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On Thursday, the Spanish parliament definitively approved some important reforms on reproductive health, the right to abortion and sexual health. The new law provides, among other things, for the introduction of menstrual leave under medical supervision, a three-day paid leave from work in the event of a disabling menstrual cycle, which could be extended to five days.
The set of pains that accompany menstruation in some women is called dysmenorrhea: it manifests itself with cramps concentrated in the lower abdomen and with pains that can spread to the legs and lower back. Often the cramps are accompanied by nausea, dizziness, intense sweating and episodes of diarrhea. Pains can appear with menstruation or precede them by a few days.
Dysmenorrhea is a very common condition, which mainly affects young women and which tends to decrease with increasing age. There are several studies and research on its diffusion: as far as Spain is concerned, according to data from the Gynecology and Obstetrics Society, dysmenorrhea interferes with the daily activities of about a third of women. Other research estimates that it interferes with the daily activities of about one in five women.
Not being able to take sick leave every month, many women suffering from severe menstrual pain are forced to go to work normally, with severe discomfort and a drop in productivity. A 2017 study published in the British Medical Journal and conducted in the Netherlands on about 33,000 women between the ages of 15 and 45 says that, on average, the female population loses the equivalent of nine days of work or study every year due to the drop in productivity linked to dysmenorrhea.
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The introduction of menstrual leave by law is supported, in the world, by many associations dealing with women’s health and rights, but it exists only in very few countries. In Japan, the law that allows female workers to take days off from work due to menstrual cramps has existed since 1947 and has more recently spread to some regions of China. In 1992, a law was passed in the Indian state of Bihar giving women the right to take two days off work a month, and other similar forms of menstrual leave are found in Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Zambia.
In the rest of the world there have also been some companies that have moved in this direction: in 2007 Nike included menstrual leave for all female employees in its code of conduct and the English company Coexist was the first to do so in the United Kingdom in 2016. Zomato, an Indian multinational that offers online services to search for restaurants and order food at home, had decided to introduce ten days of paid menstrual leave a year for female employees and transgender people in all countries in which it operates in 2020. In announcing it, the founder and CEO of the company Deepinder Goyal had explained that the company wanted to “foster a culture based on trust, truth and acceptance”. Menstrual leave, Goyal said, was also a way to relieve female workers of the embarrassment of having to explain or justify their condition every time: “You should feel free to tell or write to colleagues that you are on menstrual leave that day.”
In Europe, apart from Spain, menstrual leave is not provided for in any state: a bill was presented in Italy in 2016 to guarantee this possibility, but it had never been approved.
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One of the main arguments against the introduction of menstrual leave is that it can make women less competitive on the labor market, that it can become a further reason for discrimination in hiring, and that it can therefore further stimulate their stigmatization. Commenting on the hypothesis that the leave could be introduced in Italy, in 2017 the economist Daniela Piazzalunga on the Washington Post he said that women could “be further penalized both in terms of salary and career advancement”.
During the discussion of the law in Spain, this argument was supported for example by the Minister of Economy Nadia Calviño, vice president of the Spanish government, but Yolanda Díaz, Minister of Labor, had replied that it was, if anything, stigmatizing not to understand «that women and men are different and that the world of work is not neutral”.
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Furthermore, according to some, the leave could end up reinforcing stereotypes about women and their emotional and hormonal state on the days of menstruation. It is certainly true that for centuries superstitions, legends and stereotypes have described menstruation as a disabling phenomenon for women’s lives, justifying the exclusion of women themselves from education, working or public life with various arguments. But it was menstruation in general and not a painful condition linked to some days of the cycle.
The so-called “equality feminism” (or “state feminism”), which is the one that has found the greatest space in institutional politics and which has interpreted the women’s movement in the sense of a female request for greater parity and equality, has in fact led to paradoxical consequences: to the recognition of equality, but not of difference and to the interpretation of a difference (which in any case exists) in an exclusively devaluative sense. “In the rush to put aside a division of roles by now considered outdated and meaningless by most, we have often gone in a paradoxical direction”, you wrote a few years ago on Vice Italy Miriam Goi, «the one in which duties are equalized but not rights; the value of equalities is recognized but not of differences; and it is pretended that women have to handle every task and responsibility in exactly the same way».