As Menopause Has Its Moment, Women Are Leaving Established Careers To Advocate For It
- Tara S
- Mar 24
- 9 min read
Forbes
At last, menopause is having its moment—but sometimes journalist, writer and menopause advocate Tamsen Fadal still can’t believe it.
March 23, 2025
By Rachel Burchfield
“The fact that we’re having this conversation, you and I, that blows my mind,” she tells me via Zoom on the cusp of her latest book, How to Menopause: Take Charge of Your Health, Reclaim Your Life, and Feel Even Better Than Before, coming out on March 25. “It blows my mind that we’re all having this conversation. I’m telling you, three, four, five years ago, nobody would talk to me about it. Nobody.”
She’s not wrong. Actress Naomi Watts—who has herself become a menopause advocate, founding a skincare line, Stripes, specifically designed for menopausal women—wrote in her recently released book Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause, “I’d been warned ever since I started acting that calling attention to your age—when that age was not 23 or younger—would be career suicide. I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal. Hollywood’s lovely term for such women was ‘unfuckable.’”
But times are changing. As Watts wrote in her book, which hit shelves January 21, 2 million American women enter menopause each year—almost 6,000 women daily. There are, as Watts writes, a billion menopausal women worldwide. And yet, when her own menopausal journey started, she continued, “I felt completely alone.”
It’s not as though menopause is a new concept—but what is new is high-profile women like Fadal and former Marie Claire editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider (who co-founded the menopause startup Alloy in 2020) pivoting from successful careers to that of menopause advocates; the ushering in of a generation of actresses-turned-advocates like Watts, Halle Berry, Brooke Shields and Drew Barrymore, who have been vocal about menopause in recent years; and doctors like Dr. Lisa Mosconi (who wrote the foreward for How to Menopause), Dr. Mary Claire Haver and others making menopause something spoken about freely and publicly, taking menopause out of the shadows of doctors’ offices and firmly into the public arena.
On March 31, Oprah Winfrey will bring the hour-long program The Menopause Revolution to ABC, which will address what Winfrey called “the inevitable phase of life every woman will face: menopause,” per The Hollywood Reporter. (“This show starts the revolution of answers for millions of women throughout this country,” Winfrey said. “We discuss what you need to know to best advocate for yourself when it comes to mental health, sleep, weight, sex and your brain, so we can ultimately see how freeing menopause can be in your life, with the best yet to come.”)
“Listen, I think that we are tired of suffering,” says Fadal, who, in addition to her book, produced the PBS documentary The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause, in 2024. “I think there’s increased awareness and advocacy. There’s obviously this growing movement to destigmatize it and address it openly. And yeah, I was scared to address it openly first. Initially when I went out the door, and it was several years ago, somebody said to me, ‘You are going to ruin your career talking about menopause, because that basically equals old age.’ And unfortunately, we have had that problem. And that leads me to cultural shifts, society’s attitudes towards aging, particularly women’s health and wellness. We're seeing a shift in that, which is great. We're seeing people embrace aging as something to aspire to, as a place for wisdom, as not something to be feared or hidden.”
“This should be a celebration,” she adds of menopause and aging. “This shouldn’t be anything to fear.”
‘If You Start A Menopause Company, People Are Going To Think You’re In Menopause’
Anne Fulenwider was at the top of the masthead at Marie Claire, rising to the ranks of editor-in-chief after also serving in the same role at Brides magazine and editing such boldfaced names as Dominick Dunne, Fran Lebowitz and Buzz Bissinger while working as a senior editor at Vanity Fair. After taking over the top job at Marie Claire in 2012, Fulenwider left in 2020 to start Alloy Women’s Health, a startup dedicated to helping women receive safe, effective treatment for the symptoms of menopause, with co-founder Monica Molenaar. With a goal of making healthcare surrounding menopause accessible, the two women sought to give the millions of women entering menopause each year the healthcare solutions they need after finding that only 6% of women seeking treatment for their symptoms actually get it.
It was, admittedly, a gamble that didn’t make sense to some of Fulenwider’s colleagues in the magazine industry at the time.
“When I did tell some of those people in fashion and beauty at the beginning that I was leaving to start a menopause company—I mean, the looks and the responses that I got from some of the more, let's just say fashion- and beauty-related people, I mean, one of them was even like, ‘But Anne, if you start a menopause company, people are going to think you’re in menopause,’” she tells me via Zoom, as if that declaration was basically declaring the end of one’s life.
Fulenwider’s career pivot—which shook the magazine industry when it happened five years ago—was multifactorial: she had lost her mother suddenly to a heart attack, coincidentally not long after Marie Claire published a story titled “Being a Woman Is Killing You.”
“And one of the examples was when women—because women’s bodies have not been included in almost any medical research—the symptoms of a heart attack, for example, what everyone knows is the symptoms of a heart attack are really the symptoms of a heart attack in men,” she says. “And so that was also a very specific example that hit home for me.”
Her daughter was going through some health issues, she adds, which got her thinking even more about women’s health. She also felt called, she says, to help women from the inside out rather than reporting on it from the outside in, as she’d done in her magazine career. In co-founding Alloy, she wanted to close what she calls “a giant gap” in access to expertise.
“And so I sort of thought, well, I had been doing magazines for a long time and I was at a phase in my life where I really wanted to be intentional about what I did next,” she tells me, adding that the work of Alloy “was a much bigger project than I had thought I was heading off to do when I left Marie Claire.”
