On National Menopause Day, Centrum and “Abbott Elementary” star Lisa Ann Walter talk about “Hot Conversations”: their new joint campaign about menopause in the workplace.
“Listen up, meno-pals,” actress Lisa Ann Walter proclaims in the training video for Centrum’s new “Hot Conversations” campaign. “Together, we’ve got this.”
He also noted, “As someone who has personally gone through menopause and is candid about her experience, [Ms. Walter] understands the changes and challenges women face during this time”.
In fact, Ms. Walter has been talking about her own personal experiences with “the changes and challenges” of being a woman for years. Her first son was born in 1987 and, 18 months later, she hit the stage as a stand-up comedian. At the time, few – if any comics – were consistently talking about her current stage in life. Joan Rivers, who had one child, had made a joke or two, and Bill Cosby, who was the father of five children, had some material himself, but he was, obviously, a man who didn’t have first-hand experience with pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum.
Ms. Walter’s material, in contrast, represented her point of view: that of a woman. “I talked about the stage of life I was in,” she explained. “The things we [as women] own, our experiences: it’s important to me”. It turns out that those very same things that “mattered” to her and that she was sharing on stage also “resonated with people”.
In the process, her stand-up material broke the trend of centering men: in comedy, in health, and otherwise. Today, about 73.3% of comedians are male and 88.7% of stand-up comedians specifically are male. As of October 15, 2024, Netflix has premiered 37 comedy specials this year alone, and only nine were headlined by women.
This gender inequality is also prevalent in healthcare. According to the most recent Census, women make up 50.9% of the United States population. But, as of 2018, only 4% of all research and development for healthcare products and services went to women-specific conditions. In 2020, only 10.8% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s funding was allocated to women’s research. And, in 2021, only 1% of healthcare research and innovation was invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology.
For menopause in particular, only 31.3% of 99 surveyed U.S obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) residency programs reported that they even had a menopause curriculum in their program. That same study found that 29% of the programs with a menopause curriculum had a maximum of five lectures on menopause per year. The remaining 71% had a maximum of only two lectures per year.
