← My So-Called Midlife with Reshma Saujani
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Why do we do what we do? What makes life meaningful? My name is Elise Lunan and I'm the author of Honor Best Behavior and the host of the podcast Pulling the Thread. On Pulling the Thread, I explore life's big questions with thought leaders who help us better understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. I hope these conversations bring you moments of resonance, hope and growth. Listen to Pulling the thread from Lemonada Media wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lemonada hey midlifers, Just a quick message before we get started. You can now listen to every episode of my Soul Cloud Midlife Ad Free with Lemonada Premium on Apple Podcasts. You'll also get ad free access to an exclusive bonus content from shows like Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus, Fail Better with David Duchovny, and so many more. It's just $5.99 a month and a great way to support the work we do. Go ad free and get bonus content when you hit subscribe on this show. And Apple Podcasts make life suck less with fewer ads with Lemonada Premium. Welcome to My so Called Midlife, a podcast where we figure out how to stop just getting through it and start actually living it. I'm Reshma Sajani. So if you've been following my work with girls, Girls who Code and Moms first, and now here on My so Called Midlife, you know that I am obsessed with culture change. Because, let's be honest, culture eats policy for breakfast every time. You can pass laws, sign executive orders, create programs, but if the culture doesn't shift, nothing really changes. That's why I was so excited to talk to today's guest, Dr. Petra Person. She's a Stanford economist whose work is blowing the lid off of how public policy is actually playing out in people's lives. And I promise you, this conversation is not dry and it's not academic. It's juicy. That's right, juicy. It's about marriages, divorces, babies, burnout. It's about how we get so much wrong when we design systems for women, especially moms, and how we can start to fix it. If you're a nerd like me, you're going to love this episode. But you don't have to be a policy wonk to get a real kick out of it. Petra is sharp, funny, and most of all, she's just trying to get to the heart of what makes family life actually work. We talked about everything from Sweden's paternity leave model to the menopause penalty. Yep, there's an economic penalty to entering menopause to how policy can make or break your most intimate relationships. And of course, we got into the weeds about midlife. Because, let's be honest, that's where all the cracks in the system tend to show up. Let's get into it. So what we like to do when we start is talk about, like, how you feel about this period of your life. So you're in your midlife and like, what's like a word or a feeling you would use to describe this moment or this period of time in your life? Yeah.
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D
So to me, you know, I think whirlwind might be the word. Like midlife has been a whirlwind so far. To me, I have a two year old, a six year old and a nine year old.
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B
Woo. You're in it. I feel you. I got a 5 and a 10.
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D
Year old, so yeah, no, they keep me very busy while I also juggle my job as a researcher and teacher. But even though I feel like physically I'm always on the run, midlife also has meant more peace of mind somehow. So I'd say that my midlife mindset is that my best years are now, but they sort of run by way too quickly.
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B
It's true. So I stalked you because I had read a news article that had a headline that like stopped me in my tracks. And it basically said, research reveals women take a substantial earnings hit in menopause. And it was an article about your study and what is being called the menopause penalty. So I tracked down your email. I immediately wrote you, thank God you said yes. And what's interesting, Petra, is like, you've really been at the forefront of some really fascinating research on many of the things I work on in my life. Paternity leave and now menopause. And before we kind of dig into the findings of your work, I wanted to talk about your study on paternity leave. Like, so at Moms first, right? We are working to pass. As you know, the United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn't have paid leave. Sweden far ahead. Norway, far ahead. Canada, everyone else far ahead. And last week, what's interesting, Petra, is we had our first ever fatherhood summit. And when I announced this event on social, a lot of the, you know, probably a lot of our midlifers were like, really? We gotta fix this shit for men too. Like, come on. And there wasn't this kind of immediate, like, people weren't immediately on board with a mom's organization planning an event and going to the bat for dads. But one of the biggest points of this summit was to show that, like, when it comes to parenthood, progress is not zero sum. Like, if dads do better, moms do better, kids do better. Like, we can't win paid leave if half our team is sitting on the sidelines. And so you did a study in 2019 on paternity leave in Sweden, that really shifted the way we in the United States think about this issue. And you showed that when fathers take more leave, mom's maternal mental health dramatically improves. Fewer anxiety meds, fewer hospitalizations. Walk me through the core findings of this research.
