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Dr. Manna Semby, ND, IFMCP
I came to this work the way most people come to their most important work; through a trial by fire.
I immigrated to the United States in my early twenties with the belief that you could reinvent yourself at any time, if you so wanted. I proved it twice. First by building a career at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Goldman Sachs, then by walking away from finance in my forties to become a naturopathic and functional medicine doctor. Between those two lives I raised two neurodivergent children as a single mother, which taught me more about resilience, resourcefulness, and the limitations of systems that we live with.
Then menopause and breast cancer arrived at the same time.
I learned how little medicine understood about midlife women, how little the workplace accommodated them, and how little the culture valued what they were going through. I was a trained doctor, and I still could not get what I needed. I thought about the millions of women navigating this without my knowledge, without my resources, without anyone telling them that what they were experiencing had a name, a mechanism, and a solution.
That is when the connection between the oversight on women’s midlife health and the struggle to get to gender parity in leadership became crystal clear to me. By not affording women sustainable opportunity to lead, the world is leaving an enormous amount of talent on the table. They are leaving leadership, or never reaching it, just when their experience, judgment, and capability are most valuable. Perimenopause is a brain event. It affects memory, focus, decision-making, and resilience. And almost no one in medicine, culture, or the workplace is treating it with the seriousness it deserves.
I built the Center for Cognitive Resilience because I believe the workplace is the most powerful lever we have to affect the necessary changes. The workplace is where performance is measured, and careers are made and lost. The workplace is where decisions are made that determine whether a woman advances, plateaus, or quietly steps back. No other system has more direct influence over the trajectory of a woman’s leadership than the organization she works for.
Women’s leadership doesn’t just benefit women. It benefits every organization that needs collaborative decision-making, emotional intelligence, and long-term thinking. The organization that truly supports its women through midlife has everything to gain. In leadership, in retention, in performance, in productivity and profitability and in the kind of culture that attracts the best people at every level. That is the world I am working toward.
Book Dr. Manna Semby
Dr. Manna speaks at corporate events, leadership conferences, ERG gatherings, professional association meetings, and executive off-sites. Engagements are available in-person and virtually.