Something is shifting in the way women talk about their bodies, and it is equal parts joyful and defiant. For generations, menopause was treated as a private embarrassment, something to be endured quietly, preferably with a cold fan and a brave smile. That era is ending. Women in perimenopause and menopause are now saying, openly and even cheerfully, “We do not care.” The phrase began, reportedly, as a joke among women who were tired of tiptoeing around their own symptoms, but it quickly became a kind of movement. There is a strange, wonderful power in abandoning the need to seem perpetually young, perpetually comfortable, perpetually agreeable. From congressional hearings to celebrity tell-alls, women in midlife are making it clear that they will no longer imitate the generations who kept quiet about hot flashes, brain fog, sleeplessness, mood swings, and the whole messy, disorienting season of hormonal change. Menopause is finally having its moment. But this new visibility is not just about breaking taboos for the sake of being bold. It is about survival, about health, and about making sure that the next generation of women does not have to waste years wondering whether they are losing their minds when they are actually just losing estrogen. The conversation is long overdue, and the women leading it are done waiting.
Yet the explosion of information about menopause has created a new problem: misinformation. Not all of the advice floating around online is accurate, and some of it is actively harmful. Dr. Sasha Hamdani, a board-certified psychiatrist and health content creator with more than one million Instagram followers, sees the consequences every single day. A huge portion of her patients are midlife women, and she spends much of her clinical time untangling the myths they have absorbed from social media. The most common distortions include false guidance to go on antidepressants as a default treatment for perimenopause and menopause, and inaccurate, fear-based links between hormone replacement therapy and cancer. When a woman with a large following posts something overly simple like “just do this one thing and it will fix everything,” it can feel like a lifeline to someone who is exhausted and desperate. But the real cure is rarely that neat. Hamdani describes herself as an “accidental influencer.” She started correcting medical misinformation online several years ago without any intention of building a career as a digital personality. Her following grew organically, she says, because women were hungry for trustworthy, compassionate, evidence-based answers. She now understands the weight of that responsibility. Public content about health, she insists, has to be presented correctly, with sources that are accessible and claims that are grounded in research. At the same time, she is not dismissive of the online world. She knows that many patients arrive at her office after reading something questionable, and she is grateful for that, because it opens a conversation. Even when creators get it wrong, she says, the failure is not always catastrophic, as long as women bring their questions and doubts back to their actual doctors. The problem is not the internet itself. The problem is the noise.
That is where Amanda Yarnell comes in. Yarnell is the senior director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication, and she is trying to shape the national narrative on menopause by training the people who shape online opinion: influencers. Her project, “Influencing the Influencers: Menopause at Work,” is built on a simple but powerful insight: people are no longer all watching the same television shows; they are watching TikTok. If health organizations want to reach women where they actually are, they need to meet them in the feed, not just in the exam room. The Harvard program connects content creators with health experts and evidence-based information, and it offers free training for anyone who talks about health topics online, whether they have a medical background or not. More than 1,400 creators have signed up so far. “Simply giving creators better access to evidence can improve the quality of information that is available on social media,” Yarnell says. The program is an extension of a much older idea. In the 1980s, the same center helped launch the famous “designated driver” campaign, which worked with Hollywood television studios to weave drunk-driving warnings into popular storylines. That campaign was so successful that “designated driver” became a common phrase, nearly invisible as a public health intervention. Yarnell is trying to do something similar now for menopause. She knows that influencers are not a replacement for doctors, but she also understands that many women trust their favorite creator as much as they trust their physician. By giving those creators better tools, she hopes to turn a noisy, chaotic information ecosystem into something more genuinely helpful.
For Dr. Hamdani, the experience of participating in Harvard’s pilot influencer program was transformative. She joined in 2023 with about twenty other creators, when the focus was still on mental health. The two-day retreat on campus, she says, changed both how she practices medicine and how she presents content online. She learned to think much more carefully about the claims she makes, the words she chooses, and the sources she cites. When she shares new information, she makes sure her audience can access the original research themselves, rather than asking them to trust her on faith alone. The training gave her a sense of duty, not just to her followers, but to the truth itself. It also made her more aware of the enormous power that content creators hold. Social media users internalize what they see “either actively or just passively,” Yarnell points out. A video that says “menopause makes you depressed” may be repeated by a woman to her doctor the next week as solid fact. A post that promises a miraculous natural cure may persuade a woman to stop considering treatments that could genuinely help her. Hamdani is glad that her patients are better informed than they used to be, and she is excited that the cultural conversation around perimenopause and menopause is finally happening. But she also knows how much careful work remains. There is so much going on, she says, and so much of it is clickbait. The oversimplified messages have a way of activating all of your “Spidey senses” because they sound too good to be true. The real answers are more complicated, more individual, and more honest than a catchy video can capture. That is why the Harvard program matters: it gives influencers the infrastructure to be responsible without losing the human connection that makes them effective.
The larger movement has also caught the attention of major philanthropists and policy-minded organizations. Yarnell’s menopause project is one of eighteen winners of the Workplace Innovation Now Challenge, a competition organized by Aspen Digital with support from Pivotal, a foundation created by Melinda French Gates. The program distributed a total of $60 million to organizations across the United States, and it received nearly 900 applications from groups working on issues that affect women at work, including workplace flexibility, caregiving, and the specific health challenges of midlife. In a statement shared exclusively with USA TODAY, French Gates explained why the winners were so important. Workplaces have changed dramatically in recent years, she said, but in many ways they are still shaped by the past. Harmful biases about women’s capabilities persist, and outdated practices make it nearly impossible for women to balance raising a family with building a career. The innovators who submitted to the challenge, she said, are proving that those problems can be solved. They have brought forward a bold and practical set of ideas to remove the barriers that keep women from accessing economic opportunity and reaching their full potential. Yarnell’s project, which is expected to launch in early 2027, aims to make the workplace itself more responsive to women going through perimenopause and menopause. That means educating employers, building communities, and, crucially, making sure the influencers who talk about health are armed with accurate, evidence-based information. Menopause is not just a medical issue. It is a workforce issue, an economic issue, and a cultural issue. When women are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or forced to suffer in silence, they lose. When the systems around them finally acknowledge reality, everyone benefits.
The other winners in the Aspen Digital challenge point toward a broader vision of change. WorkLife Law is training women’s health care providers and offering a free helpline to reduce the barriers pregnant women face in the workplace. Coastal Enterprises, Inc. is working to address rural child care deserts, a problem that disproportionately forces mothers out of the workforce. Opportunity Work Inc. is focused on making hiring systems that use artificial intelligence more inclusive and less biased. And the American Journalism Project is supporting local news coverage that will expose women’s workplace inequities, because stories matter as much as statistics. Taken together, these efforts tell a story about the future of work and the future of women’s health. They recognize that a woman should not have to choose between her career and her well-being, between raising children and earning a living, between speaking honestly about her body and being treated with dignity. The joy and power of saying “We do not care” is not about caring less about health, work, or family. It is about refusing to care about the old rules that said women must be silent, must be accommodating, must be embarrassed by their own biology. It is about saying, with a shrug and a smile, that the shame belongs to the past. The women leading this movement know that they are not alone. They know that the conversations they are having today will make life easier for the women who come after them. And they know that the moment a woman stops apologizing for her body is the moment she starts telling the truth. That is a movement worth joining.