Final Insight - The Future of Menstrual Products
- Emma
- Sep 8, 2020
- 13 min read
Throughout this project, we were tasked with finding insights in relation to different areas, hoping to create a wide range of insights, and then narrow the scope to find one original, crystallized insight.
My final insight is:
Government funded research will allow people with authority to rethink policies which encourage healthy menstrual products for the planet and the body.
I will go through my previous insights and decisions that lead me to this final insight.
My First Insights
If you read my first post on this project, Introduction - The Future of Menstrual Products you would have already seen these insights. I came up with these in the very beginning of the project, from limited research. These insights set the foundation for my later insights and interview questions.
Periods will become less and less stigmatized. We can see this already starting to happen from the fact a documentary about menstruation won an Oscar. (See blog 1)
Period products will become more accessible in developing countries, again there are shifts of this being seen already, however they aren’t as good as they could be.
It is becoming more well known the environmental issue period products have.
As the environment issue is more talked about, more companies which produce organic products will be sold in stores. (This is already happening with the Oi products, however I have not seen menstrual cups or period underwear at the supermarket before)
Menstrual cups, discs and period underwear will become more common and more popular as they are reusable, more convenient than other products and are better for the environment. I think this will become more popular through word of mouth as I and I believe in a lot of Westernised places learn which products are the best to use through their mothers, sisters, aunts, friends, and each year I hear more and more talk about these types of products.
If insight 5 comes to fruition, as these products last years at a time, less products will need to be brought. Companies may run out of business due to the change in demand for women needing 1-2 products every decade instead of needing multiple products every month.
This could possibly lead to government funding for these products and them being available for free (through organisations such as family planning) as there is a decrease in demand.
Advertising for period products will become more normalized and not avoid using terms like ‘period’. We can start to see this happen from the THINX ads in the NY subway.
More women will perhaps fully skip their periods. As birth control pills are quite popular among women and allow you to skip your monthly menstruation, “82 percent of sexually active women who were not trying to get pregnant used modern methods of contraception… After prioritisation, the most common contraceptive methods used by sexually active women were the pill (23 percent), the male condom (18 percent) and their partner’s vasectomy (10 percent).” (Ministry of Health. (2019).)
More convenient forms of female contraception will become more popular among women such as the mirena, which could lead to stopping your period altogether. I believe this will become more popular as there is no need to do anything, such as take a daily pill, it is more effective in this sense and less stressful.
New internal products will be made that are able to last longer and be safer because they hold less risk of TSS.
There will be more education around periods and menstruation for women and men. A lot of the projects I researched were around educating all people to de-stigmatize periods and products.
Product packaging will become more neutral and not as femmine. Traditional brand packaging loves using bright pinks and blues and feminne imagery. This is not inclusive to all menstruating people though. Modern brands that have been launched in the past decade have been a lot more gender neutral and not so outwardly feminine. I think this will continue to progress and make its way to the traditional brands and supermarket aisles.
Automation
After these initial insights, I found insights in the area of automation. I felt that automation wasn't a huge topic in terms of the production of menstrual products, and I was more interested in the marketing side of the products at this point. However I think that it is good to think broadly and in terms of different contexts as it helps me be more open-minded, especially at the beginning of the project.
Automation: A process or procedure that requires minimal human attention, where machinery such as robots do the tasks for us.
Automated machines will be making products. Could be customised cups, or other products.
Self cleaning, if it can go in the toilet and disintegrate it could be a hands free action. Or there could be ways or your cup disposing blood hands free such as the flex disc does.
Automated machines for the disposal and composting of products and self cleaning of the disposal units.
App which could tell you when you need to change things
If automated machines are implemented in developing countries, people could lose their jobs and have nothing to do.
A lot of the modern brands that are coming out have not much to do with automation it seems, people have been given jobs by these smaller companies such as packaging and stocking, sending. It seems like automation would have a negative effect on these.
With things like automated shopping, this could also have a reverse impact on destigmatising periods as people will be able to sneakily buy things. This could make people more comfortable buying things, but it also reverts back to olden times when women used to pick up products from baskets and put in money. It’s not helping destigmatize periods.