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A
You did.
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D
Yeah. So we, we analyzed this very interesting policy in Sweden where, you know, the background here is that Sweden has had very generous parental leave for a long time. You know, from, from, you know, starting in 1974, Sweden changed from maternity leave to a parental leave program. So, you know, parents had this very generous policy. 12 months of leave by the mom or the dad. And what happened in 1974 when this was introduced was that, you know, dad took basically no leave at all, even though they were entitled to taking leave. And the few fathers that took leave were entitled were often referred to as velour dads. So velour is this like very soft, soft material. So it was like the softies that took leave. But, you know, it was basically few men used this opportunity. And it took quite a few years for men to start using parental leave. And you know, 20 years after the first paternity leave had been made available, fathers still were using quite little of it. And the government started to do these reforms that have been called, you know, use it or lucid reforms where.
- [09:24]
B
And that starts in 1995.
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D
That starts in 1995. Exactly. So Sweden was the first country to do these use it or lucid reforms where basically if you don't as a parent use one month of this 12 month leave, then that's lost to the family. So the father could not transfer the entire 12 months of leave to the mother. You know, he could transfer 11 months, but that last month would be lost if he didn't use it.
- [09:51]
B
So it was an incentive to make him at least take something because the entire 12 months is given to the whole family.
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D
That's exactly right. So it was an incentive to make the dad take at least something. And it's very interesting what happened because, you know, there's a lot of research that has shown that these use it or lose it reforms first of all pushed a lot of dads to use, you know, the first month. And subsequently there was a second use and your lucid reform and a third. So by now it's like three months you have to take, otherwise you lose it. And these reforms pushed a lot of dads to take leave, but it also kind of snowballed over time. So once a lot of dads were taking leave, very nice research by Other people has shown that once one guy took leave in the workplace, his brothers and his colleagues and his co workers were starting to take more leave too. So it really suggests that there are some norms here that are governing, you know, the perceived workplace costs or taking paternity leave and, you know, if no one else is doing it, kind of being the first is kind of difficult and costly. Yeah, I mean, once start doing it, it's kind of, you know, accepted and.
- [11:01]
B
And yeah, yeah, sorry to speak over it. I was. I always say that culture eats policy for breakfast, all day, all night. Right. And we, we really kind of forget that when we implement policy because we're like, well, this is great, people should do it. But we haven't for focus on the cultural change. So what was that cultural change that happened along with this policy change?
- [11:23]
D
Yeah. So I think norms. Is it. I agree exactly with what you're saying that I think policy, you know, drives norms and it's a slow process. It takes a long time to change norms. But norms around what role the father is expected to take are being shaped by paternity leave policies slowly over time. So, you know, if I compare the US where, you know, I live and I raise my family to Sweden, where a lot of my undergrad friends that I'm still very plugged in with are raising their families, you know, my observations suggest substantial differences in the expectations that dads are part of the household, chip in, in the household, taking equal responsibility for a lot of caregiving and so on. And I think that might be a result of the fact that men take more leave and are more involved in the beginning.
- [12:36]
B
So how did. Tell me how the, like this velour dad did that change? So, like, I mean, because, you know, we're having a lot of conversations in the US about masculinity and like, I want to like. So what you're saying is in Sweden, dads take. Spend a lot more time with their children. Right. What's the stereotype on them? Are they still seen as men? Right. Is it still like that velour man now? Is all men, like, what has shifted?
