CEO Offers First-Of-Its-Kind Unlimited Sick Days Exclusively For Women
voronaman | Shutterstock One CEO is trying to address a common problem women have in the workplace: sick days. Instead of forcing her all-female staff to take a traditional sick day when hormonal problems caused by periods or menopause are affecting them, she’s offering them unlimited “hormone holidays.”
Sick days are precious currency for workers. Most have very few, meaning they’re always stuck trying to decide if whatever is making them feel bad is actually bad enough to warrant taking the day off. This can be particularly hard for women, who feel bad more frequently due to biological factors completely out of their control. This CEO's policy allows women to take the time they need to recover and feel better without facing any judgment for doing so.
Deborah Mitchell, the CEO of Heaven Skincare, believes that she is the first to implement hormone holidays for women in the U.K.
According to Ed Chatterton of Talker News, Mitchell decided to make the interesting move based on her own experiences. “As a female who has just turned 60, I’ve experienced many hormonal challenges and shifts throughout my life,” she said. “I’ve also spent decades in the workplace and have seen firsthand how isolating and dismissive these conversations can be for women.”
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Chatterton noted that Mitchell’s new policy for her workers can be used for periods, adenomyosis, endometriosis, perimenopause, and menopause. Some people might think that offering unlimited leave like this would lead to a decrease in productivity for the company, but Mitchell insisted the opposite has happened. She argued, “When employees feel their health is ignored or invalidated, they disengage or leave.”
Heaven Skincare only has nine employees, but its small workforce spoke out about how helpful the new policy is for them. Holly Wilkinson, a social media and client relationship executive, said, “In previous jobs I have found it almost taboo to talk about, and you find yourself just saying you’re ill rather than disclosing the full truth that [you’re in a lot] of pain because of your period.”
It’s been proven that things like periods and menopause make it hard for women to work.
A study published in Digital Health pointed out what a big problem dysmenorrhea can be for women in the workforce. Dysmenorrhea is considered “cramp-like pain occurring before and/or during menstruation,” which is “often accompanied by heavy menstrual bleeding.” It impacts as much as 45 to 95% of women, and researchers said that productivity takes a serious hit because of it, with those women often having to take time off to deal with it.
Similarly, Dr. JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, the director of midlife health at UVA Health, explained that women going through menopause can experience symptoms like brain fog, irregular sleep, and mood swings, all of which can affect productivity. “We need to improve our care of menopausal women both with individualized treatment options and address their needs in the workplace,” she added.
Some may be skeptical, but it’s important to make the workplace more equitable for women.
As Chatterton said, Mitchell’s “hormone holiday” policy is still relatively new, so there’s no real data available yet on how effective it might be or how often employees are utilizing it. It would be easy to be skeptical about it, though. With only nine employees, Heaven Skincare doesn’t present the best sample size to test something like this.
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Still, Mitchell is taking an important step in making holding a job more manageable for women. Many women have a hard time functioning when facing changes to their hormonal cycle. Is it really that unreasonable to say that a woman shouldn’t have to come to work when she’s experiencing severe period cramps?
Moreover, there’s a good chance that this wouldn’t even be a conversation if it were men who were affected. The workplace, and society at large, have a way of making conditions as tolerable as possible for men, so they wouldn’t be expected to work if they were in pain. The standard shouldn’t be any different for women.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
