Acceso usuarios
Australia
Women’s participation in the labor market continues to be of interest to governments in most nations, yet it is widely acknowledged that women do not participate on equal terms or with equal outcomes to men.
While gender and cultural norms are important determinants of women’s labor market experience, institutional arrangements, and particularly formal labor law, also have a significant influence in shaping women’s work life. Over 2.7 billion women across the world are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. Amongst the 189 economies assessed by the World Bank in 2018, 104 economies were found to have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, while 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace and, in 18 economies, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working. While these and other laws remain a critical focus in achieving gender equality at work, and have received considerable academic and policy attention, menstrual leave and its role as a workplace measure to promote women’s advancements in paid work remains largely unacknowledged and under examined, despite growing interest in the subject, in both academic and public spheres.There are no cross-national global studies of menstrual leave and there is little discussion of its use or implications for workplace gender relations. Available studies primarily focus on the policy’s historical development, including its complex relationship with both pronatalist state agendas and feminist trade union movements. This literature also sheds light on the class implications of menstrual leave, which evidently has the capacity to divide women from men, and each other. Menstrual leave is also rarely addressed in the critical menstrual studies literature, which provides broad analysis on the systemic disconnect between menstruating bodies and public spaces, but seldom engages with menstruation in the workplace, and rarely as a workplace gender equality measure. It is in this context that we argue it is timely to evaluate menstrual leave legislation and policy and its potential role in improving or undermining women’s equality in paid work. Our analysis focuses on the design, motivation and intent embedded in national labor codes and company menstrual leave policies, and the official discourses used to frame their introduction. This is a necessary first step given the lack of empirical literature evaluating the impact of menstrual leave on workplace gender equality
