Menopause is finally having its moment. About time, too. For decades it sat in the same drawer as other things women were not supposed to mention at dinner such as infertility, incontinence, and the fact that ageing happens. Now it is everywhere. Your GP wants to talk about it. So does the glossy magazine at the checkout. So, increasingly, does your Instagram algorithm.
There is a real number behind all this noise. Around 1.2 billion women worldwide are expected to be menopausal or post-menopausal by 2030. That is a population the size of a continent, all going through the same biological transition at roughly the same life stage.
Naturally, someone worked out there is money in it, a great deal of money in fact. The global menopause market is already sitting in the tens of billions of dollars, and every forecast has it climbing higher through the early 2030s. Funny how quickly “no one talks about this” turns into “everyone wants to sell you something for it.”
And this is where it gets messy. The line between empowering women and exploiting them has gone blurry, and a lot of women are standing right on the line without realising.
Picture what menopause actually feels like from the inside: the brain fog that will not lift, the tiredness that sleep does not fix, a creeping sense of not quite being yourself anymore. That is exactly the kind of uncertainty a good marketer knows how to work with.
Women want answers. Answers that GPs, stretched thin and often under-trained on menopause specifically, cannot always give them in a 10-minute appointment. So, the space fills up with wellness influencers and fitness personalities, dishing out confident opinions to enormous audiences.
Confidence travels faster than accuracy online. Scroll through #menopauserelief or #perimenopause and you will find billions of views stacked up creating a real community talking honestly about something that used to be hidden, but also a huge marketplace.
The formula shows up again and again once you know what to look for. It opens gently with ‘you’re not imagining this, your hormones are real, you’re not broken’. The kind of validation a lot of women have been waiting years to hear. Then, almost without a seam, it turns into a sell with a link or a discount code or a free trial. Not every version of this does damage. But some pull women away from proper medical care, or steers them toward something with no real safety data behind it and massive financial output.
A recent Australian study on the commercial determinants of menopause put words to exactly this dynamic. Women themselves noticed that commercial actors were catastrophising menopause and leaning hard on the appearance of empathy, all to drive demand for products. The same research found that marketing, cost, and access tangle together with women’s actual lived experience of menopause in a way that makes them more vulnerable to the pitch. Even the pharmaceutical industry’s habit of sponsoring women’s health events split opinion, some women saw it as useful information-sharing, others as PR dressed up as concern.
Then there is the hormone panel, offered up as the definitive answer women have been waiting for. Except experts keep pointing out that these tests rarely change treatment plans, and are easily misread even when they are read at all. It is diagnostic theatre, basically expensive theatre.
And everyone has a take. HRT or no HRT. GLP-1s. Peptides. Herbs, teas, acupuncture, cooling pillows, magnesium sprays and “do your own research” as though that phrase settles anything rather than opening the floodgates. Some of these “influencers” are now selling their own peptides, labelled, charmingly, “not for human consumption, research purposes only”, while telling women in the same breath that this exact product will change their lives.
If it all feels familiar, that is because it is. We have watched this movie before, just with a different soundtrack. Diet culture ran the same playbook for decades that included manufacture the insecurity, then sell the fix, then invent a new fix when the last one stopped working. Now the target has shifted from the size of a woman’s body to the state of her hormones, or both her body and her hormones, but the business model has not changed at all.
None of this means women should stop asking questions, or that every supplement or every influencer is running a con. Plenty of the information now available is genuinely useful, and more openness beats decades of silence, no contest.
But we have gone from having almost nothing to having far too much, with precious little help telling the legitimate from the lucrative.
Somewhere in that overload, women are once again being asked to pay in dollars, in trust, and in false hope. Our grandmothers went through this in silence, with no information at all. It would be nice to think their granddaughters are better off, not just better marketed to.