Grown kids, ageing parents, demanding careers: Why ‘midlife collision’ is buffeting women

Yola Armstrong describes the intense demands on many women in midlife as “a different type of hectic”.

She is in her career prime, working full-time managing a large corporate team at a utility company, has two adult daughters (the first of whom has just left home) and is scaling up her support for her own parents.

Yola Armstrong is shouldering many roles common to women at midlife, including care of older children, ageing parents, a household, a job and her own health needs.Credit: Eddie Jim

“It is a very interesting stage of life, this little collision course of work, kids, ageing parents and societal pressures,” says Armstrong, 56.

“The load probably feels a little bit more chaotic now for me because there’s a sense of urgency around both my parents, who are in their 80s.”

The mental, physical and logistical responsibilities carried by Armstrong are typical of many in the first generation of women to enter the paid workforce en masse. Sydney University workplace academic Professor Rae Cooper says such women are extending – not curtailing – their working years.

They also have midlife health issues to manage – in Armstrong’s case a history of polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, a hysterectomy and breast cancer scares – and menopause.

Armstrong shoulders an array of roles that sociologist and gender scholar Professor Leah Ruppanner says are still assumed to be primarily women’s. As the menopausal transition progressed for Armstrong, so did a sense of overload.

“I was getting to the stage where I just felt like there were ants crawling in my head, I was feeling out of control,” she says. Starting menopausal hormone therapy (formerly known as HRT) helped but was no magic wand.

“It’s not the be-all-and-end-all, it doesn’t solve all your problems, but I don’t feel as manic,” she says.

Menopause influencers have found huge Western audiences of women in this demographic and are increasingly framing the provision of more hormones to women in midlife as tantamount to a rights issue.

The idea that medical systems are failing women by not providing more hormones, especially testosterone to boost flagging energy, combat exhaustion and improve mental clarity and focus, was promoted so heavily in 2024 in the US that demand for it was dubbed “an epidemic”.

But as debate continues to rage over the benefits and limits of hormonal replacement or supplementation, another phenomenon to blame for lower sense of wellbeing among women in the middle years – one more difficult to remedy than hot flushes – is drawing attention: the so-called “midlife collision”.

The term was coined by UK workplace psychologist Dr Lucy Ryan in late 2023 to describe the effect of a group of stressors experienced by many Western women, a time when perimenopause or menopause, family caregiving, careers and a range of other personal transitions come together.

What began as Ryan’s doctoral thesis became the 2023-24 bestseller Revolting Women: Why Women in Midlife are Walking Out, in which Ryan noted that just at the age women are in the position to progress in long-built careers, many in the UK are cutting back their hours, stepping down or quitting.

Professor Leah Ruppanner has been surprised to hear mothers report their load increases – rather than ebbs – as children grow up.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

The term resonated strongly enough with women’s health advocates to be referenced in submissions to the Australian Senate inquiry into the impacts of menopause on women’s workplace participation and quality of life.

Professor Ruppanner studies the mental load, or cognitive demands, of running contemporary families and says her data suggests it is still mainly carried by women. She has been surprised to hear during her current research that many feel the demands on them increase, rather than decrease, as their children get older.

This can coincide with a woman’s career taking off – beneficial for future financial security – her parents ageing, and hormones fluctuating, Ruppanner’s research subjects attest.

“They’re saying bigger kids, bigger problems,” says Ruppanner, director of The Future of Work Lab and the Gender Equity Initiative at the University of Melbourne.

“[They say] things like, ‘my child might be feeling suicidal or grappling with gender identity – they are big problems I’m trying to keep track of, adult problems’.

“The mothers are mostly doing that emotional labour, not exclusively but often – and [considering] the consequences of getting it wrong. So it’s almost like a bottleneck because you’re often doing that at work too.”

When a group of her subjects were given a small amount of money to spend on things such as occasional cleaning, childcare or meal delivery, “we saw an increase in [feelings of] health and wellbeing”.

Men told Ruppanner they worried about how to achieve work-life balance in an employment scene that still did not offer them flexibility, while women were bombarded with carrying out their competing roles.

‘Women are meeting expectation on expectation, and men are in angst; the women are taking it all on ... the men feel their hands are tied.’

