Menstrual literacy still deficient among Spanish women- study

Menstruation does not receive the necessary attention, a new Spanish study has found, despite bill guaranteeing paid menstrual leave.

More than half of the women surveyed in a study, carried out by a team from the Universitat Politècnica de València and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, claim to not have known how to manage their first period.

The study, published in the journal BMC Women’s Health, analysed the information received about menstruation, the desired information and the information that has the greatest impact on how menstruation is experienced, and found that menstrual education in Spain is still deficient.

“Menstruation continues to be treated as an uncomfortable subject that has to be hidden and what is hidden is not talked about, is not investigated, is not legislated and does not receive the necessary attention. And menstrual health requires this attention,” said Sara Sánchez López, a researcher at the INGENIO Institute, a joint centre of the UPV and the CSIC, and lead author of the study.

The study, conducted through an anonymous online questionnaire of more than 4,000 people, addressed issues such as education received about menstruation, emotions experienced during menarche, period care products, economic impact, and social impact, among others.

It found the four most common emotions reported during the first menstruation were embarrassment (23 per cent), worry (20 per cent), fear (16 per cent), and stress (15 per cent).

Additionally, it showed that 35 per cent of the women surveyed did not know much about what their periods were when they first started, with more than half not knowing enough about how to proceed.

“Unfortunately, only five per cent of the people surveyed remember having received this information at school,” Sánchez López noted.

The data indicated that despite all the social changes that have occurred in the last decades, the emotions experienced during first menstruation in Spain have not varied significantly from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

A number of testimonies collected in the study suggested menstruation remains a cause of mockery or derogatory comments.

Rocío Poveda Bautista, a researcher at INGENIO and co-author of the study, said: “The ambiguity of current legislation regarding the contents on menstruation leaves it up to the discretion of the centre or even the teacher how much time to devote to the subject and what contents to include. Often, it is merely named in its biological function as part of human reproduction.”

The study highlighted the need for reliable and accessible information on how to manage menstrual pain, symptoms of endometriosis and other similar disorders, concluding that more knowledge is needed about how the menstrual cycle affects the whole body and how it varies throughout life.

“This study is intended to serve as a guideline for the creation of efficient legislative and social measures,” said Santiago Moll López, from the department of applied mathematics at the Universitat Politècnica de València and co-author of the study.

“It is a call to action so that menstrual health education, which is still deficient today, is incorporated into the curriculum, to ensure that every schoolchild in Spain receives basic and reliable information on this topic.”