- [13:00]
D
No, it is extremely interesting. So it has by now completely shifted. I mean, it has been, you know, more than 20 years. Right. Since these use it or lose it reform. So it's been taking a long time. But in my generation in Sweden, it is fairly uncool to not take any paternity leave at all. And I guess an anecdote that I think illustrates this quite well is my own husband, when my daughter was one Years old, he took a flight with our daughter alone from San Francisco to la. I gave a talk at ucla, they joined in the afternoon and our idea was let's spend the weekend in LA and then travel back together. So my husband takes this baby on the plane to LA. It's a one hour flight and he has between five and 10 other men high fiving him, giving him a lot of positive attention, saying, you go man, you go, dad. That's so cool. And you know, that's a very sweet thing, right? But it does tell us something about the norms. You know, this was like outside of what many people might have expected a guy to do possibly. And you know, I, I think, I'm not sure we would have been high fiving dads in Sweden who would have taken that flight. You know, like dads are expecting, expected to take on a bigger role. So my impression is that there are more limited expectations on dad. Dad's here. You know, he might be the point person when it comes to sports, but you know, it might not be the one that the nanny calls or.
- [14:45]
B
Yeah, well, we're definitely the default parent. But here's the thing. I feel like I've learned we spend a lot of time being like, ugh, men. You know what I mean? Like we need to just fix them, right? So it's funny when I now. So I've really shifted my perspective on this as I just spent more time with dads and we just went through this fatherhood summit because I think in many ways in the U.S. the policy and the culture hasn't caught up to the behavior. I think that dads want to be dads. Like, I think about my husband, like he, that is like his most important identity, right? He's got a group chat, you know, and. But I think we gaslight men for doing that because we're in this very strong man culture, especially right now with like the podcast bros. Basically being like to be a man is like, put your feet up on the table, drink a beer and like watch TV while you get served. And the kids are kind of over there. But I think that that's an extreme that actually doesn't even exist. Like, I think the vast majority of American dads are, are in the middle, but the culture and the policy hasn't caught up to them. So you won't see a lot of lose it, you know, take it or lose it policies in the workplace. For example, you are still seeing, I think this kind of judgment on the trading floor, you know what I mean? Or in, you know, In a startup world, right, like for taking. I mean, you live in Silicon Valley. I mean, the culture is not like, yeah, dude, take your leave at all. There's, it's quite the opposite, which I think that's really. But I don't think that reflects, that's like to me reflects a policing of a minority. Minority of people policing the majority, not the majority sentiment. And we keep trying to fix majority sentiment, which I don't think we need to fix. I think we need to basically fix the culture and the policy.
- [16:44]
D
Yeah, I mean, you know, some, I think there's a lot of research that suggests that that's exactly right. You know, if we, if we think about what happened with these usage or lucid policies, they pushed some dads to take leave, but then a lot of other dads that were not pushed by the policy also took leave. So it is really suggesting that there's this sort of bubbling desire, but no one wants to go first. No one wants to do it. But if we sort of use policy to coordinate a lot of dads to take more leave, then it will snowball and more and more dads will feel like it's cool, it's okay to take leave.
- [17:24]
B
And I think the dads high fiving your husband are about them seeing your husband. You see what I'm saying? Like in seeing themselves and appreciated for doing that. Like, we often have this conversation, quite frankly, Nahal and I, with our couples therapist, where it's true for me, it's never enough. And you know, Dr. Becky spoke at our conference and she said this, she said, you know, it's, you can only expect a certain amount of generational change in one generation. And men are often benchmarking themselves based upon what the amount of care their fathers did. And so they're like, what are you talking about? Like, my dad didn't even look at the laundry, you know what I mean? And you're mad that I did one load instead of two loads because it's not enough. Right. For us. But for them it's more than their dads did. And that was like a real like, oh, okay. Because I often think for us in therapy that is where like my husband's always like, why can't you just see what I'm trying, I'm doing it. Why can't you just, you know what I mean, give me gratitude for that. And our therapist was always trying to get me right and get us to kind of see this piece.
- [18:41]
D
No, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, I do think partly the norms in Sweden are different precisely because policy is like a generation ahead.
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A
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E
I'm Hassan Minhaj and I have been lying to you. I only pretended to be a comedian so I could trick important people into coming on my podcast. Hasan Minhaj doesn't know to ask them the tough questions that real are way too afraid to ask people like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Is America too dumb for democracy? Outrageous parenting expert Dr. Becky, how do you skip consequences without raising a psychopath?
