Ask A Manager - my male coworkers are insisting on taking “period leave”

[UnWilly]

This is quite interesting both in itself and also for the discussion in comments about whether it is transphobic

www.askamanager.org/2022/05/my-male-coworkers-are-insisting-on-taking-period-leave.html#comments

How the hell does any organisation get itself into that mess?

American Office: Dude your local law is unfair in Americans

Local Organisation: No shit Sherlock!

The End

What country is this where women get period leave?
Do men in America get maternity leave as well depending on the state they're in?

So we have lawyers who either don’t grasp the concept of other countries having different laws - aggravatingly ignorant and arrogant - or are weighing in on what they think is fair, which isn’t really their remit.

And from the women’s rights perspective, doing the very opposite of what they’re purporting to achieve and creating a really discriminatory system: when do the women who need period leave get their extra day of holiday each month?

Interesting.

FWIW I can't see it's transphobic anymore then maternity leave would be. Presumably "men" who have periods can also have period leave.

If we go down the road of it not being fair because not anyone can benefit then the following are also unfair because not everyone needs them:
• disabled parking spaces close to shops
• smoking breaks for smokers
• time off to attend doctors appointments
• special food for vegetarians
• the whole Olympics (short people will never win the high jump)
• bereavement leave

I could go on and on.

@Kendodd South Korea has it - one day a month iirc

If only period leave existed in the UK. Too late for me now, but it would have changed my life 10 years ago.

I don't really get why it's necessary. Surely if your period is making you too ill to work, you should take sick leave?

So, this is utter bullshit! And I second the suggestion of seeking local legal advice.

No, life isn't fair - and pretty much by definition, any attempt to make it fairer will result in some potential for those looking to cheat the system. That doesn't mean we ought to actively encourage them.

Having said that, speaking in my function as a senior manager / non-smoker: I very much do encourage "smoke breaks for non-smokers". While I don't particularly think that smoking is healthy (it isn't) the "spending breaks together / chit-chat / informal information exchange and bonding is an altogether net positive for business and productivity. For that reason alone, I personally love extrovert smoking employees who will take everyone else out with them.

That'll still be a "big fat NOPE" on the subject of men taking period leave, though.

Once every month? How long before you'd be managed out due to absenteeism?

I work for an international company with sites in the US and in Europe and have been involved in discussions around the fact that in the US it's against the law to treat men and women differently. In my case it was about exposure to a chemical that could cause mutations in a foetus. We were considering only having male employees work with the chemical but the Americans thought that was unacceptable. What was mainly interesting was quite how convinced they were that we had to follow their rules and it required quite a senior American expert to say 'they have to perform the risk assessment following their own laws' before they let us proceed.

Presumably the 'you can't treat men and women differently' laws in the US are why they don't have maternity leave (it discriminates against women by forcing them out of the workplace) etc.

... but then, people spend 10 minutes on smoke breaks - with or without the smoking bit. And the benefits apply regardless of nicotine addiction.

They don't take a fun day off to make up for someone else being on their bathroom floor doubled over in pain.

Totally different!

I work for a US company with entities around the world: HQ cannot seem to grasp that US law is not universal. I work in a law-adjacent field, and regularly have to point out that if they try and implement US policy in some of the global entities, they'd be breaking local law. It gets very tiring. I do wonder if UK global companies have the same outlook.

Sick leave is limited in the US. It's almost like Annual Leave in that you sort of choose when to take it and some people 'use up' any unused. (this is from memory so might not be completely technically accurate!) It's not very generous, as per all other types of leave over there...

@Fitterbyfifty, speaking in my function as a Europe-based executive in a global corporation:

The USA are pretty, kindest wording I can think of, fucked up when it comes to sick leave (or any kind of "time off work" for that matter) by European standards.

My US based colleagues have medical leave deducted off their global allowance of "time off".

Thankfully for the rest of us, Global Megacorp Inc. [our employer] doesn't apply that to the rest of us: we get sick leave, bereavement leave, relocation leave, time off in lieu, ... you name it ... in line with local laws.

The US is really not the standard to follow when it comes to employee rights!

