Menstrual Policy as a Compass: Reorientating Workers with Endometriosis

Endometriosis can profoundly shape working lives and career trajectories. Through in-depth interviews and diaries, we explore how 21 women working with endometriosis navigate work and career across different UK employment sectors. Drawing on Ahmed’s concepts of orientations and objects, this study suggests that organizations compel individuals to turn away from bodily needs to face normative temporalities, producing feelings of disorientation and exclusion. Menstrual policy is positioned as a critical tool of reorientation, a means of shifting organizational direction so that bodies are not required to bend toward inflexible norms but rather workplaces turn toward the realities of diverse embodiments.