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B
That's a good question.
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E
Listen to Hasan Minhaj. Doesn't know from Lemonada Media, wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
I want to talk about menopause penalty. Right? So another big kind of, I think, cultural movement that's really picking up steam in the United States is this conversation around menopause. Right. And this kind of movement towards really looking at the real impacts that menopause has on women's health and on women's professional.
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A
Right.
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B
Success. And your study was so powerful because it extended into that conversation and that, look, we gotta talk about menopause more than just about the hot flashes. And I want to dive into what you learned. So first, what is the menopause penalty and who is the most affected by it? Yeah.
- [25:01]
D
So in our research, we set out to examine whether this menopausal transition takes an economic toll on women. So for decades, social scientists and economists among them have analyzed what's referred to as the child penalty. So there's a large body of research that documented how women's careers are affected when they have kids, but much less is known about what happens to women's economic outcomes at the other end of the reproductive spectrum. So menopause. And of course, as you talk about on this show all the time, we know from medical research that menopause is so much more than women no longer getting their periods. It's a major biological transition that often comes with a host of symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats, mood and sleep disturbances, forgetfulness, poor concentration, headaches and migraines, and so on. So when you learn about this long list of symptoms that women can suffer from for years during the menopausal transition, it seems very reasonable that these symptoms may interfere with women's careers. But while sort of the physiological effects of menopause are well known, there is hardly any research on the economic costs of menopause. So in plain words, we have sort of very little systematic evidence of causal effects of the menopausal transition on women's careers. So what we wanted to do is to begin to fill this gap by examining the potential economic toll of menopause. So how did we do that? Well, we use data from Norway and Sweden, where there are databases with health records for the entire population. And in our health records, especially from Norway, we are able to identify all women who visit a healthcare provider for a menopause related health symptoms between the ages of 45 and 55. We could also see exactly when that doctor's visit occurred, Then we observe economic outcomes for these women and a rich set of demographic characteristics for them. All of that makes it possible for us to use statistical techniques to separate the impact of other things going on in these women's lives from the specific impact of menopause related health issues. So, zooming out, in a nutshell, what we do is we track women's earnings and other labor market outcomes around the onset of the menopausal symptom.
- [27:53]
B
So post that doctor's visit.
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D
Exactly. And our results were startling. So one of our key findings was that women who have menopausal symptoms take a substantial earnings hit after these symptoms occur. Specifically, women who visit a healthcare provider with a menopause related symptom are earning 10% less four years later. So the economic losses for working women in menopause can be substantial. And as our study was one of the first to measure these economic costs of menopause, we coined the term the menopause penalty, of course, with an eye to, you know, a penalty that we know much more about, namely the child penalty right now.
- [28:42]
B
Why is that? Why are they, why are they getting this hit? Are they quitting? Are they reducing their hours? Are they getting discriminated against because they're sharing with their employer that they have these symptoms? Why, why are their earnings going down?
- [28:58]
D
So we see a little bit of both. So, you know, when we look at all women who visit a healthcare provider, we find that they earn this 10% last four years later. For some women, this comes from cutting back on their work hours while they stay in the labor force. But there are also women who leave the workforce altogether. Now, we don't know exactly what's going on in these women's lives, what's driving each individual decision, but the implication here is that the health symptoms of these women are interfering with their ability to work, either partly or fully. On top of studying earnings and labor force participation, we also look at the impact of disability insurance. And the results here show that claims for government funded disability insurance actually also rise after a menopause related diagnosis.
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B
Interesting.
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D
Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, entry into this disability program is often thought of as sort of a form of soft retirement or early retirement.
- [30:10]
B
Is there an age that's impacted the most? And also, how does college education impact the penalty?
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D
Yeah, we estimate the penalty for women who are diagnosed between ages 45 and 55, this age range is the most typical and therefore it's actually referred to as normal age menopause. One way to think about the sample is our Study quantifies the menopause penalty in the most common case. We don't actually study the menopause penalty among women who enter menopause before age 45. This is referred to as early menopause. But there's some other work that suggests that economic losses for this group may also be substantial.
