Perimenopause and menopause can span more than a decade. At any given moment, more than 450 million women worldwide are navigating this transition. According to research by the World Economic Forum’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health, closing the women’s health gap on menopause alone could yield an estimated 2.4 million disability adjusted life years every year and roughly 120 billion dollars in annual GDP gains. These figures represent fewer missed workdays, steadier household income, and less strain on health systems. They also represent lives experienced with more comfort, clarity, and confidence. Numbers summarize the stakes, but lived experience explains them.

What stands in the way is not a lack of need but a lack of preparation across the systems that touch women’s lives. Diagnosis and care are often late, inconsistent, or inaccessible. And there is evidence to back this — a Yale University review of insurance claims showed while 60% of women with significant symptoms of menopause seek treatment, almost 75% are left untreated. Training is part of the problem. In one study, half of family medicine doctors reported only a single lecture on menopause during training, and one in five reported none at all. The workforce impact is visible. Research indicates that one in four women has considered leaving work during the transition, and one in ten who have worked through menopause left a job because of their symptoms. This is not only a productivity story, it is also one of opportunity cost. It is a story about experienced leaders stepping back, about teams losing anchors, and about families absorbing avoidable stress.

As an Expert Member of the one-of-its-kind multistakeholder platform, the World Economic Forum’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health, as well as an expert medical advisor at acclaimed actress, director, producer, advocate, and entrepreneur, Halle Berry’s menopause care platform, Respin Health, I see how quickly the conversation shifts when evidence meets execution. These organisations are helping translate science into clinical standards and employer policies, while informing policy frameworks that leaders can adopt and fund. Advocacy is meaningful when it results in actions that are easy to copy, measure, and sustain. Our work with Halle Berry, who recently joined the Global Alliance for Women’s Health as Public Ambassador, showcases the sheer appetite and momentum that exists to redefine menopause and empower women to be the guardians of their own health. The path is known. What remains is follow-through.

“When we leave women to figure menopause out alone, we pay a grave price in health, productivity, and our very own dignity. We have to normalize this conversation about menopause. We have to make guidance useable. We have to improve access to quality care, and we need to invest in research and innovation,” said Halle Berry. 

Health care is the first place to start

Menopause should be part of routine primary care, not a specialty service that only a few can reach. Screening can begin during routine visits for women in their forties and fifties, with clear pathways for counselling and treatment. Evidence based options include lifestyle approaches, non-hormonal treatments, and, when appropriate and safe, hormonal therapies guided by informed choice. Care should consider mental health and cardiometabolic risk, since sleep disruption, mood changes, and metabolic shifts often travel together. Referral pathways must connect primary care, gynaecology, mental health, and cardiometabolic services so women are not left to navigate a maze with contradictory advice. This is not about boutique clinics for the few. It is about equipping the front lines to meet a ubiquitous need.

Workplaces are the next lever. Simple adjustments can make a meaningful difference. Flexibility where feasible, paid time off for symptom flare days, and practical measures like temperature control and quiet rest areas reduce the friction that turns symptoms into lost days. Benefits should name menopause explicitly, so women know coverage exists. Manager training should normalize support without forcing disclosure. Employers who measure retention, error rates, and team performance before and after adopting these practices will find what many have already learned. Small investments stabilize teams and pay for themselves.

Research and product design must close the data gap and raise the bar for solutions. Studies should reflect the diversity of real women, including race, age, and co existing conditions. Endpoints should be comparable so clinicians and consumers can tell what works and for whom. Digital tools and consumer products that target sleep, cognition, thermoregulation, and pelvic health should be evaluated against evidence standards and priced for broad access. Innovation is welcome. So is rigor. Women deserve both.

Policy and financing can turn best practice into the baseline

Essential menopause services belong in national primary health packages and in public and private insurance coverage. Governments can accelerate employer adoption with clear standards, public recognition, and targeted incentives that reward organizations for implementing menopause supportive policies. Public information campaigns can replace stigma with practical knowledge for women, partners, managers, and clinicians. Countries should publish a small set of indicators that matter in daily life. Time to diagnosis, treatment access, and workforce participation are simple to understand and powerful to track. Accountability is easier when the yardstick is clear.

