Chemists smash period stigma with a podcast

Manami Imada felt a wave of period cramps come over her as she waited to enter the room to take a major exam at the end of her first year studying chemistry at the University of Oxford in June 2022. “I was crouching on the floor because I just couldn’t stand up,” she says. She told the proctor that she felt ill, “but then I couldn’t really do anything about it. So I just went into the exam.” The pain made it difficult for her to focus. Imada ended up failing the exam and having to retake it later.

“Half of the population have [periods] and just get told to just get on with it,” Imada says. After her exam experience, she says, she didn’t want to stay quiet about how having a period affects her life as a chemistry student. “I wanted it to be a thing that we could talk about.”

When Charlie Simms, a PhD student in the department, sent an email in October 2022 asking for undergraduate chemistry students to share their period experiences on a podcast, Imada volunteered. So did six other young chemists: Amy Berger, Elba Feo, Sofia Olendraru, Lottie Oliver, Josie Sams, and Felicity Smith.

The podcast they created, PERIODically, recently wrapped up a second six-episode season. As of July 2024, the show had racked up a total of over 2,400 episode downloads, not including trailers. About 75% of listeners are in the UK, and another 10% are based in the US, but people from over 60 countries have tuned in to these eight women’s conversations about menstrual health and life as a chemist.

“We started out looking at undergrads in Oxford and then realized from everyone’s responses how much of a big deal this is,” Simms says.

Periodic conversations

Simms’s main thesis work is on molecular photoswitches, but she says she’s also passionate about promoting equity and diversity in the sciences. In fall 2022, she approached chemistry education researcher Michael O’Neill about collaborating on a diversity, equity, and inclusion project.

O’Neill suggested that Simms build on a former student’s master’s thesis examining women’s experiences in Oxford’s undergraduate chemistry curriculum. That earlier work had revealed that the department wasn’t always a friendly place for women on their periods. Simms and O’Neill thought a podcast would be a good platform to raise awareness about the issue.

Chemistry tends to be a demanding academic specialty, and “Oxford is like the extreme of the extreme,” Simms says. The university’s curriculum hasn’t historically given students much room to take breaks, even for physical or mental health concerns. If a student doesn’t feel well during an exam or a lab session, they often must push through or risk falling behind. The exam that Imada failed was fortunately one that allows retakes; for some, you get only one shot, Imada says.

Breaking the Barriers, a 2018 report from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) that examined factors hindering women’s retention and progression in the field, cited inflexible working requirements as one of the barriers women face in academic chemistry careers. The report doesn’t explicitly mention menstruation, but the women of PERIODically believe that acknowledging people’s period-related needs could go a long way to creating a better research culture.

Menstrual health is intertwined with many other aspects of health: reproductive health, mental health, chronic illness, and disability. If people feel empowered to have conversations about periods in the workplace, Simms says, “it becomes a more comfortable place for everyone.”

Having a period while working in the lab carries an extra mental load regardless of how bad the physical symptoms are, Oliver says. Even for something as routine as changing a pad or tampon, “trying to calculate when I need to go to the bathroom, as well as how long I need for this reaction, is like double the amount of work.”

After Simms ran focus-group conversations with the students who responded to her email, the group plotted out six episodes. The students recorded the podcast with the help of a local production company called Story Ninety-Four and financial support from an RSC diversity grant.

The first season aired in May and June 2023. In each episode, three or four hosts discussed how their periods had affected various aspects of their educational experience. They traded stories about gritting their teeth through cramps during exams and marathon laboratory sessions and navigating the trial-and-error process of starting birth control medication to regulate their periods—which often meant coping with side effects while also managing a busy academic schedule. The podcasters also talked about facing down gender stereotypes about being emotional because of their periods. Every team member brought a unique experience to the table.

“It was just us sitting down in a room for an hour and literally just chatting about things,” Smith says.

Along the way, the podcasters offered suggestions in each episode for small changes that the university could make that would have a big positive impact on their working environment—such as more defined breaks and flexibility for taking time off when not feeling well. Olendraru discussed her campaigns for accessible menstrual care on campus, which in part led to the Chemistry Department starting to stock free pads and tampons in women’s bathrooms in fall 2022.

Finding their flow

The podcast won a Women Who Inspire Award from the UK career website Bright Network. The team put the money from the award, plus another RSC grant and some additional funding from the department and the university, toward a second six-episode season, which aired earlier this year.

This time, the group brought guests into the studio to cover more topics at the intersection of reproductive and menstrual health and working in chemistry research. Tiffany Walmsley, who recently finished her PhD in physical chemistry at Oxford, talked about her ordeal with endometriosis. Jenny Burnham of the University of Sheffield talked about pregnancy, miscarriage, and raising a family while working in academia. Sarah Rawe of Technological University Dublin discussed infertility and perimenopause.

The fact that the podcast was able to line up so many guests and ideas for the second season was a very positive sign to Simms and the other members of the group that they had had created a safe and trusted space for chemists from different stages of life to talk about sensitive topics. Students “are literally like that top bit of the iceberg” of how reproductive health intersects with work in the sciences, she says, because menstruation affects people throughout their careers.

Simms says the experience of making PERIODically was incredibly empowering. “My attitude towards my own periods has changed massively,” she says, adding that she has become more in tune with how her cycle affects her mood and productivity. Simms also says she has learned to give herself more grace. “It’s made me a lot more level in terms of my feelings towards my work or productivity,” she says.

In addition, Simms says, the episodes discussing endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome inspired some people she knows, including Feo, to speak to their doctors more frankly about their periods and ask whether their experiences are normal or a sign of something more serious.

Two years after the project began, the PERIODically team members have started to move on to new phases in their careers. But Simms says most of the group still hopes to continue working together in some form to advance period awareness and equity in the sciences.

Smith says she hopes to keep normalizing discussions about menstruation. “I think the conversations to be had about periods are endless,” she says.