retention, of replacement, and how much skills they're leaving on the table because they're not informed about this topic,” she said. Losing one in ten women for a reason that is predictable, stage-of-life driven, and in many cases modifiable through support is a direct hit to institutional knowledge, leadership continuity, and diversity commitments, she pointed out.
She warned that those resignations are only the visible tip. Behind them sit women cutting hours, stepping back from promotion tracks, or cycling through sick leave without ever naming menopause as the underlying driver. That pattern distorts HR data, masks the true cost of inaction, and lets leadership teams pretend the problem is about individual resilience instead of systemic design flaws in benefits and workplace policy.
The case she makes to HR and finance teams is deliberately hard-nosed. “It's actually a financial benefit to the company, because when women get treated, they're more productive, and they take less sick leave days,” she said.
