How to make your menstrual cycle work for you

Like many women with a crucial week coming up, Maisie Hill was worried where it would fall in her menstrual cycle. With some careful planning, she picked the “perfect phase” to record the audio version of her new book, at the peak of her “oral capacity”.

Finishing up the following week was a different matter. “It was so much harder,” she adds. As the author of a new book, Period Power, Ms Hill keeps better track of her cycle than most — but she wants that to change.

She is not alone. The notion that managing menstruation might help women feel better — and perform better — at work is creeping into business literature at the same time as companies, such as PwC and Deloitte, are starting to think more about their employees’ wellbeing.

Annie Auerbach, who champions flexible working patterns in her new “modern woman’s handbook”, Flex, devotes a chapter to understanding periods in an attempt to de-stigmatise a fact of life for most working women. She started “cycle syncing” to take advantage of changes in hormone levels that affect how women feel, behave and perform at different points of the month.

“Cycle syncing means you can put yourself forward for certain things that will make you feel happy and fulfilled at the points that work for your cycle, rather than feeling inhibited or like you’re failing,” says Ms Auerbach, who co-founded Starling, an agency that briefs brands about social and cultural trends.

In The Freelance Mum, a guide for better work-life balance, author Annie Ridout suggests keeping a record of how you feel each day during your cycle: energised, reflective, tired, creative, and so on, to track mood patterns because different phases can suit different types of work. Menstruation itself is a great time for organisation, while the follicular phase works well for new projects because women tend to be more creative and energetic, she says.

Menstruation experts, like Alexandra Pope, a doyenne in the field, believe a wider focus on other natural cycles, from the circadian rhythm to the benefits of sleeping in 90-minute bursts, is helping to highlight women’s cycles. “The more you can co-operate with your organic bodily rhythms, the healthier you will feel and the more productive you are, which is why companies are becoming interested,” she says.

Women have historically avoided putting periods on the workplace agenda because early wave feminists believed they needed to copy men to get ahead, or just to draw even. “People say, ‘If we really talk about what happens when we have our periods, no one will want to employ us,’” says Lara Owen, who is completing a PhD on menstrual workplace policies at Monash University Business School in Melbourne, Australia.

She thinks the UK is “leading the way” when it comes to tackling menstrual taboos, despite the glacial rate of progress. It takes employee-driven initiatives to change policies, she adds. “Maternity leave didn’t come because the head of the company wanted it. It came from women saying, ‘Look, we are valuable employees. Help us figure this out.’”

One Bristol-based company, Coexist, drew up a menstruation policy three years ago with help from Ms Owen. Employees at the social enterprise could take a day’s leave, work from home or simply have a rest at any point in their cycle. Contingency planning meant that someone else would take over when needed.

Bex Baxter, a former director at Coexist, instigated the policy after seeing a receptionist bent double in pain at the front desk. “She looked at me with despair and said, ‘I’m fine. It’s just my period. Let’s not make a thing of it.’ That level of shame and taboo is wrong,” says Ms Baxter, who now works as a life coach.

For other firms interested in following Coexist’s lead, Ms Baxter warns, “it’s not a one-size-fits-all policy but needs to be bespoke to each organisation”. She suggests companies think about “honouring menstruation as a wellbeing guidance tool” to understand how their female employees are feeling.

Ms Hill seconds this stance. “We talk about the cycle being detrimental to women but it gives us an edge and we can utilise that to great advantage.” She says men who attend her talks are often “jealous they don’t have this approach to bring into their lives and way of working”.

Other companies that offer specific menstruation leave are scarce but there are signs of change. Georgie Wolfinden, who runs The Beam Room, a small PR agency, started offering her four female co-workers one day off per month if they were suffering. She would “think about” giving men time off for different health reasons.

At PwC, thinking about women’s health is part of a wider commitment to improve all aspects of employees’ wellbeing. The accountancy firm is planning to hold a seminar focusing on periods, featuring new research about endometriosis, an often painful disorder in which tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows somewhere else. It is a condition that affects one in ten women. Sarah Churchman, head of diversity and inclusion, says the message for employees is “don’t suffer in silence”, adding: “Women’s health issues are as real as any others. Although the symptoms might not be an illness as such, they can be proactively addressed.”

Although menstrual leave is a legal right in some countries, such as Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan, Ms Owen says this tends to operate only in industries where women are very poorly paid, and not competing with men for jobs, such as the garment industry. Global firms, such as the sporting goods giant Nike, that source from these countries adhere to local labour laws allowing women time off when they bleed, but do not extend that right to employees worldwide. Attempts by Italian legislators in 2017 to introduce three days of paid period leave were defeated; critics worried the move would stigmatise Italian women, sending the message that menstruation is a disease.

Further change will require “women in power standing up for other women”, thinks Kate Shepherd Cohen, a menstrual coach based in Cornwall. “Part of that is understanding the menstrual cycle and bringing it out of the shadows. We’re not the same as men but this is how we operate and can do better in business and life. I call this ‘menstrualism’.”