You could customise your own packaging for your cups or boxes to store things, like the cutter thing Hans made but with packaging. This isn’t a new thing but I’ve never seen it within the menstruation community and it could make it your own thing, because you own your period, no one else. It also could be better than the overly femmine product packaging you find in stores today.
I felt that automation would have a negative effect on jobs, especially within a developing country. This was after watching the Netflix documentary Period. End of Sentence.
Sustainability and climate change
The next area of focus was sustainability and climate change. This area was much more obviously suited to my topic, as many sustainable menstrual product brands have started in recent years.
I based these insights off gatherings from my precedents particularly focusing on the need of awareness and starting conversations on menstrual health; The more talk there will be, the less stigmatisation there will be around it, "the personal is the political" (Hanisch, C. (1970).) it is not an individual problem but a collective, and menstruating people and others will feel more comfortable talking about menstruation and this can lead to:
More questions being raised about what chemicals are in period products
People switching to organic, decomposable products or reusable ones, decline in plastic waste
More research into products that help symptoms of periods
More questions about developing countries and what they have in place for period products
Non profit organisations will be able to help developing countries and period poverty by giving out reusable kits.
Men will be involved in conversations about menstruation, can help deepen people’s understandings, and mean that women feel comfortable going to men for help if needed (eg. a daughter can ask her dad to buy her supplies)
Involving everyone in the conversation also means that systems such as in Nepal where women have to bleed out in huts for a week, or where women cannot enter places of worship or where it’s easier for girls to skip or drop out of school can be questioned, myths revolving around women being ‘impure’ will be debunked. Therefore access to safe and reusable products will increase.
More and more women switching to contraceptive methods that may skip or stop your period will reduce plastic waste
If there are custom products that could be made and ordered such as custom menstrual cups, then products will be made to order, not in mass bulk.
People don’t have to hide their products, hide buying them, feel uncomfortable buying products off a male checker. There is more understanding between the silence in the form of discretion and silence in the form of shame. (eg. buying toilet paper and displaying it in the bathroom)
I felt that these insights were not very original, I think anyone would be able to come up with these insights after some research. I needed to look beneath the surface.
I took the main idea that people need to talk about menstruation and thought about how this could happen:
Neutralise packaging, overtly femmenine packaging makes it feel as though menstruation is only for women (people that don’t identify as female may feel uncomfortable) and only for women to talk about.
Realistic advertising, advertising which shows red blood, stains etc. This is an example also where men need to empathise and understand menstruation (eg. the THINX ads where initially, they didn’t agree to the advertisement saying ‘period’ or the use of fruit as a symbol for the vagina.)
Teaching in primary schools needs to be non-segregated. Males need to understand what menstruation is and the reality of it, so they can empathise. Just because you don’t experience it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
It needs to be government or non profit company based, commercialized products only look for profit, supermarkets take disposable products as people keep coming back.
These insights are more about what needs to happen and not what will happen. After doing my interviews, I narrowed these insights and made them more about what will happen in the future based off of my interviews, precedents, and research.
The 3 insights I came up with were,
Along with the generational, cultural shift taking place, marketing of menstrual products will be gender neutral and more realistic to provide empathy to menstruators and allow conversations to start while providing a realistic understanding of the menstrual process.
Government funded research on all areas of menstrual health will provide academic, unbiased integrity, with sustained evidence allowing people with authoritative power to rethink policies and produce products that are sustainably healthy for the environment and the body.
Educational institutions will provide integrated learning of menstrual and sexual health and the wide array of products available to allow all people to empathise, gain understanding and drive sustained change of the gender taboos and environmental issues in place.
From here I needed to choose 1. I created a sheet and ranked them against 3 categories; Originality, Usefulness, and Believability. These qualities are key in deciding whether my insights would be exciting, plausible and useful for people to know.
Originality: Is the insight non-obvious? Is it surprising and unfamiliar? Provides something new to the domain.
