Breaking News:From silence to sisterhood: The circles building a sense of community around menopause– What Just Happened

In early 2025, a group of curious, articulate 40-plus women gathered at an Upper Worli luxury sanctum in Mumbai to recalibrate their menopausal selves, kind of a ‘what to expect when you are exploding’ assembly. We listened to experts, asked questions, rooted for each other in a foot-tapping, hand-waving affirmative circle and returned with a gift bag of assorted nutraceuticals.

It was an offline gathering of what is now one of Mumbai’s—and possibly India’s—largest menopause communities, Menopausal Mumbai, later renamed Menopausal Mates, which reflexologist and women’s health advocate Rachel Kurien started in 2022. Their menopause support Whatsapp group continues to be busy and often has useful expert opinions—in number, second only to Miror, India’s largest online menopause community (1500-plus members) that began as an offshoot of the menopause-specialised Femtech company Miror, founded by serial entrepreneur Sanjith Shetty in 2023.

Two of the speakers were TV host and actor Mini Mathur and lifestyle coach Lovina Gidwani, founder of Agless with Lovina, both Gen X women. Gidwani said that menopause care and coaching has different stages, and “the first challenge is to explain to women that they need not live with perimenopause and menopause symptoms. It’s not something we have to accept.”

Mathur started Pauseitive to discuss taboos around menopause and normalise conversations around the inevitable mid-life ravages in women. Over chai at her office in Andheri (West), she explained why she decided to be a menopause advocate: “The years leading up to menopause, or perimenopause, suddenly made me feel I no longer knew myself. I once forgot what I had to say in front of an audience, that had never happened to me. So I started reading about ageing in women obsessively.” Mathur opted for Menopause Hormone Therapy (MHT), which involves replacement of estrogen and progesterone, and decided to disseminate her knowledge.

Over the last 10 months, the menopause conversation has broken open—more forcefully in affluent countries, but also noticeably in India. Gen X women are the primary drivers of this much-needed noise. In India, 46 is the average age women go into menopause, much lower than the global average of around 51. The conversations, many of which began online, have now moved into the real world with communities being formed around this unique yet universal experience of women.

In December, gynaecologist Dr Sukhpreet Patel, who found Instagram followers in millions after she started her menopause and perimenopause awareness handle @menopausewize in 2023, opened the first independent menopause care clinic at Nana Chowk, Mumbai.

“My lifestyle was never unhealthy. I was exercising and changed my diet during the years leading to menopause but the symptoms continued. When my cholesterol parameters were getting worse, the Dexa scan didn’t look good, I decided I would have to do something. I began re-reading textbook chapters on menopause. I realised that we got no training in menopause, except a “bechara sa” chapter maybe,” says Dr Patel. After extensive research, she went on HRT and decided to share her knowledge on Instagram. HRT, also known as MHT or Menopause Hormonal Therapy, has never been a preferred prescription of gynaecologists in India, but it has been gaining traction over the past year.

“Indian women are menopausing earlier, and what I find in women who are coming for consultations is that there is a sense of frustration about not being heard,” Dr Patel says. Middle-aged women are yet to break out of the “suffer silently” mindset of hormonal health. Doctors as well as women with major menopausal symptoms tend to resist MHT, but Dr Patel believes that in a decade, things will look very different.

While HRT gained popularity around the world, the no-HRT school of thought was heard loud and clear too. Dr Srividya Gowri, a Chennai-based nutrition and lifestyle coach, a former body builder, says, “for me, HRT would be the last resort. Changes in diet, exercise, primarily strength training, and other lifestyles changes sustained over time are the best solutions.” ‘Meno-preneurs’ are a new, relatively quiet category in the Indian femtech sector. Swathi Kulkarni, co-founder of the menopause solutions company Elda Health says menopause femtech is still an uncharted and loss-making sector in India. “It will take 5 to 10 more years to be profit-making VC businesses.”

That’s a view that Sanjith Shetty, founder of Miror, a similar company but with a wider customer base, shares. “In 5 years, I have invested more than ₹5 crore in the business, and we are yet to break even. The idea is to push through by collaborating with government initiatives and with other players in the market till there is a clear demand for menopause solutions.”

Investors are not shying away, even as femtech companies open, and in a few years, close down. Dilip Kumar, investor, Rainmatter Health, a venture funded by the Zerodha group, has backed Gytree, a nutrition-focussed, plant-based protein startup for women in mid-life started by Shaili Chopra, and is optimistic about this niche. “We are very excited to continue cheering for solutions that help women in India stay healthy and fit. We’ve invested in few companies in this category,” Kumar says.

In mid-2025, Chopra, also the founder of media company SheThePeople, organised Fabulous Over Forty, the country’s first menopause and midlife wellness festival in Mumbai. Expert advice, real stories, brand tie-ups and a hummus-abundant lunch marked the one-day event, attended largely by urban women navigating menopause and midlife.

“For far too long, society has celebrated a woman only for her pregnancy, but ignored her prime phase perimenopause and menopause. This is when women are leading careers, building companies, raising families, looking after ageing parents and contributing at their fullest. This is their prime, and yet their health remains in the shadows. My aim with this initiative is to spotlight women’s midlife and menopause health and show how nutrition can be the first step in transforming and owning this powerful phase of life,” Chopra said.

Author Susan Sontag nailed women’s anxieties about ageing in her 1972 essay The Double Standard of Aging. “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination — a moral disease, a social pathology,” she wrote, and emphasised on the need to shift the focus to medical and psychological inquiry.

Consider the mathematics of this shift. With menopause typically occurring in the late 40s for Indian women, and life expectancy now extending into the 70s, the majority of Indian women will spend 25-30 years of their lives in a post-menopausal state. We have successfully extended human lifespan, but we have not extended ovarian function. Life expectancy of Indian women is now 70.3 years, a gain of more than 20 years compared to 50 years ago. But they are in worse health than men. According to the World Health Organization, in 2021 the number of women over 50 equalled 26 per cent of all women and girls globally, up from 22 per cent a decade before.

This demographic shift demands a fundamental rethinking of women’s health and menopause. Every other vital organ system receives extensive medical attention when it begins to fail. There are treatments for heart disease, interventions for kidney dysfunction, and therapies for liver disorders. Yet when it comes to ovarian failure, which is essentially what menopause is — and which affects metabolism, immune function, cardiovascular health, bone density, and cognitive performance — we simply accept it as inevitable.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer, behind The Slow Fix, a knowledge and awareness platform for preventive health and mindful living.