Let me tell you what midlife really looks like in Australia in 2025.
It’s 7pm in a hospital car park. A 58-year-old woman is sitting in her car, engine off, phone in her lap, showing six missed calls from her father. Her 88-year-old mother is in the ward upstairs awaiting hip replacement surgery. Her father – who’s been living with what they thought was mild dementia for a few years now – has been calling because he can’t find his keys. Then, because he’s made tea but can’t remember if he’s eaten. Then, because he doesn’t know where his wife is.
He’s staying at her house. Her husband is patient but strained. Her teenage son is avoiding the living room because Grandad asked him the same question four times at breakfast.
She’s taken the week off work. Her boss was understanding, then mentioned “the busy period coming up.”
And now she’s googling rehabilitation facilities, and the truth is crashing over her in waves: her father’s dementia isn’t mild. He can’t cope alone. He can’t look after himself, let alone her mother.
She Googles “exhaustion overwhelmed caring for parents.” An ad for $89 “hormone-balancing” supplements pops up.
This is the midlife collision. And it’s happening to millions of Australian women right now.
The collision no one’s naming
Menopause has become the acceptable face of women’s midlife struggles: medical, biological, manageable with the right products. The global menopause wellness market is projected to hit $30 billion by 2033.
But menopause is only one pressure point in a much larger collision – a convergence of impossible caregiving expectations, workplace discrimination, financial precarity, and society’s demand that women remain productive while absorbing everyone else’s needs.
Researchers call it the “midlife collision.” And it’s the story we’re refusing to tell because fixing it would require systemic change, not just selling stuff.
Inside the collision
New research from Deakin University, led by Professor Samantha Thomas and recently presented to federal parliamentarians, maps this collision with devastating clarity. The study “Hiding symptoms and balancing work, family and relationships”: Australian women discuss menopause and the midlife collision – surveyed over 500 women aged 45-64.
Women aren’t managing one challenge. They’re “juggling life” across multiple crises simultaneously:
Caregiving chaos:
Overwhelmed trying to care for dependent children, adolescents, adult children who can’t afford to leave home, ageing parents and in-laws, partners with serious illnesses, extended family.
The research revealed a “strained sense of responsibility” where women challenged being the default “primary carer” yet simultaneously felt bound by it. They described feeling “time poor” and “resentful of people demanding my time,” while also feeling guilty that they “should be doing more.” This tension between resentment and guilt is the rope burn from holding everything together.
Social invisibility:
“People literally look straight through you.” Many didn’t feel old internally, yet found themselves judged solely by chronological age. They’d become like infrastructure – invisible until they crumble, then suddenly everyone notices the cracks. At work: being told they’re “too old,” struggling to find employment at 53 or 60.
Workplace threats:
Productivity expectations while managing multiple crises. Hot flushes during meetings leave them terrified that colleagues think they’re no longer up to the job. One executive said: “I did not want people to conclude I was ‘losing it’.”
Financial precarity:
Career disruptions mean lost income and superannuation. With 6-9 month waiting periods for mid-level home care for parents who can no longer live independently, women either bankrupt families or become full-time carers, draining their futures for everyone else’s present.
The research shows women felt overwhelmed by the simultaneity. It’s not one thing. It’s everything, all at once. And then menopause arrives in the middle of it all.
The numbers
The CARE Index 2025 quantified the cost: Australian women aged 45-64 spend $2,800 per month and 31 hours per week in unpaid caring roles. Nearly $34,000 annually for the equivalent of a full-time job.
- 88 per cent feel completely overwhelmed and unprepared for caregiving roles
- 90 per cent are worried about their own mental health and wellbeing
- 75 per cent say caregiving is damaging their relationships
Australian society runs on women as shock absorbers, and we’re about to test them to destruction. The number of Australians over 85 will quadruple within five years, and we’ve designed a system where that demographic tsunami crashes directly into midlife women who are simultaneously expected to maintain careers, manage households, support adult children, care for ageing parents, and remain endlessly productive. When ageing parents can’t live independently, women absorb it. When adult children can’t afford to move out, women absorb it. When aged care waitlists stretch to nine months, women absorb it. We’ve built this so efficiently that the infrastructure only becomes visible when the shock absorbers finally fail.
Then we sell them supplements.
The great misdirection
The menopause wellness industry has pulled off a masterful sleight of hand, convincing us to watch the hot flush while the care system collapses in plain sight.
Can’t sleep? Buy this pillow. Feeling overwhelmed? Try this supplement. Sarah White, CEO of Jean Hailes for Women’s Health, calls it “the hot flush gold rush” – businesses suddenly realising midlife women have purchasing power and capitalising on it with menopause coaches, concierges, energy bars, chocolate almonds, and endless supplements. “It’s understandable that Australian women are grasping at the promise of help courtesy of a Facebook ad or pharmacy shelf, “White says, “But the reality is that we have to fix the system. No amount of hormone therapy, supplements or any other menopause product can alleviate the toll of the emotional, domestic and caring loads falling disproportionately on women at midlife.”
The Deakin research confirms women aren’t naive. While they welcomed increased visibility around menopause, they were concerned commercial interests were shaping the discourse – profit motives disguised as empowerment rather than genuine health advocacy. They described social media amplifying catastrophic narratives for profit, making it nearly impossible to distinguish credible information from marketing.
When we reduce the midlife collision to hormones, everyone benefits except women. Employers don’t need flexible caregiving policies. The government doesn’t need to fix aged care waitlists. Adult children don’t need to step up. Partners don’t need to redistribute domestic labour. And the wellness industry gets to sell “empowerment” to women managing impossible situations.
In the absence of real support, some are building alternatives. Platforms like Vera are emerging for “the squeeze” – midlifers navigating aging parents while raising kids and working full-time. This is life’s most predictable crisis, so why is every family experiencing it like a surprise emergency? We have birth classes, parenting books, and marriage counselling, but for ageing parents? Google and panic.
The real crisis
So yes, let’s talk about menopause. Women deserve proper medical care and workplace support. But let’s stop pretending hot flushes are the crisis.
The crisis is the collision itself. Impossible caregiving expectations, workplace discrimination, financial precarity, and society’s insistence that women remain endlessly productive while everything demands everything from them simultaneously.
Australia is facing the single largest demographic shift our nation has ever seen.
And our national strategy? That woman crying in the hospital car park at 7pm. Her unpaid labour. Her drained superannuation. Her sacrificed career. That’s the plan.
We’re not failing to see the collision. We’re choosing to look away. Because building actual infrastructure is harder than selling supplements to broken women.
The midlife collision is crushing an entire generation in plain sight. The question is whether we’ll keep calling it menopause, or finally name it for what it is: a care crisis we’ve designed to run on daughters.
Melissa Reader is the CEO and Founder of Vera – built for the sandwich generation caught in the squeeze, navigating ageing parents while raising kids, working full-time, and trying not to lose themselves entirely.
The research referenced was conducted by Professor Samantha Thomas and colleagues at Deakin University’s Institute for Health Transformation and published in Social Science & Medicine.