Menstrual leave not anti-feminist

In a bold move, the Congress government in Karnataka instituted a policy last week to offer paid menstrual leave to women in formal jobs. This entitles working women between 18 and 52 years old in government and private companies to take one day of menstrual leave every month without a medical certificate. Estimates are that it covers nearly 4 lakh women in the formal sector in the state with some of India’s largest IT, fintech, edutech, and healthcare firms. While the policy leaves out, inexplicably and controversially, millions of women working in the informal sector—often with fewer facilities, such as adequate restrooms, and women doing hard physical labour, such as construction workers—it is a progressive and gender-sensitive step forward. The Siddaramaiah government must extend the policy to cover all working women in all sectors and different kinds of jobs for it to have a comprehensive impact.

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The move has reignited the debate about paid menstrual leave being pro-gender or anti-feminist that arose when Kerala, Odisha, and Bihar instituted similar policies and, importantly, when the union government moved the bill for the Right of Women to Menstrual Leave and Free Access to Menstrual Products in 2022 as an extension of Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The bill proposed three days of paid leave. There have been PILs on the subject too. Governments