hi everyone I'm Nadia Okamoto I'm 21 years old and a rising junior at Harvard College and I believe that it is a fundamental human right to be able to discover and reach your full potential regardless of a natural need and what could be more natural than menstruation I'm Nadia and I'm here to talk about periods and I know that periods aren't the most common thing to be passionate / like pretty obsessed with for me so I thought I'd share a little bit of a story of why I'm so passionate about periods so my passion for periods comes from a really personal place when I was 16 years old my family experienced living without a home of our own and during this time I talked to homeless women who were in much worse living situations and I was in and through asking them the question what they found most challenging about their living situation I discovered this unaddressed natural need of menstrual hygiene I collected this accidental anthology of their stories of using toilet paper socks brown paper grocery bags cardboard to take care of their periods the moments that stuck with me were when they would show me how they would pull off a piece of cardboard of what they were sitting on take off the edges rub the middle in between their hands and use that as a menstrual pad and hearing these stories catalyzed this sort of possibly unhealthy obsession with period poverty for me and I started googling just wanting to know more about period poverty and through that I decided that I needed to do something about period poverty every time I collected a new fact about the magnitude of this issue the big turning point for me that pushed me to finally take action was when I learned about the tampon tax and the fact that in 2014 40 states in the US had a sales tax on period products considering them luxury items meanwhile products like Rogaine and viagra are considered essential goods right so for me at the age of 16 years old I decided that I needed to do something because America thought that old man hair growth and erections were considered more of a necessity then over half of our population phasing clean confident capable ready to discover and reach their full potential so I started this organization called period the menstrual movement which is now the largest youth friend NGO in women's health in the world we fight period poverty and period stigma through service education and policy so we're distributing period products all around the world we're trying to change the way people think talk and learn about periods and we're now fighting for menstrual equity through policy from the local to the federal level so in the last four years we've addressed over five hundred and ten thousand periods through product distribution and we now have almost 400 registered campus chapters at universities and high schools around the u. s. and abroad so when I started this organization it was really just me and a best friend wanting to take action about periods and when we started my co-founder Vince who you saw in the last picture at 16 years old as a male moderator he didn't even know what menstruation was but fast forward four years we've built this sort of what we call the menstrual movement and this past year I just published my first book called period power a manifesto for the menstrual movement out of this idea that we're no longer just students organizing on weekends for fun but we're this movement that's fighting for social and systemic change so what is the münster movement I define the menstrual movement as the fight for equitable access to menstrual hygiene and eliminating the period Sigma when I think about what the goal of all of this is the angle is not menstrual hygiene at all it's not just about talking about periods and I'm not going to be satisfied if we just end period poverty but the end goal is really gender equality and equity and I want to take a note here that throughout the rest of my speech you'll hear me use the term men Streeters because when I think about gender equality it's not just following this gender binary it's also acknowledging that one not all women men straight but not all men Streeters are women too right but we mustn't be inclusive of the experience of transgender men and people who are non-binary but assigned female at birth might still experience menstruation and when we think about gender equality and why periods become such a big priority issue is we need to be thinking about fighting gender equality in a really intersectional way so the reason I think that the menstrual movement is inherent to our fight to fighting for gender equality is because when we look at how the UN the World Health Organization talked about what makes up gender equality the factors really fall into these three buckets of health care mobility and by that I mean education and economic mobility and governance and I'm kind of gonna walk you through how periods factored into all of these so when we look at health care health care and act equal opportunity in equal gender equality in health care kind of falls into these two buckets of fighting period stigma but also research as well throughout history emotions and pain experience my bench readers has been discounted dismissed or minimized by doctors and I think one of the great examples of this is endometriosis so endometriosis is a condition that 10% of women in America have but the majority of them don't know that they have it because it's really hard to diagnose and a lot of the times when men Schrader's go to a doctor or medical professional and they talk about endometriosis and they talk about excruciating period pain it's discounted or dismissed as cramps right same thing with conditions that might screw around with hormones or things like that and so for us what we're trying to do is fight for this idea that we need to be taking gender specific