Not Her Cost. Ours.
In 2023, Mayo Clinic researchers estimated that menopause-related symptoms accounted for $1.8 billion in lost work time annually in the United States. It’s a compelling statistic, but I’ve become increasingly concerned about what happens when we repeat it without questioning the assumptions beneath it. When we frame menopause as an economic burden, we risk suggesting that women’s bodies are a liability to the organizations employing them. That their physiology makes them less reliable, less productive, or somehow more expensive to employ. That is not what the research establishes, and it is certainly not the conclusion we should be drawing. The estimate measures lost work time associated with symptoms; it does not tell us how much could be prevented through better working conditions. Yet we continue calculating the economic consequences of women’s physiological experiences without applying the same scrutiny to the environments in which those experiences occur. This is one of the central assumptions I’m challenging through Brra: what if the problem isn’t that women’s bodies interrupt their ability to participate, but that we’ve done so little to design for the ways their bodies actually function?
Consider what happens when her body interrupts her without warning in the middle of a meeting. Her attention shifts from the conversation to managing the sudden heat. She may need to remove a layer, leave the room, find cooler air, or simply endure the discomfort while maintaining the appearance that nothing has changed. The physiological event is real. But the expectation that she must manage it privately, without disrupting the environment around her, is something we’ve collectively normalized. We’ve mistaken women’s extraordinary ability to adapt for evidence that the systems around them work. Workplaces, clothing, physical environments, and technologies are all the result of design decisions. They can be reconsidered. Yet we’ve been remarkably willing to treat the existing environment as fixed and the woman as the variable that needs adjusting. Brra begins with the opposite premise. We’re engineering wearable thermal technology around women’s actual physiology, with the intention of easing the physical and cognitive effort required to navigate sudden temperature swings. Not by asking her to become better at coping, but by designing something that accommodates her in the first place.
The economic framing becomes particularly troubling when we consider what women hear when these statistics enter conversations about workforce performance. A woman approaching the height of her career should not have to wonder whether a normal physiological transition will cause an employer to question her value. She should not have to calculate the professional consequences of acknowledging discomfort or needing a different working condition. And she certainly should not have to defend her presence in an economy she has spent decades contributing to. Women already represent nearly half of the American labor force. The issue is not whether women are capable of leading organizations, managing complex responsibilities, or performing at the highest levels. They have demonstrated that for generations. The question is why the organizations benefiting from their work have been so slow to incorporate their physiological realities into the infrastructure of professional life. This is why Brra’s ambition extends beyond cooling. We’re interested in what happens when technology lightens the burden of adaptation rather than transferring more responsibility to the person wearing it. Women’s comfort should not require an economic justification. But when their discomfort is being assigned an economic cost, we have an obligation to examine who has the power to lessen it.
That distinction is becoming increasingly tangible through our early prototype testing. Women have told us they would purchase Brra exactly as it exists today, before we’ve even completed the refinements we know are necessary. Others have said they would turn around and drive home if they forgot it. They’re describing longer periods of focus, greater patience, and a renewed capacity to navigate the demands of everyday life. What stands out to me isn’t simply that they’re experiencing physical relief. It’s how that relief appears to change their experience of the entire day. We’ve spent years developing sophisticated technologies to measure sleep, stress, hormones, and physiological change. Much of that information has value. But knowing what is happening to your body does not necessarily change what you’re experiencing in the moment. The next standard for wearable innovation should be what it makes possible in someone’s life, not simply what it makes measurable. Brra is being engineered around that distinction. Thermal performance, comfort, discretion, and ease of use are not peripheral product features. They determine whether technology genuinely lightens friction or becomes one more thing women are expected to manage.
Employers and decision-makers cannot make menopause disappear, and it would be intellectually dishonest to attribute the entire $1.8 billion estimate to inadequate workplace design. But they can no longer treat women’s physiological needs as unexpected exceptions to otherwise functional systems. The responsibility for creating environments that accommodate the people working within them belongs, in meaningful part, to those designing and operating those environments. The consequential question isn’t what women are costing the economy. It is what the economy continues to lose by failing to design for them. Women have already demonstrated their ability to adapt. The next generation of products should demonstrate an equal capacity to adapt to them. That’s the standard we’re engineering toward, because we’re far more interested in what becomes possible when women no longer have to constantly accommodate their biology and can live in their bodies without interruption.
-Tayler Moore
Founder, Brra
10.12.2026