Puberty, matrescence, and menopause are windows for cultural change.

When you start to lose your sense of self, you start to question not just your interior world, but the world all around you.

Many of my conversations currently are with girls and women who are losing their old sense of self, either because they’re going through, or are supporting children going through puberty, or because they’re peri or menopausal. And these conversations are similar in lots of ways to the ones I remember in the years immediately after having children too.

These are moments of transition, and they drive us to ask questions and notice our place in the world more than usual, and while these transitions are most commonly experienced by women, they’re not exclusive to women, and the cultural patterns around them shape many people’s lives.

Many of the questions asked at these moments revolve around why we do things the way we do, and the lack of fairness we notice around us.

Recent questions from my daughter include: why is it that girls have to go through so many changes but boys don’t? Why is it fair that men get paid more than women for their work? These questions came from school and from friends.

Recent questions from my friends include: How am I supposed to carry on as normal when my brain, body and emotions are all over the place? Why, despite being in a two-earner household, am I expected to do all the caring?

And questions I remember asking after my children were born were similar: why am I supposed to carry on as I was before - especially in work - when my life has changed immeasurably? How can I ensure my children grow up in a world that will allow them to live a long, safe and joyful life, rather than one of scarcity, freak weather events and inequality?

What’s actually happening in these moments

During these transitions - felt by many, although not all women - hormones are likely to surge and decline, our brains literally rewire themselves, our bodies change significantly, our sense of sexuality can shift, our mental health ebbs and flows in ways we can’t control, and our perception of the world around us shifts. At different moments we question our place, compare ourselves to others, become aware of our responsibility to future generations, and of our own mortality.

I’m sure this all sounds familiar. But the purpose of this piece is not to announce that these periods are confusing, exciting, hard and worthwhile - for both women and the people around us - we know that. It’s to ask a bigger question: if these periods meaningfully reshape how and what we think, our identity, and our social positioning — then are they actually windows for broader cultural change? And if so, how do we take advantage of them, while supporting women sitting in them at the same time?

Rather than viewing these as three separate biological events, we can look at them as patterns of identity deconstruction and reconstruction that exist across our lifetimes.

During puberty we feel more visible, there’s high neuroplasticity, our identities are shifting quickly, and we internalise and often try to push back against social norms. But there’s also strong pressure to confirm, and capitalist culture takes advantage of any insecurities.

As we become parents our identity starts to reorganise to reframe the importance we give to work, care and the need for community. At the same time however, our lives are undercut by isolation, exhaustion, financial dependence, and romanticised narratives of ‘good mothering’ that make creating change challenging.

As we progress through perimenopause we start to feel more able to root ourselves in our own sense of self, rather than around other people’s expectations. There’s often a decline in approval seeking, more assertiveness (or a declining ability to stay nice and quiet) and a lower tolerance for living in ways that are misaligned to our internal values.

These moments offer a strong opportunity for systems criticism and the reinvention of leadership, albeit bogged down by sleep loss, brain fog and a sense of societal invisibility.

There’s an opportunity hidden in a problem here.

Transitions disrupt identity. Disruption allows rewriting. So there’s an opportunity for change, in theory, at each stage.

But - these windows of change also increase vulnerability to social conditioning. Many women are most socially constrained during these windows. And change requires energy and collective infrastructure, which these periods often deplete.

So the opportunity for change is real. But it is consistently unrealised without structural support.

And what kind of change are we pushing for?

The world these transitions could help create is one that is fairer, that appreciates slowness, that treats connection and community as normal and available, not something we have to fight for or pay for. A world where humanity is valued in all its messiness and uncontrollability.

So we have a destination. But how do we get there, and who should be involved? Giving more work to women at the most overloaded points of life isn’t fair or practical.

We therefore need to deliberately create structures that place accountability where it belongs, away from the individual woman in transition, and onto the institutions, cultures, and relationships that shape our experience.

1. Institutions must remove the friction that turns moments of transition into crises

One of the biggest things that would change the experience during these windows is structural redesign,i.e. a fundamental rethink of how workplaces, schools, and healthcare treat hormonal transition. For example:

• Workplaces should treat flexible and reduced-hour models as the default, not the exception and extend this thinking beyond maternity to cover menopause and the caring responsibilities that pile up during life.

• Schools could embed emotional and body literacy into the curriculum during puberty years - admittedly something that seems to happen at my daughters’ schools and has driven lots of valuable conversations between us.

• Healthcare systems must stop treating hormonal transitions as annoyances to be managed and start taking symptoms seriously, training practitioners, and ending the gaslighting that characterises so many women’s experiences of perimenopause in particular.

Who acts: employers, schools, healthcare systems.

2. Culture must change the story before women enter the window

Much of what makes these transitions so destabilising is not the transitions themselves, but the narratives that surround them. The ‘bounce back’ myth after childbirth. The ‘women are natural carers’ story. The cultural erasure of older women. We need to:

• Replace our stories with a more honest account of transformation, that neither romanticises nor dismisses what women go through.

• Create visible public models of women in and after perimenopause who are not ‘ageing gracefully’ but exercising authority, changing systems, and living on their own terms.

• Recognise matrescence as a legitimate identity shift, rather than an interruption to productivity.

• Make the care economy visible in political and economic discourse, so the questions women ask when they feel the weight of carrying everything, have somewhere to land.

Who acts: media, brands, policymakers.

3. Build the infrastructure that turns individual questioning into collective momentum

We need to invest in ‘community-as-scaffolding’, so that women in transition are surrounded by others who’ve been through it, reducing isolation without requiring anyone to organise, lead, or perform resilience. That means:

• Designing intergenerational connection into workplaces, neighbourhoods, and schools as a structural principle.

• Creating shared language for what these transitions actually feel like so the questions being asked in puberty, matrescence, and perimenopause do not have to be rediscovered from scratch by each generation of women.

• Invest in the kinds of community infrastructure that exist not for productivity or consumption, but simply to hold people through difficulty: drop-in spaces, peer networks, local knowledge.

Who acts: community designers, urban planners, employers.

The one ask of women in transition (if they have capacity!)

Name what you’re noticing. We don’t have to fix it right now.

The questions that surface during these windows about fairness, load, meaning, care, and worth are not moaning or complaining. They are evidence that our systems are not working. If there were low-friction ways to surface that it becomes harder to ignore and easier to act on.

I think this piece is an invitation to notice that what feels personal is also political, and that the window we’re sitting in right now has been sat in by millions of women before us, and could, with the right structural support, become the moment things actually change.