Advertising wants more women at the top. Instead It's losing them at their most experienced

Every October, menopause gets its moment. The panels, the webinars, the well-meaning LinkedIn posts. Then November arrives and in too many businesses, the conversation goes quietly back in the drawer for another year.

This October, our Bloom UK Mpower group for midlife women reissued and updated our Menofesto and I want to make the case for why it belongs on the leadership agenda, not just in the HR handbook. Because this isn’t only a well-being issue. It’s a leadership issue, a talent issue and a commercial issue.

The advertising and marketing industry likes to talk about the need to get more women into leadership positions, and with good reason. Women make up 55.9% of agency staff but hold only 40.8% of C-suite roles, according to the latest IPA Agency Census. The average agency employee is 35.6, and just 8% of agency staff are over 51, compared with a third of the UK workforce. Somewhere between the middle and the top, women are dropping out, at just the age menopause symptoms tend to peak. 

These stats come as no surprise to us. When we were putting together Bloom’s Menofesto, we heard from many members who had been in exactly this situation. One member told us that, once her symptoms hit, “I don’t think I made the best of potential career opportunities as a consequence.”

According to the CIPD, only 24% of women aged 40 to 60 said their employer had a menopause policy or offer support, and only a third of workers feel supported by their manager or employer. This lack of support can lead to what we call ‘the quiet exit’. Women don’t necessarily resign dramatically. They stop putting themselves up for promotion, avoid pitches and step back.

Menopause symptoms can get mistaken for performance problems, in appraisals and across the business but, more insidiously, in how women judge themselves. One Bloomer said, “I thought I was useless at my job and genuinely thought that my younger colleagues were better at coping.” Think about that. An experienced woman, questioning her ability to do a job she has already proved she can do. Not because she has suddenly lost her talent, but because she isn’t getting the support she needs.

Our industry is especially exposed because of its existing youth bias, ageism and menopause stigma quickly add up. As one member put it, “…we work in a young industry where older people are already discriminated [against] enough.”

But we need to challenge the “we skew young” excuse. If few women of menopausal age work in a business, or in the industry as a whole, we should all be asking: where did they go? And what are we losing when they leave?

This isn’t just an issue for agencies; clients should be concerned too. According to analysis of ONS data, households headed by 50 to 64-year-olds outspend every other age group in the UK, and households headed by over-50s account for more than half of all household spending. Yet YouGov found that more than half of women over 50 say brands don’t understand people their age. It should be a serious concern that the industry is losing the experience of exactly the people it often fails to reflect in its work.

This loss of talent is expensive. It means lost experience, lost knowledge and fewer senior women for younger staff to look up to. In fact, Gallup estimates that replacing a leader costs around twice their annual salary, before you count the client relationships that walk out of the door with them.

So how do we turn things round? According to the CIPD, only 24% of women aged 40 to 60 said their employer had a menopause policy or other support, so implementing a policy is a great starting point. Helpfully we have one in the Menofesto you can use as a template. There are four actions you can take alongside this.

Firstly, include menopause in talent reviews and succession planning. That means before rating down a previously strong performer, check whether a health conversation and adjustments have happened. Train the managers who sit on calibration panels to spot age and menopause bias. And never record health information without consent: review the process, not the person.

Secondly, track performance ratings, promotions and exits by age and gender to see where women fall off the pipeline. If women in their late forties and fifties start getting lower ratings, drop off high-potential lists or resign in greater numbers, that’s a sign your talent process is failing them. Keep the data anonymous and grouped, add questions about health and support to exit interviews, and act on what you find.

Thirdly, make support work at senior level, not just junior grades. Senior roles bring pitches, client entertaining, long-haul travel and global calls, which are exactly where symptoms like disrupted sleep, hot flushes and brain fog bite hardest. Build pitch teams with a second presenter ready to step in and treat notes and cool rooms as standard. Give leaders real choice over travel, with recovery time built in. Name a deputy for every senior role so a bad day isn’t a crisis. And offer these to everyone as good practice, so nobody has to disclose menopause to use them. 

Finally, give menopause a sponsor at board level. Someone senior should be accountable for the action plan, its budget and its results, rather than leaving it to HR or a volunteer network. And everyone should understand what the menopause is and its effects, so menopause education should happen throughout the year.  Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, firms with 250+ staff will need senior leaders to sign off their menopause action plans from spring 2027. The real value comes from leaders using the support themselves and talking about it openly. When a CEO or managing director does that, everyone below them gets permission to do the same.