The UK Just Made Menopause a Legal Issue. Ireland Won't Be Far Behind. Are You Ready?
From spring 2027, large UK employers (250+ staff) will have to publish a Menopause Action Plan alongside their gender pay gap report. Not guidance. Not a nice-to-have. Law.
And here's the thing about Ireland: we don't usually wait long to follow. We already report gender pay gaps at a lower threshold than the UK does — 50+ employees, not 250+. We're transposing the EU Pay Transparency Directive this year. The pattern is clear, even if the menopause-specific legislation hasn't landed here yet: when the UK regulates workplace equity, Ireland tends to catch up within a cycle or two, not a decade.
So the real question isn't "will this come to Ireland." It's "will your organisation be ready when it does — or scrambling to catch up after?"
Here's why this matters right now, not eventually.
Over 1 in 10 menopausal women in Ireland give up work entirely because of their symptoms. Not reduce their hours. Leave. That's according to the Institute of Directors Ireland — and it's happening to a cohort of roughly 350,000 women currently in the Irish workforce.
Widen the lens to the UK, where the data is deeper: 43% of women have considered leaving their job or cutting their hours because of menopause symptoms. 90% experience symptoms, and for 30% they're severe enough to be debilitating. Perhaps the most telling figure of all — 86% of women didn't feel able to tell their employer or manager the real reason they were struggling.
That last stat is the one worth sitting with. This isn't mostly a symptoms problem. It's a silence problem. And silence is exactly what a policy — a real one, not a poster in the break room — is designed to address.
Here's the part that should make every HR and People leader lean in.
Women in their 40s and 50s are frequently at the peak of their careers — the most senior, most experienced, most expensive-to-replace people in the building. Losing them isn't a wellbeing footnote. It's a retention and knowledge-loss problem hiding in plain sight, and it's one of the few workforce risks that's genuinely preventable.
That's the opportunity in this. Just like preventative health screening beats treating an illness after the fact, a menopause policy built now — before it's mandated — costs far less than the alternative: exit interviews, backfilling senior roles, and regulators asking "why you didn't act sooner?".
So: do you know your organisation's menopause workplace policy?
Not "does one exist somewhere in a folder." Could you describe it? Would your managers know what to do if an employee came to them today? If the honest answer is no, you're not behind — most organisations are in the same boat. Only around a quarter currently have anything formal in place, per the CIPD. But the window to get ahead of this, rather than react to it, is now.
At The Balance Project we help organisations move from "we should probably do something about this" to an actual, working policy — through corporate workshops and manager training that make the conversation normal, hands-on support auditing and building menopause action plans that will stand up to whatever Ireland's regulation ends up looking like, and consulting for HR and People teams who want a partner in the room, not just a template.
Knowledge is power. So is acting on it before you're told to.
Always with balance. Always with you.
👇 Is your organisation getting ahead of this — or waiting to be told? Drop a comment or get in touch with The Balance Project to start the conversation.
#Menopause #WorkplaceWellbeing #HR #WomenAtWork #FutureOfWork
Blog by Georgie Sliney McCormack & Helen Flynn
Georgie and Helen are the co-founders of The Balance Project. Through their work, they are committed to making women's health information more accessible, informed, and empowering. They believe better conversations lead to better understanding, better support, and better outcomes for women.
