Menstruation, womens health, and inequality in the workplace. What is the healthcare industry and corporate environment missing? And who is responsible for fixing it? Let’s talk about it. Read Tra i Leoni’s recap on Period’s latest event in collaboration with Green Light for Business, Women in Business, and Politeia.
Women face a plethora of problems in their daily lives, many of which go under the radar, and most of them are dismissed as unimportant. Above all, women hear the same sentence when they visit any kind of doctor – “it’s all in your head.” On the 3rd of November 2026, students from Bocconi gathered to listen to a scathing analysis of the current state of healthcare for women, the workplace and professional environments, and a glaringly obvious inequality in the most basic necessities.
Joined by these students were special guests – Mariachiara Tirinzini, an activist and cofounder of Eva in Rosso, Federica La Russa, researcher and neuroimmunologist, and finally Dexter Illing, founder of Period. After a brief introduction, one of the most informative panel discussions I have ever had the pleasure of taking part in began. The point of this discussion was clear from the beginning; no words would be held back, and no sugar coating. Multiple student associations came together to talk about topics that we seem to skirt around on a daily basis, and there seemed to be a collective sense of relief and satisfaction when they finally came up.
Women face, as I mentioned earlier, glaringly obvious gaps in all walks of life. In almost every dimension of female life, they come across obstacles that logically have no right being there. If a woman menstruates every month and has no control over a biological process, why should she face inaccessibility to necessary products? If a woman struggles with chronic pain and suffers from other symptoms, why should it take her 15 years to obtain a diagnosis? Those are exactly the questions posed by the two guests. Mariachiara Tirinzoni, through Eva in Rossa, a non-profit that promotes and creates awareness in menstrual education, aimed to question things that we accept as normal in our daily lives. Diagnosed with endometriosis, she spoke of her struggles to obtain that diagnosis after being dismissed by healthcare professionals for the most part of her adult life. Why should we normalize that a woman must work through menstrual pain and bleeding when her male counterpart would be given a sick leave for a cold? Federica La Russa, councilor at She is a Scientist, on the other hand, brought in a much more scientific aspect to the discussion. Her work and research on health policies and gender inequality in STEM shows that women often do not have access to solutions in their daily lives, simply because the connected problems are classified as “B-league”, in her words.
Being Bocconi, with its students and focus on professional life and business activities, the guests also touched on the economic, financial, and administrative side of things. Dex Illing, 19-year-old founder of Period, a startup that provides menstrual products completely for free to students at Bocconi, spoke about how easy it really is to provide a solution. All it takes is a step forward. By obtaining funding through conventional methods (marketing and advertisements), Dex and his organization are able to provide products that are sustainable and accessible, while also donating the same products to women who are unable to obtain said products. If a 19-year-old student completing his degree is able to do it, and create engagement online over his startup while he’s at it, why can’t multinational firms, public buildings, and corporate offices do the same?
Reinforcing the stereotypes, the event was attended by a large majority of women. There were, perhaps, five or six males in the audience, two of them being the guest and the moderator. The guests, in an interactive discussion with the audience, spoke about how it is extremely vital that the battle be extended to everyone, not just women who bleed. Perhaps men feel that these issues and inequalities do not “bleed” into their lives, per se, when the fact is that if women face man-made obstacles, men will find themselves at the same block. When women go to doctors and are asked to describe their period pain on a scale of one to ten, the world is collectively reducing the experience of pain and struggle to a binary scale that, impossibly, makes something so subjective into an objective experience. The guests spoke of how this lack of foresight in the medical industry affects men too, and how it is important that we recognize the failures of the current healthcare system.
At the end of the event, unlike most other panel discussions I have attended, several hands shot up to ask questions to the guests. None of them were confrontational, or even disagreements; they were simply questions from people who were eager to take advantage of the much-awaited opportunity of opening up about these issues. The event went on for much longer than scheduled, but not one person was unhappy with it. If such a stigmatized issue received such an overwhelmingly positive response, perhaps we should rethink why it was stigmatized in the first place.
I will end this article by paraphrasing something that an audience member said – women should not be afraid to open their pads loudly in the bathroom, nor have to hide their tampon when they walk out of the classroom, or look at themselves in a disgusted manner. At the end of the day, it is a human body, and as such it should receive the treatment it deserves.
Dubai-born Indian currently studying politics full-time at Bocconi. More often than not, I find myself debating various political controversies, and each time I wish I had a pen and paper to write about it. My head revolves around politics, football, beer, and the culinary world, so essentially your average Joe.