HR Told Her to "Just Get Through the Month". I Built a Business Case About It.

A woman walks into her HR's office and doesn't say what's actually wrong. She says she's just tired, just having an off week. She's learned, the way most women learn, that naming what's actually happening costs more than staying quiet does.

Her HR officer tells her to push through it, get through the month. Nobody asks why the same week keeps happening, every month, like clockwork.

I've heard some version of that story more times than I can count, through FEMME and through Her Body at Work. Different women, different companies, the same quiet arithmetic: stay silent, or risk being seen as difficult.

The Policy That's Missing

Every company has a maternity policy. Most have thought about parental leave, some about bereavement, a few even about pet loss. Almost none of them have thought about PCOS, endometriosis, or perimenopause. The World Health Organization estimates PCOS affects 8 to 13 percent of women of reproductive age, and endometriosis affects roughly 10 percent, symptoms that show up quietly, every single month, whether anyone's tracking it or not.

That's not an oversight because nobody cares. It's an oversight because nobody's been asked to look. HR builds policy around what gets reported, and women have spent years learning not to report this.

What Gets Normalized, and What Doesn't

Most companies cover a flu shot without a second thought. It's budgeted, scheduled, treated as basic workplace hygiene. Not one company I've worked with has a comparable, normalized response to a condition that affects a woman's ability to concentrate, sit through a meeting, or get out of bed, every month, for years, sometimes decades.

The sanitary pad in an office bathroom is still something people apologize for needing. A PCOS flare that wipes out someone's energy for three days is still something women hide behind "just a bit tired today." We've built HR systems that can flag and support almost every other kind of health event, and somehow missed the one that happens to roughly half the workforce on a predictable cycle.

Why This Is Business Intelligence, Not a Wellness Perk

I call this business intelligence because that's what it actually is. In the largest UK survey of menopausal women to date, run by Savanta ComRes with the Fawcett Society, one in ten women who worked through menopause said they left their job because of their symptoms. Separate research from Benenden Health found UK working women lose an average of 5.5 days a year to menopause-related illness alone. Numbers like that would trigger a policy review in any other part of the business. When they're tied to women's hormonal health, they get filed under "just something women deal with."

Companies already track absence. They already track attrition. They already know something is costing them, they've just never connected it to the right cause. I’m building infrastructure to close that gap, not by asking employers to become clinicians, but by giving them the same kind of clear, structured information they already use to make every other people decision.

Three Questions Worth Asking

If you lead people at your company, here's where I'd start.

Do you know how many of your absence days last year had an undiagnosed or unmanaged hormonal condition behind them? Most companies don't, because nobody's ever asked the question in a way women felt safe answering.

Does your benefits package cover anything for PCOS, endometriosis, or perimenopause specifically, or does it only start once someone is trying to get pregnant?

If a woman on your team needed to name what she was dealing with out loud, would she trust that naming it wouldn't cost her something?

What I Actually Want

A workplace where a woman doesn't have to whisper "just tired" to get through a meeting. Where naming a flare-up costs her nothing, because the system already expected it. Where the next generation of women walks into a job and finds a PCOS policy sitting right next to the maternity one, like it was always supposed to be there.

Not because that's generous. Because it's what happens once a workplace finally sees the whole person showing up, not the edited version she's learned to perform.