- [30:54]
B
So I want to talk about what you do, because this is crazy, because we might live to, like, 100. You know, we're going to live much longer. Right. Part of why, as you know. Right. We don't even have as much research is because women are living longer than they ever, you know, they have. Or so we haven't studied women at this stage in their life. So what do you think government policy can do to help protect women? Because it's just we're not paying enough attention to this. So there's probably not enough protections that are put into place and advocacy in the workforce to make sure that women are not discriminated against in this period of time.
- [31:33]
D
Yeah. You know, I'd say it's our hope that our study's findings help inform both government policymakers and employers on how best we can support working women as they transition into menopause. And there are really two policies, two types of policies that I think our work emphasizes. One broad group are things I think we can think about as smoothing the transition. And these really can come both from governments and firms. Some employers, including Fortune 500 companies, already give their menopausal workers more flexible work arrangements, mental health services, and other types of support to help them sort of navigate this transition. But they are the minority, so many more firms can step up. And I think our paper makes the case that there is an economic rationale for doing so. It's not just a nice thing for these women, but that. That may be sort of an economic cause for this. And of course, governments. There may also be an important role for the government here. We have parental leave policies. We talked about those. We have policies that support workers when their productivity dips for other health reasons. So it makes complete sense to have policies also that help women during the menopause transition.
- [33:00]
B
But how, I guess, how helpful are you? Because let's be honest, right? Like, we haven't fixed what you're calling child penalty, what we sometimes call the motherhood penalty. Like, we haven't fixed that. Right. We are still. Women who decide to have children and become mothers are still facing a gender pay gap. It's the largest gender pay gap. Right. As probably now, women in midlife now is the largest Gender pay gap, but, like, we're not good at fixing penalties.
- [33:26]
D
Yeah, I think that's right. But I think at the same time, there's reason to be hopeful and there's reason to keep advocating. I think in this case, the economics also speak a very clear language. The menopausal transition is just that, it's transitory. The symptoms that women are experiencing will pass. And at the other end of that menopausal transition, women can still contribute to the workforce. So that makes it sort of economically beneficial to think about policies that can help prevent an outcome where women just exit the labor force rather than just work a bit less during the transition and then pick back up as we go. And this is more important, I think, or more relevant than ever, because there are more women than ever women who are in the workforce while going through the menopausal transition. So one striking trend in the labor market in the US and beyond is the growing presence of what we call older women who remain actively engaged in the workforce. So today, women over the age of 50 derive employment growth in a range of countries.
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B
That's really. Oh, that's really great. Is that a study somewhere? Cause that's. So it's like many other countries are relying on women over the age of 50 basically to kind of generate that. That's really important.
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D
You know, some. Some work of our female. Recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin has.
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B
Yes, that's right. Claudia put a lot of this research out there. That's right. I think, because here it's funny, I mean, when I, as I even started learning about it and doing this podcast, I did not realize the impact, like, we kind of push women out in this country after a certain age. And I've seen that anecdotally with my friends, which, you know, as they're approaching kind of their 50s, they're not getting that promotion, they're not getting funding for that startup. Right. They're not getting the same types of opportunities. Like, we have an inverse. We think men get older, they get wiser, they get more, you know, like. Like fine wine. And it's the opposite with women. And so I often feel like when we. This kind of stuff out there, and then we're going to talk them to them about menopause, and then they're really going to have an excuse and you know what I mean, for kind of pushing us out. But I think in some ways what your research is showing is that maybe living it out loud, advocating for it and talking about it as it is transitory, that these are Moments of transition and periods where you need more flexibility. And it's not that you've lost something in your brain that you can't recover from.
