We Need to Talk About Periods at Work.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

I feel a certain apprehension writing this. Which is, of course, part of the problem.

Menstruation affects roughly half the world's population. It happens every month, for decades of a person's life. It influences energy, focus, mood, pain levels, and the ability to simply get through a working day. And yet in most professional environments, it remains almost entirely unspoken — because we have been shushed about it since we were old enough to be embarrassed, and that conditioning does not disappear when you walk into an office.

I want to make the case that this silence is costing us — individually, economically, and in terms of the health outcomes of the women around us. And I want to make it clearly enough that even those who find the topic uncomfortable might stay with me to the end.

The economic cost of saying nothing

Let us start with numbers, because numbers tend to open doors that personal experience alone does not.

The economic cost to the UK of absenteeism due to severe period pain and heavy periods alongside endometriosis, fibroids, and ovarian cysts is estimated at nearly £11 billion per year. That figure comes from a report by the NHS Confederation, CREATE Health Foundation, and London Economics, and it is not a niche figure about a niche group of people. Endometriosis alone affects one in ten women. Period pain is near-universal. These conditions do not pause for work deadlines.

Around 60,000 women in the UK are not in employment because of menopause symptoms, with unemployment due to menopause having a direct economic impact of approximately £1.5 billion per year. The three Ms — menstruation, maternity, and menopause — do not operate in isolation. They are points on the same continuum, each with financial consequences that compound over a lifetime.

What is striking about the £11 billion figure is not just its scale. It is that this cost exists largely in silence. Women are managing it, absorbing it, working through it — and in most cases not saying a word to their employer about what is actually happening.

A survey by Wellbeing of Women found that nearly 60% of women experience severe period pain, more than half said it was difficult to access treatment or support, and 47% said their workplace did not provide adequate support for menstrual health conditions. There is a gap between what women experience and what workplaces are designed to accommodate. That gap is where the £11 billion lives.

The financial inclusion connection

I have written before about the gender pension gap — the fact that women retire on average with significantly less income than men. There are many factors: the pay gap, career breaks for caring, part-time working patterns, auto-enrolment thresholds.

But health is a factor too, and one that does not always get included in the financial inclusion conversation. Women who manage painful conditions through years of their working life are not just experiencing a health problem. They are experiencing a career problem, an earnings problem, and ultimately a retirement problem. The conditions are linked.

This is why I think the conversation about menstrual health in the workplace is also a conversation about financial inclusion. Women who can get the support they need — flexible working, appropriate sick leave, access to diagnosis and treatment — are better able to sustain careers and build financial resilience. Women who cannot are absorbing costs that never appear in the statistics but show up, eventually, in the pension gap.

What workplaces can actually do

This is not about forcing anyone to discuss their health in the workplace. It is about creating conditions where, if a woman is in pain, she does not have to pretend otherwise.

People Management research found that most workplaces do not know how to provide meaningful support for menstrual health conditions, with endometriosis symptoms particularly hard to accommodate within conventional sickness policies. The barriers are largely structural: irregular symptoms that do not fit linear workplace norms, sickness policies that penalise frequent short-term absence, and a culture of silence that means managers do not know enough to ask.

Practical steps are not complicated. Flexible working. Conversations about reasonable adjustments. Menstrual health policies that name the issue directly. Access to occupational health where symptoms are severe. The existence of these policies is also a signal — that this is an organisation where you do not have to hide what is happening to your body.

Initiatives like the BSI workplace menstrual health standard BS 30416:2023 now exist to give employers a framework for this. The standard exists because there was demand for it — from employers who recognised the gap and wanted to close it.

Why sports shows us this matters everywhere

One of the things that has struck me most in looking at this topic is how under-researched it remains even in elite sport — an environment where optimising physical performance is the entire point.

Female athletes compete, train, and peak across different phases of their cycle. The research on how cycle phase affects performance, injury risk, and recovery is still emerging. In most professional sports environments, this remains largely unaccounted for in training design.

If we are not designing for menstrual health in an environment where physical performance is everything, it is perhaps not surprising that we are not designing for it in workplaces either. But the case for doing so is just as strong — and the consequences of not doing so are just as real.

What I want people to take from this

I am not asking anyone to overshare. I am not suggesting that periods should become a standard agenda item in team meetings.

I am suggesting that the silence around menstruation is costing women their health, their careers, and their financial futures. And that breaking that silence — in whatever form feels appropriate in a given context — is both a health intervention and an economic one.

The more comfortable we get with the topic, the better the outcomes for the women navigating it every month. That is good for individuals. It is good for businesses. And it is good for an economy that currently absorbs £11 billion a year in costs that do not have to be as high as they are.