The Evidence · Stay In The Room™

£46bn

Annual cost to the British economy from divorce-related productivity loss

British Chambers of Commerce / ISER

These numbers do not exist in isolation. Behind every statistic is a businesswoman who did not want to leave — a leader who had no choice but to step back, a self-employed woman whose business did not survive what her health demanded of her. The question is not whether this is happening. It is why we are still surprised by it.

The fastest growing group in the workforce is also the most likely to leave it.

Women of menopausal age are typically at the peak of their careers. They are experienced, senior, skilled — and they are leaving in numbers that should alarm every employer, policymaker and economist in the country.

The 2025 UK Government Menopause in the Workplace Literature Review found that women with severe symptoms take an average of seven days of leave per year attributable directly to those symptoms. That is an entire working week, per woman, per year — concentrated in the most experienced cohort of the workforce.

Nearly a third of women have considered leaving their job because of menopause. Seven per cent already have. Almost half have changed how they work — reducing hours, cutting responsibilities, turning down promotion. The talent drain is not coming. It is already here.

And this is before accounting for the self-employed and business owners — for whom there is no employer to make adjustments, no HR department to appeal to, and no sick pay to cushion the loss. The data on employed women is striking enough. For businesswomen navigating menopause, the exposure is total.

Of those with severe menopause symptoms, 64% reported an intention to reduce working hours and 47% to leave the workforce entirely.

A diagnosis does not pause the business. But it changes everything.

When a business owner receives a cancer diagnosis, two things are immediately at risk: her health, and everything she has built. The medical system focuses on the former. Almost no one focuses on the latter.

The business that may represent decades of work, her primary income, her family’s financial security, her professional identity — none of that has a support system attached to it. The oncology team treats the cancer. Nobody protects the business.

Through Stronger Together Through Cancer CIC, working with Macmillan teams, hospitals, local authorities and business networks across Kent and Medway, we see this gap at first hand every week. Business owners who would have stayed economically active if the right support had existed. Businesses that close not because they had to, but because no one knew how to help them stay open.

The campaign is simple and the need is urgent: Cancer Should Not Mean Business Collapse.

The UK loses £5 billion or more every year because of the difficulties of living with cancer — with inability to work costing £1–1.7bn and informal caregiving adding a further £4–4.5bn.

More than one in four workers is now also an unpaid carer.

Caregiving is the disruption nobody talks about until it is already total. It arrives gradually and then overwhelms. And it falls disproportionately on women.

In the UK, there are 3.5 million female carers compared to 2.4 million male carers. Women are more likely to provide care, more likely to reduce their hours because of it, and more likely to leave work altogether. In England, 10.3% of women are carers compared to 7.6% of men.

The economic value of the unpaid care provided in the UK is now estimated at £184 billion a year — roughly equivalent to the entire NHS budget. This is not a marginal contribution. It is the invisible foundation of the entire social care system, provided almost entirely without support, recognition or financial protection for the people providing it.

For self-employed women and business owners, the exposure is compounded. There is no employer to offer flexible working. No HR department to negotiate adjusted hours. No occupational health service. The business and the caring responsibility exist in direct competition — and too often, it is the business that loses.

69% of working carers say they haven’t focused on their career as much as they’d like. 61% say caring has affected the type of employment they’ve taken on.

Every disruption has a cost. Most go unmeasured.

Menopause, cancer and caregiving are the three disruptions with the most visible data. But they are not the only ones. Grief, divorce, chronic illness, single parenthood — each carries its own economic cost, and together they form a landscape of disruption that touches the majority of women’s working lives at some point.

The IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity found that improvements in health would increase women’s earnings at twice the rate of men — meaning the economic cost of women’s ill health is also double. The burden is not evenly distributed.

Divorce ranks as the second most significant life stressor after bereavement. The average employee loses 168 hours of productive work time in the year following a divorce. For a business owner, there is no employer absorbing that loss — and the business itself may become a matrimonial asset in the settlement, adding legal and financial pressure to an already depleted capacity.

What connects all of these disruptions is not their category. It is the structural gap they expose: the absence of support designed specifically for the businesswoman who wants to keep going, cannot easily step away, and has nowhere to turn for help that addresses both the personal and the professional simultaneously.

Better health would boost women’s earnings twice as much as men’s — which means the cost of ignoring women’s health disruption is also twice as large.

The support that exists was not built for this.

There is support for the disruption itself — medical treatment, counselling, legal advice, benefits navigation. There is support for the business in isolation — accountants, business advisors, networking, growth strategy. What does not exist — in any structured, accessible form — is support that holds both simultaneously.

The businesswoman navigating menopause alongside a £200k turnover business needs both a GP and a business strategy that works with her current capacity. She gets neither in the same room.

Where existing systems fail:

WHAT STAY IN THE ROOM™ PROVIDES

Resilience infrastructure that holds business and life together

A structured, embodied system that addresses the leadership, physical, cognitive and relational capacity a businesswoman needs to remain economically active during disruption. Not separate. Together. In the same room.

The cost that numbers cannot capture.

The economic numbers are significant. But they do not capture the full cost of what is lost when a businesswoman leaves the room before she is ready.

I do not write as someone who has all the answers. I write as someone who is still living the questions — and who knows that staying in the room was the hardest and most important thing I ever did.  Adelle Martin — Stay In The Room™

The data makes the case. The framework provides the answer. The conversation is where we begin.

If you are a policymaker, researcher, organisation or businesswoman who sees this gap and wants to do something about it — there are several ways to engage with this work: coaching and advisory, speaking and keynotes, or research and academic partnership.