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We want to talk about all things periods and how they affect our daily lives as chemists at Oxford. We would love to here your views and opinions:
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Periodically, the podcast that covers all things periods and chemistry!
Each week, over this series of six episodes, we here at the University of Oxford will be taking a deep-dive into just how periods have affected us in tutorials, exams, labs and just generally studying at undergrad. We want to talk about how periods can sometimes just get in the bloody way!
Periodically is funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry Equality and Diversity fund.
Elba - 0:06
Periodically, the podcast that covers all things periods in chemistry. How do the two overlap? Well, here at the University of Oxford, we've been looking into just that. How does having periods have an impact on studying an undergraduate chemistry degree? Over this series of six episodes, we'll be taking a deep dive into just how periods have affected us in tutorials, exams, labs, and just generally studying at undergrad. We want to talk about how periods can sometimes just get in the bloody way. We'd like to give a huge thanks to the RSC Equality and Diversity Fund for supporting this podcast. Your hosts today are...
Manami - 0:40
Hi I'm Manami and I am a second year student.
Josie - 0:44
Hi I'm Josie and I'm a second year student.
Elba - 0:46
Hi I'm Elba and I'm a fourth year student.
Charlie - 0:49
And hi I'm Charlie and I'm a postgraduate student.
Elba - 0:53
We start taking exams pretty much as our periods start so shouldn't there be some consideration for the effects of periods on taking exams? Many people have experienced disruption during exams as a result of period related issues. You can apply for extenuating circumstances but to what length are you really considered? The stigma and embarrassment can sometimes compromise even asking for help in these highly stressful situations.
Manami - 1:17
Dealing with periods during exam time can vary from pain whilst taking the exams, issues with mental health during and prior to the exams and even in some cases they can cause episodes of fainting, this means that the exam can be heavily compromised when the two overlap. This has a knock-on effect and can lead to people taking medication to prevent this situation, which is a drastic measure, just like deciding to be on any form of medication. Could more consideration by the exam board improve the exam experience for 50% of the cohort?
Josie - 1:50
Studies have found that 48.2% of participants had menstrual regularities during exams. This This was reported by the BMC Women's Health Journal and another study done at Arabian Gulf University found that periods affected the examination performance of 51.1% of female students so on average around 50% of students with periods have struggles when taking an exam. Is this something we should be addressing more and should universities be thinking about this when we set exams? From our own experiences exams can be really stressful when coupled with periods. It is clearly a wide ranging issue and even with our focus group we have heard lots of different situations which have been caused in some way by periods. So has anyone here had an exam situation in which having a period has left you at a disadvantage?
Charlie - 2:35
Yeah I had an experience when I was in secondary school so going way back now it was during my A-level exams and my periods were still quite irregular and very heavy at the time and I also wasn't really used to deal with them. I was doing one of the final biology exams when I just automatically just started bleeding everywhere. There was a lot of blood and I was very very embarrassed and I was so self-conscious that I was bleeding everywhere that I completely forgot about my exam for a while and while I was trying to make sure that I hadn't got blood everywhere I then completely forgot to like write, to concentrate on my exam questions and then I eventually tried to come back round to finishing the exam but I was really struggling, I was so worried about what was going on and I ended up leaving the exam hall quite embarrassed and quite upset and I remember I actually came out of the exam hall, my friend asked me, she's like, "Oh my word, like what's going on? I didn't think the exam was that bad." and I was like, "No, no, it's not the exam. My period started." So yeah, I actually remember not doing as well as I wanted to on this exam and I do think it impacted my grade in this situation.
Manami - 3:42
So for me, our first year exams, we call them prelims. During my prelims, on the third day I felt really sick in the evening and I tried to have dinner but couldn't really eat anything and then I tried to have breakfast and then I just threw up so I hadn't eaten properly for the last 24 hours when I walked into the exam and I felt really faint and I was also feeling really sick and I had cramps so I had to sit on the floor before walking into the exam. Others got me some chairs but this was right before the exam and everyone was so stressed. So I spoke to the invigilator, I mentioned how I felt like I might faint in the exam and I was fine during the exam in terms of I didn't faint but I was feeling awful and I did debate either leaving or carrying on and I did decide to power on through but as you might be able to guess the exam didn't go very well so yeah that was not a very good experience for me.