Professor Leah Ruppanner

“Women are trying to meet expectation on expectation, and men are in angst,” she says. “The women are taking it all on – boom, boom, boom – and the men feel their hands are tied, your partner’s hitting this collision, and you can’t help.

“We have to address the underlying gender expectations that see women carrying most of the caregiving and mental loads and doing most of the household work, on top of their paid work.”

Lawyer and workplace consultant Prue Gilbert agrees with Ruppanner that “midlife collision is real” and should be central in discussion about how to support women’s workforce participation and wellbeing at midlife.

“There is an element of perimenopause or menopausal symptoms they are navigating, and at the same time often having teenage children or young adults living in the house, bigger careers, and they’re often playing a caring role in the workplace as well,” Gilbert says. “And then there’s the care they’re providing elderly parents, or the grief for their loss.

Lawyer and workplace gender equality consultant Prue Gilbert.Credit: Eddie Jim

“It only takes a couple of those factors to collide for [women] to almost hit a short-term challenge – I do emphasise that it’s short term because there is a risk we catastrophise it and actually gaslight women and say, ‘this is all on you’, when these are societal issues.”

Addressing this imbalance is “a workplace issue and a women’s health issue”.

As well as allowing women flexibility during the window of their working life in which role overload may occur, Gilbert says employers encouraging men to take their parental leave entitlements when their children are young will help create family models less reliant on one parent managing most of the logistical load.

“When the man has taken a block of dedicated parental leave, then they are equally invested in the caregiving of the child, equally invested in having flexibility as well – also the financial dynamic changes because you are less likely to designate one person as having the ‘primary’ career,” she says.

Professor Rae Cooper said data shows the impact of gendered midlife stressors on women’s choices about workforce particiaption.

Gilbert is among advocates who caution against “catastrophising” the effects of menopause on women’s work ability, as Australian data shows women are extending their working years, not shortening them, according to gender, work and employment relations professor, Rae Cooper.

But even if women here are not resigning due to the midlife collision, there is statistical evidence that the conflict between work and family for women in the middle years is often “intense”, Cooper says.

“I know some people myself who’ve suffered greatly [due to symptoms] during the menopause years, but all the data and evidence shows the other features of women’s lives around that time have a profound impact on women’s labour force engagement,” Cooper says.

Many women say in her study focus groups that they are surprised to discover the complexity of their early to mid-50s, quite apart from menopause.

“You think, ‘I’m going to be free of the barriers of care that felt like they were holding me back when I was young’ – then work out there’s a whole new range of [care] challenges,” Cooper says. “This work is very gendered, it’s daughters and mothers who do it.”

Cooper, a member of the Work and Family Policy Roundtable, said nonmedical solutions to bring down pressure on women at midlife were possible and needed investigation.

“It is a very stressed period of life, and if people are offered medical solutions perhaps that’s attractive, but there is a bunch of other stuff we can fix through nonmedical means,” she says.

“We can share care more in families … we can have better-designed flexibility that recognises men as well as women have needs outside work to attend to.”

Yola Armstrong says women are not less professionally able when they are going through the midlife collision.Credit: Eddie Jim

Stress is documented to worsen menopause symptoms, and there is evidence that support eases them, but those who have researched this relationship say more data is needed. The Senate’s menopause inquiry urged the Department of Health and Aged Care to establish “a comprehensive evidence base”.

Its top recommendation was research to differentiate menopause from other midlife stressors.

In its submission to the menopause inquiry, Jean Hailes for Women’s Health also noted research was needed to measure the impact of stressors including “complex midlife collision of caring responsibilities”.

The organisation’s chief executive, Sarah White, says no amount of hormone therapy will reduce pressure on women expected to do too much. “If we want to support women, we have to understand and prevent the root causes of the midlife collision,” she says.

Yola Armstrong says that discussing such issues in workplaces in ways that support women going through this stressful time – without stigmatising them as less professionally able during this period – would help.

Bringing her female general manager in on what she was juggling outside her high-level work was “the best decision ever … we’ve made it really easy for other people to have those open and frank conversations at work”.

“We’re all about being your authentic self at work; I am often fanning myself in board meetings in front of the managing director and the executive – this is my authentic self. It doesn’t mean I am less capable.”

Armstrong said she had gone public about midlife collision because, “I have two girls, and I want to help create a world where they can live, work and enjoy life without having to make themselves smaller”.

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