Why I Talk About Periods, Finance, and Purpose on LinkedIn.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

At the start of 2024, I took a career break. The photo I kept coming back to from that time is me at Machu Picchu — grinning, slightly altitude-sick, and genuinely uncertain about what came next.

I had spent the previous seven-plus years inside a FTSE 100 financial services group. I had been promoted several times, led teams, sat in strategy meetings, and genuinely cared about the work. I left not because it was wrong, but because I wanted to ask myself — properly, with time and space to think — what I actually wanted to do.

Two questions became the frame:

What impact do I actually want to have through my work?

Where and how do I want to do that?

What became clear

Three things emerged from that period of reflection, and they have shaped everything since.

The first was freedom. Not freedom from responsibility — I had learned to love responsibility and found it energising. But freedom to work from anywhere, to connect with people globally, to bring insights from travel and different cultures into how I think. Freedom to not be in the same city or the same building every day.

The second was meaningful impact. I wanted, looking back in ten years or from a much later vantage point, to feel that I had genuinely made a difference. Not in a vague, aspirational way, but in a specific, traceable way — through business strategy and solution design that actually changed outcomes for real people.

The third was focused change. I wanted to work on problems that genuinely mattered to me, in areas where I had real expertise and real conviction. Not just where there was opportunity, but where opportunity and belief coincided.

The problems I wanted to solve

Every business podcast I had ever listened to said to write down the problems you want to solve. So I did.

People being wealthier. My years in financial services showed me how profoundly wealth shapes life outcomes — what healthcare you can access, what education your children receive, what options you have when things go wrong. I believe financial education and access can and should be more democratically distributed. That conviction comes from watching the gap between people who understand financial tools and people who do not — and seeing what that gap costs the people on the wrong side of it.

People living more fulfilling lives. In a world drowning in productivity pressure and constant doing, purpose and genuine connection matter more than ever. I wanted to explore how we design organisations, products, and careers that feel meaningful — not just efficient.

Period pain. This one is personal. I spent years managing pain that was severe enough to affect my ability to work and live normally — and for most of that time, I was not adequately supported by either the healthcare system or the workplaces I was in. We can send people to space. Women are still managing crippling monthly pain largely in silence. That gap is not acceptable.

Why these are the same thing

What looks like three separate topics is actually one coherent framework — which is also how I think about customer strategy and proposition design.

Everything starts with identifying real human problems. Not assumed ones, not theoretical ones, but the ones that actually exist in the lives of real people and create real consequences.

Then the question is: what better outcomes could we create? And what solutions are possible — given what exists, what is technically feasible, and what people will actually use?

Period pain connects to financial inclusion because menstrual health affects women's earnings, career trajectories, and retirement savings. Financial education connects to purpose because people who understand their financial options have more freedom to make choices that reflect what they actually value. Purpose in work connects to better customer outcomes because organisations that genuinely know what they stand for tend to design better products.

These threads pull in the same direction. That is why I talk about all of them.

The women's savings gap is a design flaw

I work in finance and proposition design. I also talk about menstruation and menopause and the women's savings gap — because these are not separate issues. They are the same issue expressed at different scales.

Period pain and menstrual stigma mean missed school and work days. Menopause symptoms mean career breaks. Medical misdiagnosis means higher out-of-pocket costs. Caregiving expectations mean part-time roles. Pay gaps mean smaller pensions. Over time, this leads to lower income, smaller retirement savings, less investing, less financial resilience, and ultimately a savings gap that is not about behaviour — it is about barriers.

Most financial products were not built with these realities in mind. The savings gap is not a mystery. It is a design flaw. And design flaws have design solutions.

That is why I talk about periods on LinkedIn. Because women's health is a financial issue, and it should be treated like one.