- [36:12]
D
Absolutely. The second policy implication, I think, of our research is we also try to shed light or we ask what happens when women are given more information about menopause and given greater access to menopause related health care. We answer this by using what researchers often call a natural experience. There's some event that happened to occur. It allows us to look at behavior before and behavior after this event to see if there was a change. The particular event that we used was a TV show, so an informational series about menopause that aired on the major public channel in October 2018. This was two hour long informational episodes. One was about symptoms, you know, celebrities, non celebrities came on and talked about the symptoms that they had encountered and the fact that they hadn't realized that this was because of menopause. Then the second show was about possible treatment. Basically then in our research, we looked at the health outcomes of women who visited their gynecologists before and after this series aired. Specifically, we wanted to know, were women more likely to seek out information or to access menopause related health care, including hormone therapy. Our results suggested that awareness around an increased access to menopause related health care can lower the economic losses of menopause.
- [37:51]
B
Oh, interesting. Because they're getting HRT or different kinds of therapy to kind of minimize the losses. That would be an interesting. Is that your next study is to. Because that would, that's what I would want to know. Right. Is like, then how do you like actually have two different groups, one who kind of did something with their symptoms? Right. How did that lessen the impact or keep them in the workforce versus ones who did it?
- [38:15]
D
Yeah, so we found, you know, we, you know, it's sort of the end of this study is to look at what happened to both health behaviors and health outcomes around that show. And we see, for example, first of all, we see a spike in the number of Google searches just after this series aired. So people are sort of interested and this makes people think about menopause. And then we saw an increase in the number of visits that women made to gynecologists after this show aired. And perhaps most interestingly, we found sort of a long lasting change in the provision of menopause related care. More women were accessing menopause related care, more women were getting hormone therapy and so on. And here's the punchline. Women who benefited from this Information shock and the increased access to menopause related healthcare also had lower economic losses of menopause, especially women among women without a college degree. So this is powerful because it suggests that educating the public more broadly about menopause can encourage women to seek care for their symptoms and increase the use of menopause related care to manage them.
- [39:38]
B
Our health care system is broken in so many ways. We have a health care system that's.
- [39:44]
D
Supposed to be taking care of people, that is making it literally more difficult for people to put food on the table.
- [39:51]
B
So this season we'll dive into the challenges headfirst while also thinking about how we can find a better way because we all deserve better. Uncared for season three from Lemonada Media, available August 6th. Wherever you get your podcasts, what people, what did your colleagues think about you doing this research? Like, did you like. Because this is probably right, one of the first, the few right economists that are really looking at menopause.
- [40:33]
D
Yeah, you know, I've gotten a lot of positive encouragement from many of my colleagues, both, you know, here at Stanford and in the profession generally. I think there's a lot of, you know, many men are married to women who go through menopause, you know, so I thought I would have to sort of explain what menopause is and why this would affect, you know, women's careers. But a lot of men are on board with that and say, like, absolutely, you know, so it's interesting. Yeah, there's been a lot of enthusiasm for these findings. And I think, you know, economists have studied, for example, you know, unemployment is a typical productivity shock that, you know, there are hundreds, if not thousands of studies on unemployment and how that affects careers and earnings. But, you know, that's a fairly, it's like way more people are affected by health related menopause symptoms than are affected by unemployment. So it is time that we as economists think of this potentially enormous productivity shock for women.
- [41:51]
B
That's powerful. So what are you working on next?
- [41:54]
D
I'm working on, I think this particular study, we have several. We showed something, but I think there are many things that we need to do next. So one thing is to try to quantify this menopause penalty in many other places. So we did this in Norway and Sweden. We had fantastic data and it was the perfect place to start. But I think it is interesting to document this menopause penalty in more circumstances, in more countries, in more places. Just like we have child penalties that vary across places, it's very likely that the menopause penalty Varies, too. And we need more research that establishes that and also that establishes the mechanisms that are driving variation in menopause penalties.
- [42:44]
B
Yeah, I've been calling what. I've been calling it the midlife penalty, which are all the things, Right. That kind of women face in this period of time. And I think I would love for you to study that, too, because I do think that there are some women who don't go through menopause, but are going through midlife and are seeing a real shift, you know what I mean, in how they're being treated in the workforce.
