What to measure for a menopause action plan, in the government’s own words
Part of the Summ Base menopause action plan guide.
Step 1 of the government guidance on action plans lists nine things to analyse before you choose your actions. All nine are gender pay gap measures. Menopause appears once, as an instruction to engage with employees, with no data item attached.
The measurement job for menopause is specified all the same. It sits one level down, on the page for each of the six menopause actions, and most employers never read that far. This page collects it in one place.
The sentence every menopause action page repeats
You should gather data before you start this action. This can help you monitor any changes for your target group, such as women aged 40 to 60 years.
Three things follow from that one sentence. There is a target group, and it is named. There is a baseline, and it has to exist before the action starts. And there is a comparison to come, so whatever you measure first has to be measured the same way again.
Step 5 of the guidance says the same thing for every action, gender pay gap or menopause: produce a set of metrics before you start, record them before you put each action in place, and use the same analysis so you can compare outcomes over time. It suggests looking at the data monthly or annually afterwards, because some changes take time to appear.
Source: GOV.UK, Creating an action plan: Step 5, track the outcomes of your actions
The metrics GOV.UK names for each of the six menopause actions
Each action page has a tracking section. This is what each one asks you to look at, lightly shortened. The link on each row goes to the page itself.
| Action | What GOV.UK says to track |
|---|---|
| Train managers to support employees experiencing menopause | The number of managers finishing the training. Manager surveys before and after, to see what they learned. What employees say about the organisation’s approach to menopause in staff surveys. Whether absence rates or retention change for women in the relevant age groups. |
| Offer occupational health advice for employees experiencing menopause | Employees’ awareness and understanding of the occupational health offer. How many people use occupational health, by age and sex. Absence and retention rates, particularly women aged 40 to 60. Satisfaction with the support, from anonymous surveys or exit interviews. |
| Set up menopause support groups and networks | How many people join the groups, with regular feedback from them. Whether employees are happy with the menopause support provided. Absence rates and how many staff stay, particularly women aged 40 to 60. Whether understanding of menopause symptoms has improved. |
| Offer workplace adjustments for employees experiencing menopause | The proportion of people using adjustments, by age and sex. Absence and retention rates, by age and sex. Feedback on how effective the adjustments are, from anonymous surveys or exit interviews. |
| Conduct a menopause risk assessment for your workplace | How many people use the assessments once they are available. Anonymous surveys to check whether employees are satisfied with the assessment process and the changes made. Absence rates and how many staff stay with the organisation. |
| Review policies and procedures to meet the needs of employees experiencing menopause | Absence and retention across age groups and sexes, such as women aged 40 to 60. The proportion using flexible working or reasonable adjustments, by age group and sex. Whether use of the updated policies has increased among women in that age group. Satisfaction with the support, from anonymous surveys. Exit interviews with people in the target age group. |
Where each number comes from
The list looks long until you sort it by source. There are only three, and each one produces a different kind of number.
| Source | What it can tell you |
|---|---|
| Your people, through an anonymous survey | Awareness of the support you fund, whether they have used it, whether an adjustment they asked for actually happened, why they never asked, and how supported they feel. This is the only source for any of those, and it only works if the survey is not run by you. |
| Your HR system | Absence and retention for women aged 40 to 60, and the proportion using flexible working or adjustments by age and sex. You already hold this. The job is to pull it for the right group, date it, and pull it the same way next year. |
| Your providers and your own records | Occupational health use by age and sex, from the provider. Managers trained, from your training records. Network membership and exit interview themes, from whoever runs each. |
The second and third sources are administrative. Somebody has to run the report and write the number down with a date. The first source is the hard one, and it is where most employers stall, because the organisation that decides your pay and promotion cannot run its own anonymous survey and expect honest answers.
Why your absence data undercounts
GOV.UK asks for absence rates among women aged 40 to 60, and the figure is worth having. Read it knowing what it misses. In a 2018 survey of police officers and staff, 44% of those who had taken sickness absence because of menopause had not told their manager the real reason.
That is not a reason to skip the metric. It is a reason to pair it with the anonymous survey, which is the only place the real reason for an absence ever gets recorded. Movement in the two together is evidence. Movement in absence data alone could be anything.
The data protection line, and where it bites
Some or all of the equality information you collect is likely to be ‘special category personal data’, meaning it has special legal protections. Ensure that you are complying with the UK’s data protection legislation when you collect and analyse employees’ data. Get advice and approval from your organisation’s privacy or data protection expert before you start.
Health information about an identifiable person is special category data under UK GDPR Article 9. A survey that asks named or traceable employees how severe their symptoms are creates exactly that, and it needs a lawful basis, a condition for processing, and usually an impact assessment before a single answer is collected.
The way round it is not to promise anonymity harder. It is to design the collection so that no individual can be identified in the first place, and to ask about work impact rather than health. No name, no email, no employee number, no IP address, nothing reported for a group smaller than ten, and no severity scale anywhere. Your privacy lead still has to approve the design. It is a much shorter conversation when there is nothing identifiable in it.
How Summ Base covers the list
The anonymous pulse supplies the first source: awareness and use of the support you already fund, whether requested adjustments happened, why people never asked, and a supported-at-work score, each dated to the round it came from and repeated with identical wording so the comparison is real. The portal counts the work areas you have assessed.
For the administrative sources, the action plan composer lists the GOV.UK metrics for each action you choose and gives you a place to record your own baseline figure with its date, then the latest figure at each review. The tracking text for each action is drafted from what you recorded, and the measurement section of your published plan prints the table.
There is also a data protection note you can hand to your privacy lead before you start, setting out what is collected, what is refused, and how the reporting floor works. We are not a menopause provider and we take no commission from any provider we measure, which is why the awareness and use figures can be reported however they come out.