The geological period that no one talks about: menstruation in the field

Try typing the phrase ‘period in geosciences’ into Google.

You’ll get something like ‘divisions of geological time’, and how we divide ancient earth time into eras, periods and epochs. We learn about this in the first year and again in every subsequent year of geological training. We are both geochronologists, so this is a topic we are deeply familiar with.

But we are also both women. To us, and every other person who menstruates, period means something else too.

Given the composition of most undergraduate classes, at least half the students are likely to experience menstruation during field training. Or during postgraduate fieldwork or during a research cruise or working in industry etc. Yet, this issue remains unspoken of at best, and taboo at worst.

So unspoken, in fact, that neither of us had ever talked about getting our period in the field, planning for it, or managing it. We had never talked about it with our peers or classmates, let alone mentioned something like this to staff running field training trips.

But as unmentioned as menstruation in the field is, it’s not unique to our experience. It is a global issue of silence.

As soon as we started talking to each other, we started to dig around, and while we did find some very useful and practical guidelines and policies, like this field-teaching primer on toilet stops in the field, we found very little written on this topic. This is remarkable, we think, given how many people it affects and how intrinsic field training, fieldwork and expeditions are to our broad discipline of geosciences.

At the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, we receive funding from a scheme called #AdvancingWomxn – for womxn by womxn. A scheme designed to uplift and fund research by womxn in historically male dominated disciplines. As part of this we run an All Womxn Field Camp. In 2022, we had 22 participants ranging from undergraduate, to postgraduate and staff, all involved in the study of human origins, drawing on the disciplines of geology and archaeology.

On the second night, after everyone had a chance to get to know each other and relax into the setting, we looked at each other and said, “Let’s do this”. Starting the conversation was not easy. But we were surprised that it took very little for every single woman to speak up.

Our participants all reported experiencing menstruation at some point during their field training. They all expressed issues of discomfort, pain, and anxiety which affected their ability to work optimally. Many indicated the inability to openly communicate with lecturers or demonstrators about menstruation-related issues due to the surrounding stigma. No one had a positive experience or good story, but everyone had a story. This didn’t surprise us, but hearing these stories was confronting nonetheless. But the silence was broken.

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