‘I feel a responsibility to talk about menopause’
In an interview with The Shift podcast, Sturgeon says she is ambivalent about discussing the menopause in public:
We talk about the menopause much more, and I’m very conscious of being a woman with a profile and a platform, a fair degree of influence, so I feel a responsibility – given that I’m at that age – to talk about it myself. And yet even talking about it like this, I am so far out of my comfort zone, in terms of the intensely personal nature of it. That tells me no matter how far we’ve come in this discussion, we still have a long way to go that somebody like me still feels kind of uncomfortable with it. ven though there is more information available than there has ever been before, there’s still a massive amount of guesswork about it. We’re still all feeling our way through it.
Asked how she might deal with a hot flush during a work meeting:
I would like to think I would be open about it. If you look around the world, there’s not been that many women leaders … I guess Angela Merkel must have gone through when she was in office, Hillary Clinton … so if you’ve got that platform, then I would like to think I would use that positively, but I’m also a human. So I’ve got windows open in the depth of winter, my poor husband is shivering. I’ve thought to myself: what if that happens when I’m on my feet in parliament in the middle of first minister’s questions? What would I do? That could happen any time. I’m not sure I will know the answer to that question until it happens. Maybe male opposition leaders should be thinking about what I will do, as well
She says that she has already had a conversation with her doctor about taking hormone replacement therapy.