#More companies are adopting paid menstrual leave policies

More companies have recently come out on the side of workplace gender equality, with many announcing a policy allowing women and transgender people paid sick leave for period symptoms.

“Going forward, women at Zomato can avail up to 10 period leaves in a year. This also applies to transgender people working at Zomato,” the company said on Twitter last week. The move to allow up to two workweeks of period leave per year was made in the spirit of “truth and acceptance,” the Indian food and dining platform stated on its website blog.

“This is a part of life, and while we don’t fully understand what women go through, we need to trust them when they say they need to rest this out,” wrote Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s founder and CEO. “I know that menstrual cramps are very painful for a lot of women — and we have to support them through it if we want to build a truly collaborative culture at Zomato.”

Most women in the US will experience some 450 periods in their lifetime. That’s between 1,350 and 2,250 or so days of uncomfortable and often painful symptoms, such as abdominal cramps which range from mild to debilitating; lower back pain; diarrhea and constipation; sore breasts; headache; skin breakouts; bloating; fatigue; mood swings; and poor sleep — sometimes all at once!

Adding insult to injury, menstruation has been the source of misogynistic stigma for many thousands of years, despite the fact that it’s fundamental to life itself. Even today, nearly half of women will experience “period shaming” at some point in their lifetime. Some have lost their jobs over it — which is tragic considering the high cost of female hygiene products, all designed to mitigate pain and embarrassment.

Despite this litany of potential period complications, women are still generally expected to just suck it up. According to a recent study, 32,748 adult women revealed an average loss of 8.9 days per year in workplace productivity due to period symptoms. Researchers deemed “presenteeism,” meaning a culture that encourages workers to show up for work even in a low-functioning state, as the primary contributor to this problem. On the other hand, women who regularly took off work for menstruation-related symptoms were far less common, but their doing so resulted in a lower mean productivity loss of only 1.3 days annually.

The study concluded that “more focus on the impact of [period] symptoms” and “more flexibility” from employers is needed to address the loss of productivity due to presenteeism.

Although Zomato isn’t the first business to offer paid menstrual leave, they are “the most high profile” among those who have, according to CNN.

In fact, menstrual leave and related measures are already established in some parts of the world, such as Japan, where the practice was adopted in WWII.

In 2016, Coexist, a nonprofit firm in England, became among the first to publicly roll out a period policy, claiming that women performed better with time off during their period.

Similar accommodations were recently taken up by the UK women’s pro soccer club, which announced in February that they would begin scheduling training around the menstrual cycles of the players. They cited medical evidence that soft tissue injuries are more common in athletes during their menstrual cycles, due to a rise in estrogen causing too much joint flexibility.

Delhi, India-based Zomato, whose home country has a history of menstruation-related oppression, was praised by many on social media for bringing attention to the “ignored reality” of women’s health. Meanwhile, others are cautious that similar sex-based allowances, such as maternity leave, have prompted employers to can women for insisting on those rights, or deterred them from hiring women altogether — another unfortunate reality of workplace gender discrimination.