GAIN Releases Good Practice Guide for Neurodiversity & Menopause

The front cover of the Neurodiversity and Menopause Good Practice Guide, a dark blue page with yellow curving lines, featuring an image of smiling women.

In 2025 and 2026, we ran two surveys on neurodiversity and menopause in the workplace. Thank you to everyone who took part. Across 2025 and 2026, 202 people gave their time to help us understand how menopause and perimenopause impact neurodivergent people's career confidence and career security. Many shared personal and difficult experiences, often in detail, and often because they hoped it would make things easier for someone else. This guide exists because of them.

Women make up more than half of the UK insurance, investment and finance workforce, and the sector is competing hard to attract and keep experienced people. Menopause and neurodivergence are each well documented as workplace issues, but they are rarely considered together. Our research suggests that is a costly blind spot.

The data showed us that neurodivergent people experience menopause as a sharp intensification of the traits they already manage. Among respondents to our surveys, the most commonly reported changes were:

• Brain fog: 93% said it affected them more

• Memory issues: 91%

• Neurodivergent burnout: 89%

• Sensory sensitivities: 87%

• Mood regulation: 85%

Rejection sensitivity (78%), autistic inertia (75%), multi-tasking (74%) and task switching (73%) were not far behind.

A chart from the Neurodiversity and Menopause Good Practice Guide, showing the percentage of survey respondents who experienced increased challenges with different neurodivergent traits.

At work, this created challenges in activities such as:

• Recovering energy during the day (97% found this harder overall)

• Concentrating in long meetings (94%)

• Processing large amounts of information (90%)

• Switching between tasks and systems (88%).

Many respondents described the collapse of cognitive strategies and masking skills they had relied on for decades to succeed.

The impact on wellbeing at work was significant. Among neurodivergent respondents to our 2026 survey:

• 50% felt less confident in their role as a result of how menopause had been handled at work

• 40% had considered leaving their organisation

• 38% had considered reducing their hours

• 36% had taken more time off than they otherwise would have

Only 28% said the experience had not influenced their work decisions. At the same time, 26% had not discussed menopause-related challenges at work at all, and a further 13% wanted to but did not feel able to.

Those who asked for support at work had mixed experiences, with some citing:

• Reduced autonomy after disclosing

• Increased monitoring or micromanagement

• Being moved away from valued responsibilities, or left out of meetings to “lighten the workload” while being left with the tasks they found hardest

• Responsibilities being reduced without the underlying issues being addressed

Respondents also pointed to a lack of understanding of neurodiversity from managers and colleagues, pressure to “just push through” and a lack of understanding of menopause.

Occupational health support was inconsistent too: 36% said it helped a lot, but 12% said it made things worse, most often because each condition was assessed separately.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and the fixes are often cheap. The adjustments that helped most were simple things, like giving employees real autonomy over breaks, providing access to a quiet or low-stimulus workspace, providing clear written follow-ups after meetings, allowing remote working, and giving access to peer support from people with lived experience.

We have turned these findings into a good practice guide, Neurodiversity & Menopause: A Guide for Managers, Leaders, HR Teams & ERGs. This 24-page document sets out practical recommendations for each group, along with the legal context, including the Equality Act 2010 and the new Equality Action Plan requirements under the Employment Rights Act 2025.

As a taste, here are three of the eight recommended actions for HR teams:

1. Lead with autonomy. Let employees choose their own way of working without needing permission or repeated proof. It also frees HR time for the complex cases that need it.

2. Build an adjustment pathway that doesn’t require a diagnosis. Diagnosis can take months or years. Design entry around impact, not label.

3. Audit your policies for the gap. Check whether your menopause, neurodiversity and adjustments policies even mention each other. If they were written by teams that never spoke, that is where these employees fall through.

The guide has equivalent sections for senior leaders and managers, plus a glossary, to ensure it can be understood by people who may not have read much on neurodiversity before.

You can access the good practice guide from our resource hub over at the GAIN member website.

This guide is the product of our surveys, and we want to do the same for other topics. Two are open now:

• Neurodivergent burnout in the workplace survey

• Neurodivergent masking in the workplace survey

Both are anonymous and voluntary. If you are neurodivergent, or you have experiences with burnout or masking at work, your experience will directly shape the resources we create. Please take part and share them with colleagues.