Josie - 4:36
That sounds like a really horrible situation, I'm really sorry that had to go through that. It is clear that periods can have quite extreme consequences in exam settings so it's very important for us to be discussing this. Manami, did the examiners take your issues into consideration?.
Manami - 4:51
So I put in a mitigating circumstances form and I had to communicate with college to get this done as well. So yeah the impacts were considered but no appropriate adjustment could be made so I just needed like two more percent that didn't happen for me.
Elba - 5:09
Yes, I think the mitigating circumstances, I can only speak for the experience here at Oxford, is a very stressful process to go through because it's not transparent at all. For chemistry, if you apply for mitigating circumstances for your first year exams, for prelims, you'll find out because the first year is taken separately to the rest of your degree. But if you submit mitigating circumstances in second year or third year, you don't actually find out whether they've even been considered until the end of your fourth year when you've finished your degree. So I had to submit mitigating circumstances for some exams and I don't know whether that will actually be taken into consideration, whether those exams will count, whether they will be lenient on certain things until the end of my fourth year and I think this creates a lot of stress for people when you usually submit mitigating circumstances because of things that are already very stressful so it's just kind of adding to something and drags it on for even up to three years. The mitigating circumstances process is also not transparent in the sense that you don't know who's sitting on the board, you don't know what they consider, there's no way for you to really find out more about the process and it can often feel like they're just sort of brushing it under the carpet because not being able to talk to anyone about it and not being able to really understand how these decisions are being made feels like they're not actually being considered properly, even if perhaps they are. But I think if we could understand a bit more about the process, maybe we'd feel like we're actually being listened to a little bit more and I think the mitigating circumstances to submit them, you often have to get a letter of support from your college, which means that maybe one college will say yes, we'll support you in writing a letter if for example, your issue was periods, but maybe someone at a different college doesn't deem that issue to be something that the college will support. So it's also so different based on what college you're at, what exams you're sitting, what school, what department you're in, can really affect how seriously your mitigating circumstances are actually considered.
Josie - 7:17
Do either of you feel like these experiences have affected you later in subsequent exams?
Charlie - 7:23
Yeah. So when I had my experience when I was in A level, this was kind of like the first instance it was like the first time that like my periods had really like kind of stressed me out in an exam situation. I had been slightly worried about it prior to the exam just because I knew that my periods were heavy but because the exam season at A-level is so long it's that like I knew I would get a period at some point during the exams. But also this is something that like when I started to go to uni and knowing that at uni I had like in first year I had like exams before Christmas and after Christmas and then kind of carries on that way up until fourth year. I was very worried about this happening again so it kind of became something that I considered going on contraception for. I was considering contraception at the time anyway but I think this kind of helped me kind of decide that I was going to actually start taking the pill which does give you a little bit more control over when the periods are but yeah it was definitely something that I did experience and I think going on the pill did help me at the time and I talk about this in another episode a bit more but it was kind of like a quick fix for that situation and in the long term I actually think that I didn't enjoy being on the pill that much but it did help me in terms of the anxiety I had from my exams and coming on my period during the exams was decreased.
Josie - 8:44
So exams on the day are obviously something we need to think about due to the sudden nature of periods but also has anyone found that having periods has affected the lead up to exams and revising?
Elba - 8:54
During the first year of my undergrad, my mood started to change wildly with my period cycles. The week before I would get my period, I'd have extreme depressive moods where I couldn't even face getting out of bed, let alone do any work and it got to the point where in these weeks before I would get my period, I would just feel like I didn't want to be alive anymore and it's that sense of you know that you're being irrational because you know that you're not going to feel like that in a week's time, but it doesn't take away from that feeling and it's really hard to balance these sort of cycles of your mood with a workload that doesn't allow for off weeks or even off days and how do you explain to your tutors that I can't hand in this piece of work because my period is going to come, so now I'm extremely depressed. Another issue for me was that it felt like something that everyone deals with if they've got a period. Everyone has… half the population has a period so why can't I deal with it? But the problem is that it's not a universal experience and we all deal with it differently.
Josie - 10:02
Clearly periods have large effects on your general workload and tutorials. Do you also feel like they affect your revision and the lead up to exams in that way?
