Why I built Summ Base
I did not set out to build this.
I was building an evidence-led platform for professional women in perimenopause. To get it right, I spent months talking to the women it was for.
They talked about symptoms. Then almost all of them talked about work.
They had stopped putting themselves forward. They had dropped a day, or moved to part time, without telling anyone why. They could not find a way to start the conversation, so they made the change quietly instead.
One in ten women who worked through menopause have left a job because of their symptoms. Fawcett Society, 2022.
Then I spoke to HR directors and heard it from the other side. Managers are not unwilling. They are worried about saying the wrong thing, so they say nothing at all.
Two groups, both silent, each waiting for the other to speak first.
That changed what I was building. The hardest part of menopause at work is not the symptoms. It is disclosure.
Hormone replacement therapy helps many women, and that decision sits with them and their clinician. It does not tell a manager what to say, or change a rota, or get someone off her feet for part of a shift.
The support that helps is practical. Fewer hours for a while. A later start. A chair, a break, different protective clothing if the job is physical. Most employers are not refusing it. They do not know what to provide, because nobody has told them.
Summ Base exists to close that gap. It collects anonymous evidence from your own people, and turns it into the action plan you publish. Nobody has to raise their hand.
Women who are good at their jobs should not have to leave them quietly.
Shirley SarkerFounder, Summ Base
We have nothing to sell in the answer
Summ Base collects anonymous workforce evidence for menopause action plans. We are not a menopause provider. We do not deliver coaching, clinical care, hormone replacement therapy, or therapy. We take no commission from any organisation we measure or signpost, and we never will.
That neutrality is not a marketing position. It is a data quality control. Employees answering their own employer are answering the organisation that decides their promotion, so they underreport. A provider reporting on its own service cannot honestly tell you that service is failing, because the finding is against themselves. We can, because a negative finding about existing provision costs us nothing.
Neutrality is not a feature we added. It is the reason the data is worth reading.
What the neutral space gives your people
- One place to see every support option you already fund, with how to reach each one
- Somewhere to disclose safely, with no name attached and no manager in the room
- A way to rate the support they have tried, so you learn what actually helps
- Workplace changes requested anonymously, drawn from the list you have said you can consider
Where our understanding comes from
The product is grounded in conversations with HR professionals and with women in perimenopause working in senior roles, alongside the published research named wherever a figure appears on this site. Where a statistic has no named publication and year, we remove it rather than publish it.
The survey questions are workplace questions, never clinical ones. We never score symptom severity, and results are never shown for groups smaller than 10 people, enforced in the system rather than by policy.
The company
Summ Base is operated by Consult Blue Ltd, a UK company, company number 08528647, registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, registration C1910715. How we handle data is set out in plain words at summbase.co.uk/privacy. Questions reach a person at hello@summbase.co.uk and are answered within one working day.