Why does this matter beyond the clinic and the workplace? Because when women’s health is prioritized, families and economies function better. Earlier diagnosis and appropriate treatment reduce absenteeism. Menopause supportive workplaces keep experienced talent on the job and reduce turnover. Good care prevents avoidable complications that are costly later. These mechanisms repeat across millions of women and thousands of organizations. The cumulative effect shows up in national productivity. The more important return, however, is human. Better sleep, clearer thinking, steadier mood, and restored confidence change how women experience midlife. That is growth measured in dignity and opportunity.

Effective advocacy pairs public leadership with technical depth and coordinated action. Public figures help make the issue relatable. Researchers and clinicians define what quality care looks like. Cross-sector forums align employers, health systems, and governments on practical standards and timelines. This combination turns awareness into accountable implementation. This is where platforms such as the Global Alliance for Women’s Health and the International Menopause Society bring real value to the conversation — by bringing together experts and leaders to make the shift from intention to implementation. 

What should happen now?

Health systems can add a brief screening and counselling step to routine primary care visits and build simple referral pathways that do not collapse under real world pressure. Medical schools and continuing education providers can strengthen training, so the next generation of clinicians starts on firmer ground. Employers can publish a menopause policy, train managers, and update benefits language so support is easy to find. Researchers can design studies that reflect the diversity of women and use shared endpoints that allow transparent comparisons. Policymakers can put menopause care in the basic benefit package and require transparent reporting on access and outcomes. None of these actions is a moonshot. Each is a choice that aligns with what we already know.

Culture change travels alongside policy change. Partners can listen without judgment. Friends can share what has helped them. Community leaders can include menopause in health talks that already reach women where they live and work. The tone matters. Precision matters. A plan matters. Together they create an environment where a woman does not have to spend years searching for a name for her symptoms or for a path to relief.

World Menopause Day should not be a once-a-year reminder. It should be a yearly accountability moment that asks a simple question: Did we make it easier this year for women to find accurate information, timely care, and practical support? If the answer is yes, the benefits will be visible in clinics, workplaces, homes, and countries.

The path is clear — what remains is resolve. Let us act today so more women can live, work, and thrive tomorrow.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Maybe. The impact of a shutdown will, of course, depend on its length and the reaction of those impacted. Investors aren’t happy, but that could pass. While roughly three-quarters of federal employees are classified as “essential” workers who must stay on the job, some may stop showing up if they’re not paid. As another CEO pointed out yesterday, a raft of no-show TSA workers can make for annoying security lines, but a dozen “sick” air traffic controllers can seriously disrupt air travel.

The U.S. has weathered 10 shutdowns since the current budget policy was established in 1976.

One difference this time around is that DOGE cuts and policy shifts have already disrupted various aspects of government operations, from education grants to public health programs, making yesterday’s “orderly shutdown” yet another challenge to navigate. The main message from CEOs I reached yesterday: Check back in a week or two.

While CEOs are keeping an eye on the economic impact of a shutdown, they have to stay focused on growing their business, recruiting top talent and leveraging or developing breakthrough technologies in areas from clean energy to AI. That’s why gatherings like the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh on the 26^th and 27^th of this month are so important. It’s an opportunity for leaders to learn and connect around shared challenges and opportunities. Among the CEOs joining us are Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Masdar’s Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, Delta’s Ed Bastian, Abhijit Dubey of NTT Data, Mary Callahan Erdoes of JPMorgan Chase, JLL’s Christian Ulbrich, Bill Winters of Standard Chartered, Cohere’s Aidan Gomez, Nokia’s Justin Hotard, Tony Han of WeRide, Jenny Johnson of Franklin Templeton, Zimmer Biomet’s Ivan Tornos, Tan Su Shan of DBS Group, Gilberto Tomazoni of JBS, Jonathan Ross of Groq and many more. You can check out more about the upcoming forum here and click here to apply to attend.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]

Top news

Trump uses shutdown to cut spending, fire workers 

“Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud. Billions of Dollars can be saved,” the president said on Truth Social. White House budget director Russell Vought said $26 billion in funding for previously approved programs was on hold, much of which had been earmarked for Democrat-led states or cities. Permanent layoffs are expected to begin in the next day or so. The White House is using government agency websites to refer to the shutdown as “Democrat-led.”

U.S. to provide intelligence for long-range strikes on Russia

More evidence that Trump’s break with Putin is serious: The WSJ reports that the White House has approved sharing intelligence with Ukraine that will help Kyiv conduct long-range strikes deep into Russia, potentially targeting the oil and power infrastructure that fuels the invasion of Ukraine. Washington is also considering sending Ukraine long-range missiles, but has not made a final decision.