I used to read and comment on Ask A Manager daily. I stopped when she published a letter from someone who was terribly het up about Harry Potter - along the lines of, should they keep up their workplace Quidditch team when the author is such a wicked witch? - and she answered the letter with a lot of pompous blather about what a wicked witch JK is.

It was like a switch going off - why am I immersing myself in this American nonsense? Most of the advice on the site seemed sensible, then you get walloped over the head with something like that and really do feel we're two nations separated by a common language.

Interesting if it's now going to eat itself re: period leave.

An interesting read, thanks OP.
It's weird reading the comments - I'm the first to complain about use of phrases like "menstruating people" "people with a uterus" but in the context of being clear when discussing period leave it seemed quite helpful Maybe this sort of language becomes ingrained subliminally.

This comment was interesting and worrying:

"I want to love period leave. I really do.
BUT
I hate period leave in the current climate. It could potentially be used against period having people down the line. There are some messed up Draconian laws being drafted to limit reproductive rights of uterus bearing people. If a person takes period leave for 6 months in a row, skip the leave for 2 or 3 because they’re feeling fine, then start taking it again, will someone look at it and suspect you’ve done something illegal? Will an investigation be started? Will it be tracked and reported to a state agency?
The fact that ‘period leave’ has really started popping up/getting talked about in the US right when Roe v Wade is poised to be thrown out seems really… suspicious? IMHO, in the current climate, less information given to anyone in regard to periods is best. Also, I hate that I’m so suspicious of what should be a good thing."

How does she know her colleagues are “male” and don’t need period leave ? Has she checked their chromosomes? Has she checked to see if they have a uterus? She seems to be making assumptions about her colleagues, here. They could be trans men. They could be non binary. they could be a trans woman experiencing a period minus the bleeding.

I’m being sarcastic, of course, but it is interesting to me how people are magically able to identify men taking the piss when the entire rhetoric at the moment is that biological sex doesn’t exist (or is so complex it can’t be known), and that people’s self identities are sacrosanct.

Yes, that's interesting. I wonder if they'd be able to hold that data for long. (Could be that their symptoms vary and they have irregular cycles, go on and off contraception, etc of course).

I'm the first to complain about use of phrases like "menstruating people" "people with a uterus" but in the context of being clear when discussing period leave it seemed quite helpful

I've actually always thought it's useful when SPECIFICALLY discussing people who are actually menstruating vs people who aren't. E.g. when that is the actual subject of the discussion or study, and not just a clumsy word that is supposed to mean 'woman', because 'woman' wouldn't specify the group in question here clearly enough. I remember quite heated arguments about this some time ago!

This!

This all just seems to be a bit of a race to the bottom. Yes, women have more healthcare challenges, in part due to health care been skewed towards men. Maybe women should just be allowed more sick leave?

If a man had to put up with cramps, nausea, epic migraines each month something would be done about it. But men just have this constant niggle that they are been left out...,

Yes I agree re the language @PrelateChuckles
In this context there is a need to specify a menstruating person and in days past the fact that that person was a woman would be a given. And it's actually quite hard to think of specific wording that isn't very long winded, I suppose constantly saying "woman who is menstruating" and then it gets silly because we all know (or at least used to know) that someone who is menstruating is a woman and a policy like this is intended for women.
I suppose there has been leakage of language in this type of specific instance into general usage and now being used in preference to the word woman and that is where it all goes downhill.

There is still no need for that sort of dehumanising, sex-erasing language (menstruator/menstruating people/person with a uterus etc). When woman/women is not specific enough, then menstruating woman should be used to differentiate a woman who might benefit from period leave from a woman who would don't because she is pregnant or post-menopause.

I've heard before of American companies operating in other countries trying to have the same kinds of rules they would in the US, especially if they have American employees. So I guess that may be a thing, for whatever reason?

It seems to me that the reason this is seen to be troublesome is because it's seen as one identity group being discriminated against, even if that is not the intent, in terms of leave allowances. In the same way that you might see someone say that a certain policy here was discriminatory against women, not because it does so directly, but because the ultimate effect seems to disadvantage women more often.

I think the law in the US, and also other places like the UK, Canada, etc has been moving for some time in a direction that does not accept biological realities as adequate reasons to apply the law differently to different people.