Usefulness: Is the insight useful to a collective? Does it inspire action and discussion?
Believability: Is the insight plausible, backed by evidence?
Insight 1
Along with the generational, cultural shift taking place, marketing of menstrual products will be gender neutral and more realistic to provide empathy to menstruators and allow conversations to start while providing a realistic understanding of the menstrual process.
Originality: 7/10 I think that this is already being talked about. I think the gender neutral and realistic packaging is easily believable and doesn't have much originality however how the combination of the two can help shape the conversations and empathy involved is more original and a step further.
Usefulness: 8/10. This is incredibly useful to all menstruators and all people. It inspires people to continue and start their own cultural shift in their lives, to starts conversations about menstruation and to allow empathy and understanding which is highly needed in this area.
Believability: (Evidence from interviews)
"We’ve definitely seen a social shift, people are a lot more willing to talk about periods and people are learning a lot about menstrual cups." (Meg Rea, Wā Collective)
"The main struggle for us is that we only really need to sell one product to a customer because then they don’t need to come back to us for ten years, so we put a lot of time and energy into getting the customer and getting them to swap over to a menstrual cup." (Susan Johns, Lunette NZ)
"I mean advertising sanitary wear for instance 30 years ago you’d never see and now certainly in women’s magazines that it is very commonly advertised or even things like IUD that can help with your periods are actually being advertised on social media and on women’s blogs" (Dr. Lisa Meyers, Omnicare)
Insight 2
Government funded research on all areas of menstrual health will provide academic, unbiased integrity, with sustained evidence allowing people with authoritative power to rethink policies and produce products that are sustainably healthy for the environment and the body.
Originality: 9/10. I think this is the most original insight I have but it also is the hardest one to give evidence on, as the lack of evidence from research is the evidence in a sense. Because this is an insight that hasn't already begun happening, it is the most original and interesting one.
Usefulness: 9/10. I think this inspires action among people to continue to push for menstrual health so that governments hear our voices, as is already being done with climate change strikes. It is also useful for companies and producers of products to create healthier and safer products, which can only be provided through unbias research. It is useful to the public to be informed of what's in their products and the longterm effects. It is useful for the governments and eople with political power to realise that their lack of understanding is creating gender biased policies such as tampon taxes and for research to provide the evidence that sanitary wear is a neccessity. This is more interesting to me as it us useful for a wide variety of people and powers, however is a lot to talk about.
Believability: (Evidence from interviews)
"I think most people put up with symptoms for a long time thinking there isn’t anything to be done or are embarrassed and that includes things like heavy periods as well, or people don’t realise that they’re outside of the norm." (Dr. Cathy Dowle, Wadestown Medical Practice) "I think it is the environmental shift, and a lot of stuff like ‘school strike for climate’ and a lot of environmental debates that have been happening recently, and the current state of climate change. It’s in the back of people's minds all the time now" (Meg Rea, Wā Collective)
"I think it looks like a lot more tech and a lot of research being done. Within… the endometriosis space and the menstrual healthcare area, there’s not a lot of research being done for the amount of people that suffer from endometriosis, it’s like equal to the amount of people that have diabetes, yet there’s no research being funded in New Zealand for that at all." (Meg Rea, Wā Collective)
"I think the future of period products is sustainable, I think we’ll see all the plastic options go, I would like to see some production taxes on ones that are thrown away single use, similarly to the way that its pushed to tax things that are single use, disposable and making a lot of rubbish... We want companies to take responsibilty for the way that they're diposed of." (Susan Johns, Lunette NZ)
"That’s the problem with a lot of it, is there’s not a lot of studies, and there’s not a lot of information on the long term effects of these things." (Amber Hassett, Oi)
“Discussion has not been brought up by policy makers or by law makers, it’s been brought up by social movement, that also explains a bit about what’s going on and who is in a position of power.” (Dr. Jacqueline Gaybor, EUR)
“We need solid evidence, we need empirical research, you can only have a serious study about anything when you have enough funding… we need solid evidence, we don’t need studies that are being conducted in two or three months we need empirical and sustained research.” (Dr. Jacqueline Gaybor, EUR)
Insight 3
Educational institutions will provide integrated learning of menstrual and sexual health and the wide array of products available to allow all people to empathise, gain understanding and drive sustained change of the gender taboos and environmental issues in place.
