Menstrual Equity and Menopause Truths with Jennifer Weiss-Wolf | HFYH #121

**Jennifer Weiss-Wolf** (0:00)
Menopause is like a ball of twine, not like a ball of yarn. If you throw it, nothing actually comes, and you have to yank it out, and it gets stuck to each other, and it gets all kinky, and you have to keep unfolding it. That's, to me, what the menopause ecosystem feels like, because everything affects everything else, and creates a really hard thing to unravel.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:20)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture, as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality. Hey, everybody, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright. Welcome back to another episode of HOT For Your Health, where we talk about what's innovative in life, in medicine, in policy, and I get to talk to fascinating people like Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, who is not only a lawyer, but she is a nonprofit leader, currently serving as the Executive Director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Network at NYU Law. You may be aware of her work because she is a prolific advocate and author, writing numerous op-eds, position papers, and really giving words to the about 190 million women and those who love them in this country. So, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today.

**Jennifer Weiss-Wolf** (1:31)
I am so happy to be here.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:34)
You know, I became familiar with your advocacy work through your position with Ms. Magazine and advocacy through modern feminism. And when I go back through some of the topics you've written about, your work really spans the whole lifespan of a woman, because a lot of your work was in periods, right? And up through periods.

**Jennifer Weiss-Wolf** (1:58)
That's where it got started, really, in the women's health space, is menstruation and public policy around menstruation.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:07)
So how did you first become interested? You're a lawyer, you've probably all been, always been interested in advocacy. But how did it really roll forward in women's health?

**Jennifer Weiss-Wolf** (2:18)
I know it's not like most people go to law school thinking that menstruation is the thing that is going to create a pathway for them. I've been, in my entire career as in the legal community and public policy advocacy world, I have been focused on reproductive health and rights, primarily because as somebody who came of professional age in the early 90s, abortion rights were front and center in the country then, and the future of them was under attack then as well. And so that was, I guess, probably a defining moment. I started my career at the ACLU, working at the Reproductive Freedom Project and the Women's Rights Project. And women's rights and gender equity has always been the core of what I do and why I do. But it was only about 10 years ago that menstruation and the idea that menstruation and the way we talk and think and behave when it comes to menstruation could be in the, could be considered a public policy framework and agenda too. That was really new and novel to me. And it was just, it was accidental, as I guess some of the best things in life are. I had stumbled on a social media post by a local, another local mom in the community where I lived. And she and her two daughters who were like a pre-teenager and a teenager at the time, were doing a collection drive of tampons and pads for our local food pantry. It's as simple as that. And I would say that whereas that now seems like something you might hear about kids doing, or you might read about in the news, and you've heard that there have been laws passed to mandate period products in schools or eliminate sales tax on menstrual products. None of that was part of the discourse at the time. This was 2015 And so when I heard about this project, I was really kind of bobsmacked that I hadn't thought about that in any sort of either social way or let alone a systemic way. And that was the first thing that kind of occurred to me when I heard about their project. I definitely wanted to contribute to it and be part of what they were doing. But I had all these questions. I was like, well, why are they doing this for a food pantry that otherwise has a budget for other items? And if these are what their customers and clients and the people who frequent the food pantry need, why is that not part of their proper budget? Why are these two kids out there doing this? Like, what's going on here that there is this seeming disconnect? So, I started to just unpack that because I found it really interesting. And I pretty quickly figured out what public policy channels could be tapped to solve what seemed like a pretty solvable issue to me. And I wrote this big memo because that's what I do. And I started also writing publicly about it.