Politics & Power Quote by Gail Sheehy

Boardrooms “lighting up with hot flashes” is Gail Sheehy at peak provocation: a neatly combustible image that turns a private, feminized bodily experience into a public corporate event. The line lands because it treats menopause not as an embarrassment to be managed offstage, but as a demographic force about to crash the most performatively controlled spaces in American life. “Hot flashes” are involuntary, visible, hard to disguise; “boardrooms” are built on the fantasy that power is cool, rational, and disembodied. Sheehy shorts that circuit on purpose.

The specific intent is agitational and predictive. She’s not offering a medical factoid; she’s warning executives and culture-makers that the leadership pipeline is changing because women are staying in the workforce longer and reaching senior roles at the same age their biology gets culturally policed. The subtext is blunt: the corporate world has been organized around male bodies as the default setting, and it’s about to be confronted by the realities it has relegated to HR pamphlets and whispered jokes.

Contextually, Sheehy made her name mapping life stages and the politics of aging, especially for women, in an era when professional legitimacy still depended on appearing effortlessly “ageless.” The phrase “going to light up” carries a sly double meaning: yes, it’s a flare of discomfort, but also illumination. If menopause shows up in the boardroom, it exposes who gets to look “professional,” whose needs count as normal, and how much of workplace “merit” is really just design bias dressed as tradition.