Opportunity
Menopause can significantly affect women’s health and quality of life, yet its impact on economic outcomes – such as employment, income, and retirement security – remains largely unknown in Australia and worldwide. This evidence gap limits the ability of policymakers and employers to support women effectively through this life transition.
This project will examine variation in healthcare for women during the menopause transition by linking menopause age data for over 120,000 women to administrative data on healthcare, wages, employment, retirement savings, and government income support. By integrating longitudinal health, employment, and administrative data to create a novel dataset, this project will examine the relationship between healthcare use and economic outcomes and identify sources of variation which may mitigate or worsen outcomes for women in this period of their lives.
Study findings may help to inform employers, health funds and superannuation funds on how to co-design workplace retention programs and flexible health benefit models to address health-related workforce exit, inform public health campaigns tailored to specific at-risk women, and inform and update clinical practice guidelines or the development of new protocols targeting areas of unwarranted variation in women’s health.
Project Objectives
- Build a long-term national data resource by securely linking large-scale survey information with Commonwealth datasets to generate new insights.
- Measure the economic impact of menopause on Australian women’s workforce participation, income, and retirement outcomes.
- Explore how menopause affects different groups of women to identify and address disparities in experiences and outcomes.
