Mensuration and inaccessibility

Hello everyone,

I hope you are having a great pre weekend!

Today, something so eye opening happened.

I got selected to attend a public policy program conducted by the state and central govt. of my country and have been attending it for a month or so. Now, I do not carry pads usually with me to work places when i am not shedding my uterine , because even if i have a suprise visit from the uterus, i expect them to have it as a part of the institution.

Today, I got my periods during my classes. For context, I have been working out only since the starting of this year. So my body is very new to working out and thus it's not very used to all the movements and it is very hurtful when I'm not working out.

And I got my periods and I have severe, very severe cramping issues.

And also yesterday I fell down, so my knees are in very bad shape.

I decide to go into the institution that I am currently enrolled in and I ask them for a pad. They don't have it. I find someone else and I ask them again. At a point, I ask, where do I find it? And they do not have a machine. They do not have a sanitary napkin disposable machine!!

So this is annoying me, but also I am bleeding.

So, I decided to go to a shop nearby and get some pads. Surprise, surprise, surprise, there is no shop nearby. So I had to walk 15 minutes with my pain to the shop, get the pad, come back 15 minutes, change it and then sit in the class.

I was infuriated, obviously.

So I decided to go and talk to a professor and my friend suggests that I talk to a female professor about it. I try to find a female professor, but then I do not know any female professor in my institute. The institution's primary thing is not to take classes, but to do research. They are primarily research oriented. That's why even this fellowship has very limited single digit number of students.

So I try to locate a professor, but I can't think of a female professor. Then I go to the website in actual searching of the female professor and out of all the faculties, they had one, only one female professor and she was to an assistant professor who I have never seen in the campus, probably working in some project outside the campus.

This reminded me of the gender disparity that we go through every day. An entire central government institution that is getting help from the state government does not have pad accessibility. I will obviously write an email, but still this was shocking. I couldn't find a female professor working in the central government institution. They do not have accessibility to pad because females do not have accessibility to work in this education institute in the first place.