In the beginning of her startup career, “I wasn't exactly sure what we were going to do to help with menopause,” she says. “And I did think it was more kind of content and nutrition and sort of lifestyle changes—and all of those things are important. But what we finally realized, having done some digging—why is everyone suffering from this so badly and why isn’t anyone talking about this, and what are the real solutions that work? And we did some digging. We realized that there's a study that came out 20 years ago that really put into hiding the most accessible FDA-approved solution, which is hormone therapy, which is much safer.”
The Alloy platform connects women to a menopause-specialized doctor that provides ongoing care and education and helps the right medicine get delivered directly to a woman’s door. The company started with the aforementioned menopausal hormone therapy, and since then has created more lifestyle products in the realms of hair, skin and sexual health.
“What we realized was [there are] between 55 and 85 million women in perimenopause and menopause, depending on your source, and under 2,000 certified menopause practitioners,” Fulenwider says. “We just really knew that that was a problem that only could be solved by technology.”
What Fulenwider and her team learned was staggering, and a bit scary—that women’s bodies weren’t included in clinical trials until 1993, for example, and even since then “we’re barely included,” she says. Or how no one teaches menopause in medical school, she adds, “which is insane. How is that possible? How is [it] possible [when] 51% of the population is going to experience this?” There’s also the need to clear up misinformation about hormone therapy, along with misinformation about menopause in general, debunking outdated and incorrect studies, research and information.
“And so I think one of the reasons, and there are many, but one of the reasons women have been suffering from menopause symptoms in silence or just without the health that they need is because it has not in recent years been addressed as a health issue,” Fulenwider says. “So I think this is a biological change in your body for which there is very safe, FDA-approved treatment that is not reaching the people for whom it is approved and safe and will not only improve the quality of their lives, but also really help them have longer and healthier health spans.”
Of menopause’s emergence into the forefront as of late, “the movement has taken a life of its own because women everywhere are finding this great sense of community or sense of belonging or sense of being seen, which is a huge part of our mission at Alloy,” Fulenwider says, adding that “doing this work has meant so much to me. It’s been a tremendous privilege and an honor to be able to educate women about menopause and get them the relief that they need. It is such satisfying work. As much as I absolutely love my 25 years in magazines, this means something to me in a different way.”
It was a gamble to leave a career she’d known for a quarter-century and step into a world that, even five years ago, was still largely shrouded in secrecy, but “it’s the most satisfying and most meaningful work I’ve done in my life,” she says. “And there's so much more to do. But I think that’s really my message.”
‘This Has Been The Biggest Story Of My Lifetime At This Point’
Tamsen Fadal thinks that menopause is having its moment for a few reasons—first of all, online platforms and social media are allowing women to experience this transition together, having conversions, sharing stories and finding community. In the work she’s doing as a menopause advocate, “We're not trying to fix menopause,” she clarifies. “We're not trying to rebrand it, necessarily. We are trying to shred the silence that has surrounded this time in life.”
“I think that conversation has helped shift this narrative, which has been menopause equals death,” she says, adding, “We’re living longer than we have before. We didn't really have a roadmap for this. It's been shrouded in silence because we didn't know. And then once we thought we knew, we stopped talking about it because we thought it was something that was to be ashamed of.”
Fadal says of her own menopause experience, “I suffered. I went through it.” Admittedly, she says, “I never said, ‘Hey, you know what might be a good thing to do? Let’s talk about menopause for the remainder of your career.’ It wasn’t a thing that I planned, but I couldn’t stop researching it, looking into it, going down this rabbit hole.”
“I think for me, it is following my curiosity as a journalist and the need to reveal stories that haven’t been told,” she continues. “And this has been the biggest story of my lifetime at this point.”
How to Menopause is filled with information about the experience, including what society’s gotten wrong about it. “I think the most misunderstood part is that this is something to dread and there are no gifts of it, and I don’t agree with that,” Fadal says. “I think there are some real gifts in this period of life. And in fact, when I was writing the book, I thought, well, we have to say that there’s gifts in this. And then I thought, well, you need to make sure that you know what those gifts are, and that's really what we did. I wanted to make sure that there were the facts, there were the fears, because they're real. We're not going to pretend there's not fear of it. I’m not going to pretend it’s just, like, the easiest thing in the world. I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't come with its share of a little bit of grief and a little fear of loss. But I will say this—I will say that I have had transitions in this part of my life that I could have never, ever, ever imagined. I've met people that I could never [have] imagined. I'm having conversations openly about things that I've whispered about in the past. And so I hope that young women do not have a fear, but have an awareness. That's the difference. We have to shift those words.”
Though work has been done, there’s much more to do. Case in point? As Fadal writes about in her book, in 2024, $5 billion in federal funds were allocated towards women’s health, but menopause only received $15 million of that pie. “Isn’t that embarrassing?” Fadal asks me.
“We’re fighting on a lot of fronts,” she adds. “We’re fighting on getting research dollars. We’re fighting for women in midlife. We’re fighting to make sure that women have access at work so they can have some help there. And then we're making sure that they're not being discriminated against as a result of their age or this period.”
She continues that the biggest obstacle of the work is that it’s a cultural shift, one that both women and men must take part in—from seeing age as a matter of lack and less than, or that once a woman reaches menopause that her best years are behind her. “There are cultures that revere age,” Fadal says. “We have to get there.”
“I feel like there’s still so much more to do,” she adds. “I had no idea how badly this was needed until I went through it. And yeah, I do feel like it’s the work of my life, and I feel like I'm just getting started.”