This article explores how older women experience and manage menopause at work by asking how female workers construct their work identity around their experiences of menopause at work. Based on qualitative data from 21 women in Edinburgh, UK, findings suggest that women engaged in conflicting behaviors to manage and make sense of their menopausal bodies at work. On the one hand, women engaged in a highly resilient, neoliberal discourse around controlling and managing the symptoms at work. Conversely, data emerged reflecting a negative and self‐deprecating identity talk in how women described themselves in relation to the menopause. This article responds to the call for more nuanced empirical work on factors affecting extending working lives and experiences of menopause at work. While research output generally acknowledges the need for organizations to better understand individuals’ needs at work and not to be blinded by anti‐ageing discourses, this article recognizes that individual women themselves must also heed this advice to more effectively navigate the menopause through continued labor force participation. This article also concludes that menopause management at work must consider that individual women face their own unique cocktail of menopause symptoms, as such blanket human resources policies on their own might be inadequate to improve employment outcomes of women challenged and interrupted by the menopause.

Menopause is one of the most distinctive and individualised aspects of health-related gendered ageing at work, which is important as more women than ever before are working through their entire menopause cycle. We turn to the life-span development model of Selection, Optimisation and Compensation (SOC), which has great potential to provide a more nuanced review of adaptive behavioural strategies for potential work-related resource loss due to menopause. In this paper, we provide evidence from two studies: Study 1 was an inductive analysis of 21 interviews; Study 2 tested a number of hypotheses emergent from study 1 on two survey samples (n=381). We found that women with severe menopause symptoms were adversely affected at work; however, the use of SOC alongside supervisory and female peer support, ameliorated the negative impact of physical menopause symptoms on work performance. We also identified that SOC use was actually detrimental to work performance when used to manage psychological menopause symptoms. Our findings advance the understanding of gendered ageing at work, specifically managing menopause at work, through the lens of SOC theory. We show how engaging in agentic adaptive behaviours can be both beneficial and detrimental for differentially managing physical and psychological menopause symptoms at work.