Whose rhythms? Rhythmic agency, rhythmic justice, and circadian health in the menopausal transition

Sleep disturbance and circadian disruption affect 40-60% of women during the menopausal transition, yet public health guidance continues to frame circadian health primarily as a matter of individual behaviour. This commentary argues that such guidance assumes a degree of control over time, light, and rest that many women do not have. Drawing on chronobiology and feminist scholarship on time, we introduce rhythmic agency, the capacity to shape the environmental and temporal conditions that regulate circadian rhythms, as a framework for understanding why women frequently cannot act on behavioural framed advice in everyday life. We extend this with rhythmic justice, which examines how that capacity is unevenly distributed across caregiving roles, occupational demands, and built environments. Together, these concepts reposition circadian disruption during the menopausal transition as a problem of social organisation rather than individual regulation. We close by outlining research directions and policy levers, including work scheduling, nighttime communication norms, urban lighting, and caregiving support, that follow from treating circadian health as a socially distributed capacity.