Why Did It Take Congress 237 Years to Hold a Menopause Hearing?

Yes, it really took this long. On September 16, the Senate Special Committee on Aging held the United States Congress's first-ever hearing dedicated to menopause, a transition that will happen to essentially every woman who lives past midlife. The hearing was blunt about the delay in its own title: "Half the Country, Zero Hearings: Meeting the Moment to End the Menopause Care Gap in America." Half the country. Zero hearings. In 237 years.

I keep coming back to that title because it's not spin, it's just math. Women are just over half of this country, and until three weeks ago, the body that funds medical research and writes health policy had never sat down to talk about a phase of life every one of us will either go through or watch someone we love go through. That's not an oversight. That's what it looks like when a group's voice doesn't carry enough weight to get a hearing.

What happened at the hearing?

Senators Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who chairs the committee, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and the ranking member, brought in four women to testify about what the gap actually costs. Dr. Lynne Coslett-Charlton, a board-certified gynecologist, told the committee that "too many women suffer needlessly" because of physician shortages and thin insurance coverage. Dr. Jean Wactawski-Wende, a public health professor at the University at Buffalo, put the research problem plainly: "Clinical trials are the gold standard evidence, and we do not have enough." And Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, who runs the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at NYU Law, gave the number that stopped me cold: less than 1% of federal research funding goes toward midlife women's health.

For scale, roughly 1 million American women enter menopause every year, and about 64 million are currently postmenopausal. Yet in 2025, the National Institutes of Health put about $78 million into menopause research, compared with $314 million for prostate cancer and $768 million for men's health research broadly. And 80% of OB/GYN residents say they don't feel prepared to even discuss menopause with a patient, according to testimony cited at the hearing. So the gap isn't just funding. It's training doctors, too, which is part of why the same brain fog and mood swings this blog has covered before so often go unaddressed at a routine appointment.

Two bills came up as possible fixes: the Menopause Education for Medical Students Act, which would require medical schools to actually teach this, and the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women's Health Act, aimed at research and access. Gillibrand and Scott also followed the hearing with a bipartisan request asking the Government Accountability Office to audit how federal agencies fund and coordinate menopause research and care, which is the unglamorous but real next step toward accountability.

Why does it matter if menopause feels decades away to you?

It matters now, not eventually, because this hearing was never really about menopause specifically. It's about a pattern this blog keeps running into: women's symptoms get taken less seriously, dismissed as vague, or handed a "come back if it gets worse." We've written about how that shows up when young women say they don't trust the health care system, and it's the same current running under a Senate hearing that took 237 years to happen. If the pattern doesn't get interrupted somewhere, it just keeps repeating at every life stage, including the ones you haven't reached yet.

There's also something worth sitting with about what it took to finally get this hearing scheduled: women publicly, repeatedly, insistently naming the gap until it became impossible to ignore. That's the throughline in a lot of the change we cover here, including what Gloria Steinem taught women about using their voice. Being heard by an institution is rarely handed over. It's usually the result of enough women refusing to stop saying the thing out loud.

One thing to try today

If you're anywhere near perimenopause, or you have a mother, sister, or friend who is, ask your doctor directly: "Are you comfortable managing menopause symptoms, or should I see someone who specializes in this?" It's a fair, direct question, and given that 4 in 5 OB/GYN residents say they weren't trained for it, you deserve a straight answer instead of a shrug.

Quote to sit with

"Credibility is a basic survival tool." — Rebecca Solnit

💌 Sarah