In recent years the topic of menopause in the UK has gone from being something largely buried and ‘shameful’ in society, to being the focus of huge public attention across media, politics, medicine, retail, and more. This ‘menopause revolution’, as it has been called, represents a unique opportunity: a decisive turning point for either extending or delimiting how menopause is popularly envisioned, approached and experienced. This network engages this moment as a springboard, both to intervene in how that revolution is being shaped widely in the UK (in what has been described often as a medicalised discourse, that problematically primarily centres the experiences of white, middle-class women); and, further, to cultivate a more inclusive and informed reimagining of menopause, empowering those who are in or will undergo menopause, and promoting and integrating awareness of how menopause is configured internationally in other socio-cultural contexts. Its aim, then, is to foster greater dialogue, knowledge, and diversity in the unfolding conversation about menopause, across academic, stakeholder and wider public communities. The work is both timely and urgent. By 2030 there will be approximately 1.2 billion menopausal and post-menopausal women (Foster, 2009), with the ‘menopause market’ predicted to be worth over $24b by 2030 (Bloomberg, 2022). Further, menopausal women are ‘the fastest growing workforce demographic’ (Brewis, 2017), under increasing pressure globally to work later in life in the context of ageing populations. Yet at the same time a recent survey among postmenopausal women found that almost half the participants felt ‘not informed at all’ about menopause (Aljumah et al, 2023), this underlining the pressing need to expand and disseminate more extensive and nuanced understandings of menopause. The UK is at the vanguard of the ‘menopause in the workplace’ movement where, for example, companies issue menopause policies and acquire the accreditation developed by Henpicked: Menopause in the Workplace, a British professional training firm. As Britain is currently positioned as leading the way in the field of menopause awareness, with this transdisciplinary network we aim to harness ‘the menopausal turn’ (Jermyn 2023) making sure cross-cultural awareness and greater inclusivity are embedded in dominant discourses and practices around the menopause.

MAUSI_Net is underpinned by a combination of research coordination and capacity building objectives. A key research coordination objective is promoting a transdisciplinary debate across national boundaries by bringing together different stakeholders including academic, national and international menopause charities, women’s organisations, health professionals, corporate EDI representatives (for instance menopause champions at UoG) and international organisations in the three sites (Sweden, India and UK). The network’s capacity building will be achieved through creating a sustainable and supportive scholars’ community fostering visibility of researchers and their findings on place-based socio-cultural understandings of women’s post-reproductive age. By foregrounding real life experiences, perspectives and narratives about menopause, this intervention will aim at both widening and shifting the existing discourse from medical and consumerist perspectives to one of agency and empowerment among all those who undergo menopause.