The Government has listed “problem periods” among the top priorities to be tackled under its Women’s Health Strategy for 2024. But simply investigating their impact on women in the workplace is not enough, says Sophie Wilkinson.
If I’m lucky, it’ll wake me at 4am with sharp twinges across my lower back, unfurling out as cramp through each leg. If I’m unlucky, I’ll feel an onerous heft looming within my pelvis before, at around midday, a thunderclap, and my period arrives, with all its associated torment.
You see, if it comes in the middle of the night, I’m not really expected to be anywhere – at least not for a few hours. The later it arrives, the higher the risk that I’m already out and about, in an office, at a shop, on a run, basically trying to do something normal with my day – something incompatible with the feeling that a sledgehammer to my pelvic bone would be preferable.
I have “problem periods”, as the Department of Health is calling them. Periods that get in the way of normal life. For me, that’s searing and consistent pain that renders me writhing and bed-bound until my wonder drug, mefenamic acid, kicks in. The soothing wave of calm across my body is comparable only to coming up on something illegal, bursting through the clouds as a flight takes off, reaching climax in a bed full of all your favourite CK models. Afterwards, dazed, I can just about get on with my life.
Not all women have these sorts of periods, but a 2019 survey suggested a third of women are so badly hit by their periods they can’t carry out everyday tasks. Of these, half of them stay quiet about their symptoms. In loud and brutal honesty, the reason my pezzer afflicts me with all the rage of a Millwall away game is that I live with polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects around one in ten women. Though the symptoms of this – mainly, for me, irregular, heavy and painful periods – aren’t quite as savage as those for endometriosis – pain during sex, pain on the toilet, flare ups mid-cycle – I still struggle.
Periods are nothing new to me and hopefully I’ve hit the halfway point of having them at all! (Will I even get a period in my fifties? Is menopause something anyone even considers before it’s staring back at you in the mirror with a hot face, panting and dizzy in the middle of a wintry night?). But I still don’t get periods.
Sure, I know my heavy periods are caused by low progesterone confusing my womb into overproducing its lining. So I tool up with enough kit to make a Marine proud: moon cup, thick pad, black pants, vigilance. And I guess the pain is because cramps are required to detach all that lining. And I manage this with that sweet horse pill. The timing, for me, is the thing I don’t get. Not just because my periods are irregular, either. It’s that they pick a time to happen. Others are besieged by periods (did you know a French idiom for getting a period translates to “the English are coming”?) by surprise. Even friends who have the sort of perfect and punctual periods that would’ve played centre on the school netball team, have told me that society has so successfully compartmentalised the concept that even they are startled by their period’s arrival. Oh this! Again? Really? Like a leaky bin, or a waiter bringing a bill with a 20 per cent service charge. These pesky periods, they get in the way.
I am really glad to hear that the government is funding the Office of National Statistics to investigate the impacts of endometriosis on women’s employment. But how about a few steps further? Menstrual leave, launched in Spain late last year, is widely derided in Britain as a woke European thing, like… I don’t know, workplace creches, or adequately paid maternity leave. So their offer of three to five days of paid leave per month won’t happen here just yet. That means the only tangible workplace support for problem period sufferers in the UK – reasonable adjustments like reduced or flexible hours, home working and the provision of special equipment – is if they meet the threshold for disability.
Surely there’s a midway point? One which acknowledges that periods are not fun for anyone, but that some people will need sporadic time off to deal with them? Which educates male employers – because, my God, did you see the TikTok with men being asked if women pee while wearing a tampon? – around what a period actually is? That provides women with a convenient and discreet way of divulging this ailment to their line manager? That rewards companies that discourage presenteeism?
A few years ago, you could not move for pink books about periods: their power, their pain, their mysteries. The stigma was meant to be undone by now. To have an MP talk about periods – as the health and social care secretary Victoria Atkins has – is a shift from 2015 when, in discussions about the tampon tax, David Cameron couldn’t even use the word.
But words are only words, and if we want women to be able to work – to be able to function – as humans despite the various nonsensical menstrual conundrums that have been bestowed upon us, we need to not just look into the murky clues of what’s causing problem periods, but give women the time and space to deal with these things.
After all, no one wants blood on their hands, do they?