Menstruating at work is hardly one of women’s most pressing problems. Or so argues Guardian opinion writer Abi Wilkinson. She’s taken issue with Zambia’s so-called Mother’s Day, one day a month that women can take off for menstruating. Wilkinson says there is good reason to question the logic of this practice since women have fought hard to discourage the notion that a period makes them weak or less able to function fully.
Zambia’s Mother’s Day is reminiscent of the Fast Company story I featured in July that presented the economic case for employers to supply women with sanitary items and for period-talk to be considered less taboo in the workplace. At the time I argued that that line of thinking felt regressive, since working women have managed to scale corporate hierarchies and blast through barriers with little accommodation for even the most disruptive of female traits—the ability to give birth. Asking employers and male co-workers now to be more sensitive to our most mundane attribute felt like speeding backward in time.
Wilkinson entered the argument with a counter-offer: women should receive at least one monthly “pay gap day” to represent women’s pay disparity. Interestingly enough, women in Iceland have been putting this idea into practice for years, albeit with less frequency than Wilkinson suggests. On October 24, they leave work early. This year they trimmed the work day by two hours and 22 minutes or 30% to represent their pay gap. Their message is, essentially: if we were men, we would have earned our entire paycheck by now. The protest spread to France in November.
Women’s pay gap is certainly more worthy of its own “day,” after all, it’s much more painful and persistent than any period.