Originality: 5/10. I think this is the least original as in all of my interviews they all said there needs to be more education, so this is an easily believable insight. I think the ideas around sustained change and the impact of integrated learning is more interesting.
Usefulness: 10/10. I think this is the most useful and widely accessible insight as it can be applied to all types of contexts such as developing countries. In all of my interviews, more education was a common theme that was brought up, as well as many precedents to back this issue up. More education leads to more understanding and open conversations which is the foundation of changing the way we see menstruation from all areas.
Believability: (Evidence from interviews)
"I think there’s probably more of a move towards seeing it as it’s absolutely okay for your body if you don’t have a period, if we engineer it so you don’t have a period, that’s fine, it’s not harmful to you and it might have some advantages for you. I think that’s probably a little bit different to ten or fifteen years ago" (Dowle)
"I think it’s perhaps been more widely discussed in school, or it’s more in the media, people are more exposed to it through tv shows, it’s become less kind of a taboo or hidden thing." (Dr. Cathy Dowle, Wadestown Medical Practice) " So rather than shy away from that, the younger generation does not, they are very open. I think this will continue to evolve in schools, in biology classes and reproductive classes and so it’s part of our normal education." (Dr. Lisa Meyers, Omnicare)
"I think more and more women realise the old myths around contraceptives and hormones manipulating cycles and manipulating and stopping periods that the old myths are becoming replaced with education" (Dr. Lisa Meyers, Omnicare)
"Yep, very important because it’s taught in schools and in the general public that it’s part of natural life, that women bleeds and there’s no stigma on it, it’s not that time of the month and everyone walk on eggshells, it’s normal, that will be beneficial, yes definitely. " (Dr. Lisa Meyers, Omnicare)
"Since having sustainably built into the New Zealand and Australian curriculum, I think it's just that push, they’ve got eco-educators at every school now that will say, yes you can recycle but recycling just downgrades the product again, what we wanna see is reusable products, and now we’ve got the sustainable period project education kits, the teachers actually have hands on resources that can be used over and over again, so they can use that same resource kit every year and say look this is a pair of period underwear, these are menstrual cups, these are the sustainable reusable options." (Susan Johns, Lunette NZ)
"I’m pretty sure most schools still do the period talk separately for boys and for girls, it would be awesome for them to cover as much information in the boys session as they do in the girls session." (Susan Johns, Lunette NZ)
From this ranking I chose the second insight related to government funded research. I also felt that the two other insights are apart of research and bringing awareness to menstrual issues. I found myself becoming more interested in the politics behind menstruation and the gender bias laws that exist. I recommend reading Beth Goldblatt and Linda Steele's 2019 article on the discrimination laws in Australia; Bloody Unfair: Inequality related to Menstruation - Considering the Role of Discrimination Law, which can be found here.
From here I had to narrow down my insight and make it easier to read and punchy. I focused on the main message I wanted to get across and the most interesting parts. As I am writing an article and documentary along my insight, my insight does not need to convey everything at once.
I found the most interesting part to be that new policies or changed policies will happen in relation to the production of healthy products.
I feel the most important part is emphasizing government funded research.
This shortened my insight to:
Government funded research will allow people with authority to rethink policies which encourage healthy menstrual products for the planet and the body.
In the next and final blog post on this project, I will showcase my article and documentary and how I chose the most key information to get across.
References
Ministry of Health. (2019). Contraception: Findings from the 2014/15 New Zealand Health Survey. Ministry of Health.
Zehtabchi, R. [Director]. (2018). Period. End of Sentence. [Film]. IMBD.
Goldblatt, B. & Steele, Linda. (2019). Bloody Unfair: Inequality related to Menstruation - Considering the Role of Discrimination Law. Sydney Law Review 293.
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