How pad company Always censored my words to remove 'woman'

An article about periods I helped with was published today with my own words 'neutralised'.

I almost can’t quite believe what I’m about to type.

As some of you know, for the last three weeks I’ve been writing a new section of this newsletter, The Word is Woman. It documents the erasure of women from language and life. My specific focus is on recording instances of other words being used to replace ‘woman’. You can read the first two editions here.

This week I have been busily preparing The Word is Woman #3. Whilst I’ve been working on this, a friend got in touch and said, ‘Seen this?’, regarding an article which has been live on the GoodtoKnow website for the past couple of weeks.

It was a prime candidate for The Word is Woman newsletter because, while it quite rightly suggests that ‘both genders’ (or both sexes, as I would say), should be included in the period conversation, the word ‘women’ gets only one mention (as part of a quote), and girls gets just 3 mentions (twice as part of quotes). The rest of the time it’s ‘kids’ (19) or ‘people’ (4), to the point of obscuring data, for example by saying, “Most people start their periods at the age of 12”. Err, no they don’t.

The interesting thing about this particular article was that I had had a message on instagram from the journalist who wrote it, back in mid August, asking for quotes from me on a number of questions about periods. I was not paid by her but gave her a few hundred words of responses in hopeful exchange for a book plug.