conditions and their symptoms very seriously but also be pushing forward solutions because for a king like endometriosis that affects so many people in America there is still no cure for it and there are limited options for treatment and this brings me to my next point of some of the importance of fighting for gender specific conditions and solutions to them is getting more women in the medical field it wasn't until 1993 that women were even included in clinical trials by the NIH until 1993 women were treated and thought of as just smaller men my second point is around equal opportunity and access to education and economic mobility periods are the number one reason white girls miss school in developing countries and because a girl's first period often signifies as cultural moment when she can suddenly become a wife and a mother a girl's first period is often the time that marked the time that marks when a girl drops out of school gets married early or undergoes female genital mutilation or social isolation and things like child marriage the magnitude of that issue is still very prevalent still today 15 million underage girls are married each year to put that into context that's about 37,000 girls every day and one of the strongest strategies to pushing and delaying child marriage is by keeping girls in school and how can we do that is by if we eliminate the period Sigmund we we could continue fighting for this idea that when a girl even when she's menstruating can still go to school and still participate equally amongst male peers that's one of the solutions that we can do to we can keep fighting for to keep them in school in the US one in four women in the last year struggled to afford period products do it due to a lack of income and one in five girls miss school due to their period there has been research that shows that period related pain in the United States is a leading cause of absenteeism for girls in the US and so one of the things that we're trying to do within this movement is fight for the idea that period products should be treated as a necessity in st.
Louis alone there's a recent study that came out that said 46 percent of women had to choose between a meal and period products in the last six months and that statistic alone shows that we have so much more work to do both in terms of fighting the systemic barriers as well in the u. s. food stamps and financial assistance programs like that don't acknowledge period products is a necessity either so one of the things we're trying to do is fighting for period products to be accessible in all restrooms whether they be in public schools and shelters in prisons there has been a great resurgence of period product innovation which is akin stream ly important to fighting period poverty because it provides this reusable solution so you see period underwear menstrual cups cloth pads come around and that reusable solution offers this idea that someone doesn't have to be spending ten dollars a month on getting period products anymore but what I want to talk about on this one specifically is that period product innovation is still very much needed in terms of our international aid work right because there currently doesn't exist a product that addresses period poverty for people in rural and rural communities in developing countries because there when there's no there's no constant access to clean water but there's also no waste management system you suddenly can't be distributing disposable or reusable products so a lot of the work that we're trying to do to fight education and economic mobility internationally also comes with figuring out what products were sending out and where we're sending them out and how we can be approaching this in a sustainable way lastly governance and this is my favorite one to talk about and I'm going to talk about governance and sort of equal representation in this both in government and in industry so my first statement is that periods can still be powerful for far too long even though people have been menstruating since the beginning of humankind and over half of the global population menstruates on an average of 40 years of the life their life for a monthly basis periods are still a reason for why women and girls all around the world are hindered from reaching higher decision-making positions and a lot of this is from the belief that when someone is menstruating they're less capable or less likely to be able to fulfill responsibilities in the same way there's this thing called menstrual leave that's practiced in a lot of Asian countries and enforced as a way for women and men traitors to take sick days 25% of a month and it's sort of a double-edged sword because on one hand it's being more understanding of the symptoms and how period pain can be a real hindrance for people especially when they're trying to go about their days but at the same time period period breaks and menstrual leave becomes a reason for why women and girls and men traders aren't being promoted because it's this excuse of 25% of the month they won't be able to fulfill their responsibilities and so this is something we're trying to fight for and just trying to end this stigma and say menstruation is natural it doesn't affect capabilities or ability to fulfill responsibilities and periods can still be powerful this leads me to my next point of periods can be presidential in 2016 it was literally an insult thrown around regularly that Hillary Clinton could not be President because 25% of the time she'd be menstruating which is funny and goes to show the need for more education because Hillary Clinton was a decade too old or so to get her period so a lot of what we're trying to do is just say understand periods but also know that periods shouldn't be a reason for why women can't be President or hold the frontlines of combat in the u.
s.