Elba - 10:11
I think everyone plans their revision differently but I often plan revision as this day I'm to cover this topic and then this day I'll cover this topic" but if you suddenly get your period and there are days where you're in a lot of pain and you can't work it just throws off all your careful planning and suddenly you don't feel like you have time to cover those topics and again it just means that like let's say you have a bad week because you're going to get your period then all those topics you haven't covered as much and you think that this is something you can plan since you've had periods for so long but you don't always know when your period's going to come, you don't know how bad the pain will be or how easy it will be for you to work through that. So I think it does heavily impact how you are able to plan revision and how much you have to be able to adapt to situations more than perhaps other students who don't have periods have to.
Josie - 11:00
Is there anything in particular you think the department could do to make periods less of an issue during the exam period?
Manami - 11:06
So the way our degree is structured in first year you have have the opportunity to reset exams. For example, if you failed an exam, that might be due to your period or any other reasons, or if you were ill and you couldn't go to the exam, you have the opportunity to resit the exam. But in second and third year, there isn't a September reset, so if you do badly in the exam, that's kind of it and say you are really ill on the day, you're just going to have to go in and do the paper. So if there were opportunities to reset the exam for whatever reason including periods and just illnesses and everything else that can affect your exam performance that would probably be a very good, not fix, but a good way of helping people who are struggling in that way.
Charlie - 11:57
I think as well it would have really helped me as when I was doing my A-level exams if I could have just been able to like talk to the invigilators about what was going on in situation, I was so embarrassed that I couldn't even think to talk to them and this might be something as well due to how young I was but I think it's something that we've all experienced in a way that we are sometimes embarrassed about what's happened and if I could have talked to the invigilators maybe they would have been able to give me some advice about what to do, maybe like be like let's go like you can go to the toilet now and then like have 10 minutes something come back when you're feeling okay, maybe I don't know, they could just kind of support you a bit more but one of the things that I found that the reason I couldn't talk to the invigilators was just because I was embarrassed so I think if we had something in schools, in universities where we do chat about periods more to the point where we're not scared to to tell someone we're not scared to be like, oh actually is quite big things happened and it's going to affect my exam, instead of just keeping that to ourselves I think that would be really good and something that we could definitely look into and again I think on the lines of making people aware, having training at schools, invigilators, people who sit on exam boards, all these things, having training for them to understand that there are other things that can affect the exam on the day such as periods or even into the lead-up of it I think could be something that could benefit quite a lot of people.
Elba - 13:26
I completely agree with everything Charlie said I think a lot of the issues that we have arise from a lack of understanding and appreciation of other people about the severity of periods and the consequences of periods. I know someone who was told by a tutor that mitigating circumstances were never going to be allowed for something period related because that's not something that they would consider a serious issue and clearly the first thing to do here is that we need to be having more conversations about how periods actually impact us to help people understand that it isn't just "oh it's something you deal with every month and you just do it and move on and your life can continue as normal" and the fact that it is different for every person and just because half the population has a period doesn't mean that for some people periods aren't extreme things. I think this relates back to mitigating circumstances. It would be great to know that there's gonna be at least one woman on the examination board that's gonna look at your mitigating circumstances hoping that maybe they'd have more of an empathetic view on period issues but I think again with the issue of transparency it would be great to know whether people that look at mitigating circumstances receive any training or have any knowledge of how serious these problems really are, not just for periods but for all medical problems really. On the positive side I do think that it's encouraging to see that even in the last five years the number of women on the exam boards for first year has increased from zero to 50%. So that's clearly great to see, but there's still room for improvement in the later years. The examiners follow through with every year group, so hopefully this change of having more women on the exam boards will keep following through and be kept up from now on. I think none of us really know what this exact solution is to all of this. I think it's a change of attitude is the first port of call for most of the things that we'd like to see addressed.
Josie - 15:24
Thank you to all of you for sharing your experiences today. This is such an important issue for us to discuss and hopefully this will serve to start that conversation. Periods are an undeniable part of the lives of so many students and in a degree that is so exam oriented this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Elba - 15:41
Thank you so much for listening, we hope you enjoyed our discussion and hopefully it was relatable for those studying with periods. And for those listening that don't experience periods, we hope you can understand a bit more more about the day-to-day issues they can cause. Please feel free to let us know your thoughts and opinions. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @periodically_ox. Again, we would like to give a huge thanks to the RSC Equality and Diversity Fund for supporting this podcast.