Beyond Biology: How Menstruation Shapes Women’s Experiences of Campus Life

She was a medical student, trained to stay calm under pressure, but during her periods, the hours of standing and walking that clinical postings demanded pushed her body past its limits. “The lecturers just scream at me for not being responsible,” she recalled. She had almost fainted multiple times. But nobody asked her why.

Stories of this nature are not exceptional. Each day, approximately 800 million individuals between the ages of 15 and 49 are menstruating across the world. And for many of them, menstruation, a natural biological process, continues to spell something far more than a monthly inconvenience—in classrooms, in campus corridors, inside examination halls.

It exists as a burden which carries the weight of stigma, silence, institutional neglect and cultural expectation. Universities—at least those in South Asia—are places in which this burden is acutely felt, where young women are expected to perform academically while navigating bodies that their institutions were never designed to accommodate. 

As part of my research on this, I conducted a small survey among 43 women including undergraduates, recent graduates and those who graduated more than 5 years ago from Sri Lankan universities (both government and private). It offers a candid, raw account of navigating menstruation as an undergraduate.

The Burden Before the Campus Life

To understand how menstruation shapes the university life, one must first understand how it is shaped long before a woman arrives at her first lecture. In South Asia, menstruation has historically been—and in many communities continues to be—a topic involving myths, religious prohibition and cultural taboo.

As Patel (2022) points out, menstruating women across the region have faced restrictions on eating certain food, cooking, entering holy places and participating in daily household and community life.

Sri Lanka is no exception. In many Buddhist and Hindu households, menstruating women are discouraged from entering places of worship, touching religious artifacts or participating in religious ceremonies based on the ancient belief that menstruation is impure while many Muslim women, despite having no explicit prohibitions, choose to avoid entering mosques and handling the Quran based on the cultural stigma passed down from generations (Skandakumar, 2025).

A UNICEF and Water Aid study further revealed that 60% of Sri Lankan parents do not allow their daughters to go to school during menstruation while 80% of the teachers included in the study believed that bathing during menstruation is unhealthy.

The responses to the survey conducted reflect this cultural landscape with striking intimacy. Many respondents described their first menstruation as a highly ritualized event which included isolating themselves for several days, bathing conducted at auspicious times, strict dietary restrictions and the careful choice of colours to wear on the prescribed auspicious day for celebration.

“I was kept in a separate room,” one woman recalled, “and my backbone was massaged with a salt-free milk rice pack.” Another recalled being advised to carry a piece of lime as she moved within the house and being forbidden from encountering any male relatives for 4 days.

Some respondents associated the memories of the rituals with much warmth, as moments of feminine solidarity and family celebration. “My friends, my mum—I had a team to support me,” one respondent mentioned. Others, however, noted a quieter undercurrent beneath the ceremony: the instruction to keep quiet about it from then on.

One graduate wrote, “I had the whole coming of age ceremony with close family and felt embarrassed.” “I was told don’t talk about it with males or others, and during school days it was embarrassing, especially with white uniforms.”

The last detail about white school uniforms—captures something that the statistics fail to: the peculiar, grinding anxiety about a body that could betray you at any moment, especially in a public space designed for something entirely different. 

The Campus Body Under Pressure

By the time these women arrived at the university, they had already learned to endure the weight of menstruation and what they found on campus, unfortunately, did not make things easier.

As noted by Polis et al. (2021), a systematic review published in PLOS ONE which drew on 83 studies from across the globe found that dysmenorrhea (painful menstruation) led to university absenteeism, impaired participation, distraction and declining academic performance consistently regardless of the country’s income level.

This is worsened by other factors such as inadequate sanitation facilities which often result in fear of leaking or staining cloths making undergraduate women to adopt strategies such as bunking lectures or taking medication to postpone their periods when exams or assignments are due in order to manage the gap between their biology and their academic obligations.

The mini survey conducted reflects these global patterns with painful consistency. Nearly half—47% reported that menstruation had affected both their concentration and productivity along with their mental and emotional well-being.

