Sense and Action: Career Disruptions During the Menopause Transition

This narrative study explores how women make sense of career disruptions during the menopause transition. Drawing on biographical narrative interviews with 30 professional and executive women, we examine how biological symptoms, social cues of gendered ageism, and psychological dimensions of midlife shape women's interpretations of career disruption during this life stage. Our analysis identifies four sensemaking trajectories—early awareness, delayed recognition, encountering ageism, and midlife redirection—reflecting the main trigger of career deliberations and the temporal dynamics of noticing, interpreting, and acting. Across these pathways, many women made career changes before fully understanding the source of the disruption, often constructing coherence retrospectively. We argue that ambiguous, fragmented experiences during the menopause transition can operate as a career shock and that the sensemaking process is shaped by the epistemic resources available to women. This study contributes to menopause and work research by showing that career outcomes vary depending on when deliberate sensemaking is triggered and what interpretive frames support it. We extend sensemaking theory by demonstrating that absent or distorted epistemic resources can cause career deliberations to precede understanding. We also position fragmented, ambiguous disruptions as a theoretically distinct category within career shock literature.