Supreme Court delays decision on Fed’s Cook

The high court ruled that it will not take up Fed Governor Lisa Cook’s lawsuit against President Trump until January, after lower courts have dealt with the case. The move is a potential signal that the court is skeptical of the White House’s legal right to fire her.

PIMCO: There are “cracks” in the corporate credit market 

PIMCO President Christian Stracke told CNBC that the private credit market for companies seeking debt funding was going through a difficult patch. “We’re seeing some real problems in the credit markets. There have been some high-profile defaults in the credit markets — in the public markets — where it’s very difficult for the company to negotiate with the lenders to preserve value in the company,” he said.

The turnaround at Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lauren was staring irrelevance in the face when Procter & Gamble veteran Patrice Louvet took over as CEO and brought the fashion brand back to its luxury roots. Now, with profits at a 13-year high, Louvet says, “It’s got to stay fresh.”

Two weeks of bro-co-CEOs 

In the past two weeks, three large companies—Spotify, Oracle, and Comcast—either added a co-CEO to their corner office or replaced their CEO with a leadership duo. Fortune’s Lila MacLellan describes the phenomenon as the “rise of the bro-co-CEO.”

Citi mandates AI training for most employees

Citi is mandating AI training for the majority of its 229,00 employees, according to an internal memo shared with American Banker. A Citi representative told Fortune that “This training is about teaching our colleagues the possibilities of great prompting versus basic prompting to generate impactful results.”

OpenAI is officially worth $500 billion

Sam Altman’s AI company has completed a funding round that values his company at a higher level than SpaceX, making it the world’s most valuable startup.

Bitcoin treasury craze cools

Companies that diluted their stock by selling shares specifically to fund Bitcoin purchases have seen their values tumble by 20% to 50%, according to the WSJ. While their valuations remain above the price of Bitcoin on their balance sheets, it seems the market is not willing to buy an endless number of self-diluting Bitcoin treasury companies. Michael Saylor’s Strategy fell 20% in Q3.

The markets

S&P 500 futures were up 0.16% this morning. The index closed up 0.34% in its last session. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.7% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 flat in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.87%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.45%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 2.7%. India’s Nifty 50 was up 0.92% before the end of the session. Bitcoin rose to $118.6K.

Around the watercooler

Walmart now plans to bring drone deliveries to ‘most areas that we operate in’, exec says by Jessica Mathews

The economy is just getting stronger, not weaker, and ‘we in the economics profession need to look ourselves in the mirror,’ top analyst says by Nick Lichtenberg

People destroyed the ‘friend.com’ AI necklace ads with graffiti. The 22-year-old founder loves it: ‘Capitalism is the greatest artistic medium.’ by Eva Roytburg

Former Wall Street darling Charlie Javice says ‘I have remorse deeper than I knew possible’ in tearful apology to JPMorgan shareholders by Dave Smith

CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Jim Edwards.

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read global insights from CEOs and industry leaders. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.

Mark Zuckerberg has some similar thoughts. 

The Meta CEO acknowledged that the rapid development of and surging investments in AI stands to form a bubble, potentially outpacing practical productivity and returns and risking a market crash. But Zuckerberg insists that the risk of over-investment is preferable to the alternative: being late to what he sees as an era-defining technological transformation.

“There are compelling arguments for why AI could be an outlier,” Zuckerberg hedged in an appearance on the Access podcast. “And if the models keep on growing in capability year-over-year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse.”

Then Zuckerberg joined the Altman camp, saying that all capital expenditure bubbles like the buildout of AI infrastructure, seen largely in the form of data centers, tend to end in similar ways. “But I do think there’s definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles, that something like that would happen here,” Zuckerberg said.

Bubble echoes

Zuckerberg pointed to past bubbles, namely railroads and the dot-com bubble, as key examples of infrastructure buildouts leading to a stock-market collapse. In these instances, he claimed that bubbles occurred due to businesses taking on too much debt, macroeconomic factors, or product demand waning, leading to companies going under and leaving behind valuable assets. 

The Meta CEO’s comments echoed Altman’s, who has similarly cautioned that the AI boom is showing many signs of a bubble. 

