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Period Poverty Education
What is Period Poverty?
Period poverty is a global issue affecting women and girls who don't have access to safe, hygienic sanitary products, and/or who are unable to manage their periods with dignity, sometimes due to community stigma and sanction
- Action Aid
What Causes Period Poverty?
In the United States women struggle to achieve adequate menstrual hygiene due to lack of access and lack of income. Two prominent groups that face period poverty are students and homeless women and girls. The “Pink Tax”, or “Tampon Tax”, also contributes to period poverty as well.
- American Medicals Women's Association
Impacts of Period Poverty
Health Issues
Lack of access to period products can cause improper menstrual hygiene. This can lead to diseases like toxic shock syndrome, which can be fatal. Period poverty also forces some women to miss school. This lack of education makes teenage marriage more likely and therefore miscarriages more common.
Stigma
Girls who menstruate are ostracized from basic activities like working, going to school, and socializing. These missed opportunities have an emotional toll and can result in mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
Missing work or school
Without access to menstrual products, many women and girls are forced to miss work or school. In the US, nearly 1 in 5 girls have had to miss school or leave early because of period poverty. 36% of women surveyed have had to miss work.
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Tampon Tax
A regular sales tax that is applied to an item in a category generally considered “non-luxury necessities,” which are typically exempt from sales tax. Women's menstrual products are considered luxury necessities and are taxed as such
Incarcerated
Women
With more than one million women behind bars or under the control of the criminal justice system, women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population increasing at nearly double the rate of men since 1985.
the ab-367 bill
This bill would enact the Menstrual Equity Act of 2021, which would require any California-based school, maintaining a combination of classes from grades 6 to 12, inclusive, to stock at least 50% of the school’s restrooms with free menstrual products at all times, on or before the start of the 2022–23 school year.