Chapter 3: Reproductive Issues in Production Spaces: Managing Menstruation, Perimenopause, and Infertility Treatments in the Workplace

At any moment, approximately 800 million people in the world are menstruating (Barron, 2017). Worldwide, around 1.9% of women experience primary infertility (i.e., incapability of having a first biological baby) and 10.5% experience secondary infertility (i.e., incapability of having a biological baby after having at least one other biological child; Mascarenhas, Flaxman, Boerma, Vanderpoel, & Stevens, 2012). Additionally, all menstruators will eventually stop menstruating, either through natural means (i.e., menopause) or other means (e.g., hysterectomy). While all of this is happening, many of these people go to work—and yet, as a field, we are not talking about it.

The purpose of this chapter is to begin the discussion of how reproductive issues, beyond pregnancy and parenting, are an important topic for industrial-organizational (IO) psychology. This is not to suggest that pregnancy and parenting and their interface with work are unimportant. To the contrary, these are important topics that have considerable impact on people’s lives inside and outside the workplace, such as the motherhood penalty (Avellar & Smock, 2003; Budig & Hodges, 2010; Correll, Benard, & Paik, 2007), the fatherhood uplift (Hodges & Budig, 2010), pregnancy stigma (King & Botsford, 2009), and work-family conflict (Allen, Herst, Bruck, & Sutton, 2000; Allen & Martin, 2017). However, in the IO psychology, organizational behavior, and management literatures, little attention has been paid to reproductive health in the workplace. Anecdotal evidence indicates that there are a number of concerns for employees and how their reproductive health intersects with institutional policies and events, in the workplace (Chandler, 2017b; Habersham, 2017) and beyond (Chandler, 2017a; Held, 2018).