- [43:04]
D
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think you, you know, in one thing that is interesting when we talk about menopause, if we think how can we sort of work together to prevent the menopause penalty? One important component is to contribute to spreading awareness by talking about menopause with others. So the more we can sort of remove the stigma, contribute to efforts to educate more women about menopausal symptoms and the benefits of treatment, the better. And, you know, as you mentioned, today we talk more about menopause than just a few years ago. This is in part thanks to the many celebrities who have come out to talk about their own experiences, of course, thanks to podcasts like yours. But there's still a lot of silence around menopause. There's a survey out of UCL University College London just two years ago. It showed that more than half of the women who had gone through menopause felt that they didn't know what was happening when it happened to them. And this is just two years.
- [44:15]
B
I mean, it's so interesting you say that. I was having dinner with one of my best friends, and she was, like, running late. And we're sitting there, she comes in, she's like, I just think I had a hot flash. She's like, I came off the subway. I'm so hot. I was just in the bathroom, and I'm like, what do I do? And I'm like, you know, and it was like, I'm like, sit down.
- [44:35]
D
Right.
- [44:35]
B
Like, let's get you some water. But you're. You're. You're totally right. It's like, we don't. We still don't know what is happening and what we're supposed to do.
- [44:43]
D
Yeah. And I mean, compare that, for example, to how we talk about puberty in society. Like, my. My oldest child, she's in third grade. One of the people in my parenting orbit around her recently said something that gave me pause. So she said, I feel more prepared for. For my child. Entering the teenage years than for my own menopause.
- [45:04]
B
Wow.
- [45:05]
D
And if we think about that, you know, it's sort of true that puberty could be described in similar ways as menopause. You know, it's a biological transition. It comes with changing hormone levels. It comes with associated physical and mental changes. But we talk so much more about puberty. You know, we talk to the kid who will be affected. We prepare all the people around. You know, I, as a mom, I know this is coming. It's happening broadly. You know, it's happening through media. We have movies like Inside out too. It's fantastic, by the way. And it's also happening, you know, through schools and all of that. And the end result is that we to some extent know that puberty will bring changes and we expect that it won't be easy. But we know what's coming and we know that it's temporary. So why don't we do the same with menopause?
- [45:59]
B
I think the reason is because puberty in some ways is aspirational and menopause still has shame.
- [46:05]
D
Yeah, that might be. I mean, it's perhaps also no coincidence that puberty happens also to boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:13]
B
And it's just the postmenopausal. But I think that's the opportunity because most women who are on the other side of it feel fucking great. Like, you know, it is. I've heard that it is aspirational. So I think it is. It is that. That is, you know, that is really the opportunity.
- [46:36]
D
Well, thank you.
- [46:36]
B
This was so great. I really appreciate you letting me be your first podcast. Absolutely.
- [46:42]
D
This was amazing and this was an.
- [46:43]
B
Amazing conversation and you're doing incredible work. So thank you for being on this show.
- [46:47]
D
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was great.
- [47:02]
B
Thank you so much, Petra Person, for this illuminating conversation. One last thing, thank you so much for listening to my so called Midlife. If you haven't subscribed, subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you'll unlock exclusive bonus content, like even more from my conversation with my monk, Razanath Das. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadepremium.com to subscribe on any other app. That's lemonade premium dot com. Don't miss out.
- [47:37]
D
Thanks.
- [47:37]
B
And we'll be back next week. I'm your host, Reshma Sajani. Our associate producer is Isara Acevez and our senior producer is Chrissy Pease. This series is sound designed by Ivan Kulraev. Ivan also composed our theme music and performed it with Ryan Jewell and Karen Waltok. Our VP of New content is Rachel Neal. Special thanks to our development team, Oha Lopez, Jamila Zara Williams and Alex McGowan. Executive producers include me, Reshma Sajani, Stephanie Whittles Wax, and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Series consulting and production support from Katie Cordova. Help others find our show by leaving a rating and writing a review. And let us know how you're doing in the. You can submit your story to be included in this show@speakpipe.com midlife follow my so called Midlife wherever you get your podcasts or listen. Ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week. Bye.