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The lack of resources and infrastructure in the educational system for menstrual health seriously affects the experience of millions of female students around the world.
School absenteeism is a serious global problem, which has been exacerbated by the conditions imposed by the pandemic. However, before the emergence of this global health crisis, there was another, ever-present but less notorious problem affecting half of the world’s school population.
One of the biggest causes of absenteeism among female students who have reached puberty and older is the menstrual cycle. In 2017, absenteeism of 41% was reported among young girls between ages 11 and 17 in Bangladesh. There was 24% among girls in the same age range in India. In Latin America, UNICEF Mexico reported that 43 % of the female students with a menstrual period prefer not to go to school during their cycle.
“If one of them decides to miss one or two days a month, by the end of the year, that accumulates into an educational lag. The issue of menstrual hygiene is concatenated to many other things, which make girls in high school and undergraduate school decide to leave,” explains Paola Gómez, National Education Officer for UNICEF Mexico, about the problem presented to the percentage of students who express their concerns about attending school during their period.
Why does attending school when having a menstrual period pose a greater difficulty than other conditions such as an upset stomach, a cold, or a headache? The complication does not lie in the PMS symptoms but in the lack of resources in the facilities and the educational structure to maintain the female students’ quality of educational experience during their menstruation.
Without resources or logistics
The biggest obstacle to integrating female students into educational life during their menstrual cycles is the lack of menstrual hygiene resources. Households and school facilities struggle to budget them in. Mostly because of the price and taxes over the items for menstrual health and hygiene.
The social and economic aspect is crucial not only to obtain the right to a period with dignity but also access to education with or without the period. In countries like India, the customs and belief that biological processes such as menstruation make a woman an “impure being” weigh heavily and drag on the integral and equal development of women.
“If there are already girls menstruating at age 9, then menstrual education should start between the ages of 3 and 4.”
In several Africa regions, girls do not have access to sanitary towels or ways to dispose of them or clean them if they are reusable. In México, 23 % of the schools do not have potable water. This problem affects not only the logistics of menstrual health for female students but the overall hygiene of all the population in these affected schools. This problem is not exclusive to developing countries or regions. In England, one of every ten families cannot afford menstrual hygiene products for their daughters. In the United States and Germany, menstrual hygiene products are not considered basic requirements and are taxed as articles of secondary or luxury necessities.
There is no cultural or economic basis for considering periods as part of the daily life of women of study or working age. The logistical deficiencies that this generates deprive millions of girls and women of access to education and a quality educational experience.
Without relevant education
There is still no rubric in education that helps familiarize female students with the menstrual cycle experience and how it can impact their educational lives. Education about women’s health for men is even scarcer. Men’s understanding of the menstrual cycle is rarely above the basics of the biological process. Sex and health education in schools is designed to codify menstruation either as the absence of a pregnancy or the reason why women suffer from physical discomfort or emotional or hormonal imbalances.
Even inside the schools, the conversation about menstruation is almost always segregated in an alienated space-time apart from the educational intention and away from male students and teachers’ ears. Female students are taught about menstruation only to learn how to manage it silently and outside of their aspect as a student or member of the workforce.
“We grow up feeling disgusted with menstruation. Thinking it is something to hide,” says Johana Karis Molina Ortiz, social worker and expert in menstrual health education. Molina explains that one of the most notorious shortcomings of education for health and sex education in schools is that teaching the subject of menstruation is utterly devoid of its social, political, and economic dimensions. It does not question the prejudices or taboos associated with menstruation, nor does it prepare students to overcome the psychological impact of these social judgments of their bodies and biological processes.
There are no visualization guides for transgender students who also experience the menstrual cycle, adding one more rung to the set of difficulties faced by non-heteronormal students. All of this constitutes a set of conditions inherently hostile to any student with a body that menstruates. How do we begin to dimension solutions in this terrain?
The need for education with a gender perspective
One of the most determinant factors against ensuring an equitable education is the resistance to integrating a gender perspective into sex education. If teachers and educational staff are limited only to describing biological processes, the female students are deprived of important information about how the social vision of menstruation will affect their experiences and opportunities for the rest of their lives, more notably when men are excluded from these learnings.
The timing of these issues in school also plays against it. By the time the sex or health education curriculum touches on menstruation, many female students have already experienced their menarche. At that moment, both girls and boys are already years behind in developing social and emotional intelligence skills to assimilate the implications of what happens to half of the people in the classroom. The impact on the female students who are not
ready to process their menarche is so pressing that it can also influence how long they remain within the educational system.
“We grow up feeling disgusted with menstruation. Thinking it is something to hide.”
Yarimar Rosa Rodríguez, a clinical psychologist and author of the research, “Menstruation: Experiences, attitudes, and beliefs in Latin America,” sustains a controversial but valuable perspective on when the task of menstrual education should begin. “If there are already girls menstruating at age 9, then menstrual education should start between the ages of 3 and 4.”
According to the psychologist and Doctor in Philosophy, this age for girls is instrumental in breaking down educational parameters that deprive people who have menstruating bodies of sex and health education. There should be conversations and educational integration of all aspects of students’ lives, dealing with the taboos and social myths that separate the female school-age population from access to education.
Social and political awareness of the need for menstrual hygiene resources is also helpful. At the beginning of this year, the United Kingdom finally withdrew the tax that defined menstrual hygiene products as a taxable luxury item. Scotland went one step further by becoming the first country in the world to institute that these products are a fundamental right and should be provided by the state to whoever needs them.
These initiatives are essential to establishing the social practice of a dignified period. They are also a significant help in reducing the extreme poverty that women suffer in greater incidence and eliminate the poverty subsector that disables menstruating people and prevents them from experiencing a period with dignity.
Do you think menstrual education in schools is necessary? Have you noticed an imbalance in your female students’ educational experience due to the lack of resources or logistics that facilitate meeting the student female population’s needs? Do you think this also impacts their educational and job opportunities in the long term? Tell us in the comments section below.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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