“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told The Verge, adding that AI is that kernel: transformative and real, but often surrounded by irrational exuberance. Altman has also warned that “the frenzy of cash chasing anything labeled ‘AI’” can lead to inflated valuations and risk for many. 

The consequences of these bubbles are costly. During the dot-com bubble, investors poured money into tech startups with unrealistic expectations, driven by hype and a frenzy for new internet-based companies. When the results fell short, the stocks involved in the dot-com bubble lost more than $5 trillion in total market cap.

An AI bubble stands to have similarly significant economic impacts. In 2025 alone, the largest U.S. tech companies, including Meta, have spent more than $155 billion on AI development. And, according to Statista, the current AI market value is approximately $244.2 billion.

But, for Zuckerberg, losing out on AI’s potential is a far greater risk than losing money in an AI bubble. The company recently committed at least $600 billion to U.S. data centers and infrastructure through 2028 to support its AI ambitions. According to Meta’s chief financial officer, this money will go towards all of the tech giant’s US data center buildouts and domestic business operations, including new hires. Meta also launched its superintelligence lab, recruiting talent aggressively with multi-million-dollar job offers, to develop AI that outperforms human intelligence.

“If we end up misspending a couple hundred billion dollars,  that’s going to be very unfortunate obviously. But I would say the risk is higher on the other side,” Zuckerberg said. “If you build too slowly, and superintelligence is possible in three years but you built it out were assuming it would be there in five years, then you’re out of position on what I think is going to be the most important technology that enables the most new products and innovation and value creation in history.”

While he sees the consequences of not being aggressive enough in AI investing outweighing overinvesting, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta’s survival isn’t dependent upon AI’s success.

For companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, he said “there’s obviously this open question of to what extent are they going to keep on raising money, and that’s dependent both to some degree on their performance and how AI does, but also all of these macroeconomic factors that are out of their control.”

Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.

In her new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, journalist and WIRED alum Megan Greenwell chronicles the devastating impacts of one of the most powerful yet poorly understood forces in modern American capitalism. Flush with cash, largely unregulated, and relentlessly focused on profit, private equity firms have quietly reshaped the US economy, taking over large chunks of industries ranging from health care to retail—often leaving financial ruin in their wake.

Twelve million people in the US now work for companies owned by private equity, Greenwell writes, or about 8 percent of the total employed population. Her book focuses on the stories of four of these individuals, including a Toys “R” Us supervisor who loses the best job she ever had and a Wyoming doctor who watches his rural hospital cut essential services. Their collective experiences are a damning account of how innovation is being replaced by financial engineering and the ways that shift is being paid for by everyone except those at the top.

In a review of Bad Company for Bloomberg, a longtime private equity executive accused Greenwell of seeking out sad stories with inevitably “sad endings.” But the characters Greenwell selected don’t just sit back and watch as private equity devastates their communities. The book is a portrait of not only how the American dream is being eroded but also the creative tactics people are using to fight back.

Greenwell spoke to WIRED late last month about what private equity is and isn’t, how it has transformed different industries, and what workers are doing to reclaim their power.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What is private equity? How is the business model different from, say, venture capital?

Megan Greenwell: People confuse private equity and venture capital all the time, but it’s totally reasonable that normal people don’t understand the difference. Basically, the easiest way to explain the difference is that venture capital firms invest money, usually in startups. They’re essentially taking a stake in the company and expecting some sort of returns over time. They’re also generally playing a significantly longer game than private equity.

But the way private equity works, especially with leveraged buyouts, which is what I focus on in the book, is they’re buying companies outright. In venture capital, you put your money in, you’re entrusting it to a CEO, and you probably have a board seat. But in the leveraged buyout model, the private equity firm really is the owner and controlling decider of the portfolio company.

How do private equity firms define success? What kinds of companies or businesses are attractive to them?

In venture capital, VCs are evaluating whether to make a deal based solely on whether they think that company is going to become successful. They are looking for unicorns. Is this company going to be the next Uber? Private equity is looking to make money off of companies in ways that don’t actually require the company itself to make money. That is like the biggest thing.

So it’s less of a gamble.

It is very hard for private equity firms to lose money on deals. They’re getting a 2 percent management fee, even if they’re running the company into the ground. They’re also able to pull off all these tricks, like selling off the company’s real estate and then charging the company rent on the same land it used to own. When private equity firms take out loans to buy companies, the debt from those loans is assigned not to the private equity firm but to the portfolio company.