“Are They Going to Want Me Anymore at 45?”
Photo by Jenny Moloney
By Leigh Scheps
Ten months ago, PIX11 news anchor Tamsen Fadal asked her bosses if she could cut back on her anchoring duties. Instead of anchoring from 4pm to 7pm plus the 10pm newscasts daily, she would only do the first three hours of live television.
Generally speaking in TV news, the more air time the better for an anchor, and Fadal, 52, was asking for less. “If you would have told me two years ago I was going to do that, I would have thought you're crazy,” she says, but she has her reasons.
Fadal relinquished her late night broadcast to focus on a new mission. She’s made it her goal to become an advocate about menopause.
“I kept finding myself asking, what am I supposed to be doing? I'm working. I'm where I wanted to be. But now what? I needed something else. And that something else came in the form of informing women of where they were in life,” Fadal says. A scary leap? Sure, but she has no regrets. “I believed in it so much that it wasn't.”
A few years ago, Fadal was anchoring the 10pm newscast when all of a sudden she said to her co-workers nearby, “If I fall over, someone catch me.” Her heart was racing and she had no idea what was going on. She had a hard time reading the teleprompter and reciting words that she normally could. A male colleague helped her get off the anchor desk and into the bathroom. Doctors later told Fadal that she had been having an anxiety attack, which is among the many symptoms of perimenopause.
“Since then, I've heard other women say they couldn't speak clearly or they were searching for different words,” Fadal says. “I realize that's not so uncommon. It’s just not so common to have it happen [on air].”
Fadal was 48 years old when she started experiencing perimenopause, which can start happening between the ages of 45 to 55 according to the National Institute on Aging and last for 7 to 14 years. For her, it felt like it came out of nowhere, with no other recognizable symptoms. And that was exactly the problem. She had never really heard other women discuss menopause and didn’t know what signs to pay attention to. She couldn't recall sharing many stories about it on the news, either.
Part of Fadal’s deal with no longer anchoring the 10 o’clock news is she’ll dedicate more time to producing specials on women’s wellness and midlife.
“Because I'm really trying to make this transition into the next chapter of my life, it's important for me to be telling the stories of women,” she says.
She’s ardently fighting the narrative that age can be a “career-killer,” something she was explicitly told as a young journalist. “Twenty years ago, I sat next to this woman who, at that point, was 45. She said to me, ‘You're gonna tap out. You're gonna have a shelf life.’ That was always a fear of mine. At 45, are they going to want me any longer? 46? 47? 48?”
Long before Fadal could even think about aging out of a job, she got her start working for a newspaper. She jumped to radio in Tampa, then transitioned to television with jobs in Pittsburgh, Orlando, and Philadelphia. Fadal joined WCBS in New York City in 2004 finally landing at WPIX in 2008.
In 2020, she married television executive Ira Berstein. It was a second marriage for both. Also in the pandemic, Fadal started a podcast called “Coming Up Next” where she interviews doctors and other experts about women’s health issues. That same year, just down the street from Fadal at NY1, 5 women left the station after settling an age and gender discrimination lawsuit against the company. This is the environment in which her mission became clear.
In 2022, a TikTok she made sharing some of the 34 symptoms of menopause garnered a huge response — it currently has 2.7 million views. And with that, she’d found her calling, soon enrolling at the Integrative Institute of Nutrition; she graduated a few weeks ago, now a certified Menopause Wellness Coach, eager “to help myself and other women with lifestyle changes during this time in life.”
The life of a news anchor, as one might imagine, is jam packed, symptoms or not. On most days Fadal gets up around 7:30 or 8am. Instead of running for exercise, which she did premenopause, Fadal lifts weights and does yoga. “Everything changed when I hit midlife. It became really difficult to lose weight and to feel like I could keep up with the workouts, too. I wasn’t motivated and I wasn’t sleeping at night. Menopause whacked me hard.”
Nevertheless, she shoots videos for social media twice a week, getting her hair blown out just as often. She often has speaking engagements and then also hosts the nationally syndicated “The Broadway Show With Tamsen Fadal.” She’s in makeup by 1:30pm and at the PIX11 studio by 2 to record the evening news.
When asked how bringing attention to herself about going through menopause could impact her career, she says, “I am in that place where what's going to happen happens. I felt very confident in the company I work for. They've always been very supportive of me. I've been outside of the box and on a lot of different topics. I was outside of the box on divorce when I wasn't quite sure I should have been talking about that out loud. When I was talking about it, most people were not having that conversation.”
Fadal believes it hasn’t been until recently that “women have felt proud of talking about their age.” For example, Drew Barrymore, who is 48, recently said she experienced a hot flash while doing an interview on her talk show. “We’re working past ages that we never thought we were going to be working before. A lot of women are in the prime of their career, in these incredible positions and they're struggling with these kinds of symptoms,” Fadal says, adding that the conversation has changed “tremendously” since she started. She’s found “some kind of freedom” in opening up the way she has, and that’s what she wants to help her fans and followers find. “If they're not able to talk about it, I hope I can help give them that freedom.”