40% reported that it had affected their ability to attend lectures. 28% said it had affected them during examinations. 70% identified menstrual pain and cramps as a challenge experienced at university while fatigue and mood changes each affected 53% of respondents.

The open-ended responses provide a human texture to the numbers mentioned above. One respondent wrote of waiting all day to change her sanitary napkin because she found the university washrooms so unclean that she refused to enter them.

Another noted the same, admitting that she wore the same pad for an entire day during lectures for the same reason while adding, with startling understatement, that she had walked all the way to a nearby shopping mall because the university sanitary facilities were “hell” in her words.

An undergraduate who later fainted described a day on which she had been managing a group assignment, attended a family function and reached home at midnight to request one of her friends to take over the next morning, as her period had left her exhausted—only to be refused.

She had then gone to the university the next day, skipping the breakfast due to the chaos and was eventually taken to the hospital, to the distress of those around her where the doctor had noted that gastritis had spiked due to the combination of menstrual fatigue, stress and skipping meals.

When the respondents were asked whether the university provided adequate support for menstruating students, 53% disagreed or strongly disagreed while only 14% agreed or strongly agreed.

It is not drama that strikes one across these accounts, but the sheer ordinariness of endurance. The respondents are not exceptional sufferers but living accounts of what menstruating women in period-hostile environments have been trained to do: absorb the cost in silence and keep moving.

Apart from the fact that the physical infrastructure of most Sri Lankan universities falls short, their social environment does too. Menstruation remains a topic that is whispered rather than spoken plainly and openly across many South Asian campuses. 

The survey conducted captured this institutional dimension acutely. One respondent described being misunderstood by lecturers when she needed to use the washroom often during lectures: “I was wrongly misunderstood as using that as an excuse to go out of classes.” The opening account of the medical student mentioned in this essay is also an example of such where the first assumption of the institutions was that these women were being evasive, rather than acknowledging the fact that they were experiencing a medical reality which their environment had no framework to address.

As a part of their answer to the question on what changes should Sri Lankan universities embrace to make them period-friendly, one respondent noted that she couldn’t even think of not attending a lecture by e-mailing the lecturer that she is on her period.

Yet, depicting the power of individuals to be agents of change, one respondent described how she had managed to turn the taboo topic into a “one of normalcy” by the end of her university life by bravely choosing to be vocal about it among her male peers. The fact that she noted this act as an achievement clearly depicts the reality of the social environment within most Sri Lankan universities from a menstruating student’s point of view. 

What Universities Should Do?

When inquired about the improvements they would like to see, the respondents painted a consistent picture: 79% called for better washroom facilities; 74% requested free or affordable menstrual products; 51% wanted better health services; 42% asked for more understanding from lecturers; 35% asked for education and awareness programmes; 33% asked for efforts to reduce stigma and 28% called for greater flexibility during examinations.

Interestingly, the personal recommendations offered were neither radical nor financially impossible. The respondents requested pad dispensers in university washrooms, for commodes that flush and bidets with reasonable water pressure, for rest rooms with beds for those experiencing heavy bleeding.

One also requested for menstrual leave, not as a special treatment but to “ensure that students with significant menstrual symptoms are not academically disadvantaged because of a normal biological process.”

One respondent offered a vision that is perhaps the sharpest of all. She wrote that, if the culture is to change it should start from the ground up—not just with the undergraduates but with the maintenance staff, security guards and lecturers alike.

Conclusion

Thus, the experiences shared through the survey emphasize that menstruation is not merely a biological event but is something that arrives carrying the weight of culture, of ceremony, of silence and shame. They demonstrate that in Sri Lankan universities, where women are nominally equal participants in academic life, menstruation remains a largely unacknowledged presence. 

The requests of the women who participated in the survey were not meant to attract any sympathy but simply a basic acknowledgement that their bodies exist and that those bodies deserve the same basic consideration as any other.

This is not beyond biology. This is just basic decency.