[Lahore: Nov 2021]: Swyft logistics, a two year old tech based logistics startup boasting a 30% female workforce pioneered a '[pro]period policy' titled 'Monthlies' permitting employees to take time off during their periods. This would come against the unwarranted need for them to call in 'sick,' during their cycle.
This policy planks off as revolutionary, in light of period discrimination pandemic across the globe. A Chartered Institute of Personnel Development training specialist's survey reported that half of its participants experienced workplace, anti-period stigmas and a third confessed to their co-workers not taking period pain seriously.
CEO of Swyft, Muhammad Uns, claimed that 'monthlies' sought to combat the social stigma:
'I have managed many female members of staff over the years and I have seen women at work who are bent over double because of the pain caused by their periods. Despite this, they feel they cannot go home because they do not class themselves as unwell.“And this is unfair. At Swyft Logistics we are very understanding. If someone is in pain – no matter what kind – they are encouraged to go home. But, for us, we wanted a policy in place which recognises and allows women to take time for their body’s natural cycle without putting this under the label of illness.'
In addition to a local landmark, 'monthlies' condones women to take time off and condemns silence on anatomical cycles. One must praise how it's diligently designed to revamp workplace narratives on women's bodies. Part and parcel of its period policy is Swyft’s precedence afforded to productivity, for research reveals how womens’ productivity plummets and rather, flows in correlation with their menstrual cycle. Hence, workplaces ought to work with that natural flow, instead of against it.
In creating a workplace more sensitized towards women's bodies, Swyft seeks to ward of worrisome stigmas downplaying menstruation as a disease. Indeed, you could use your sick leave to take a day off if needed, but should you take a sick day off if you’re not even sick, to begin with? Menstruation isn’t a state of illness or aberrance: it’s a biological process, brutal and unbearable enough to make you sick, but it is not a sickness in its absoluteness.