WHO ARE WELLBEING OF WOMEN?
A CHAT WITH REBECCA WHITE, WELLBEING of WOMEN.
We host many incredible women-led businesses in our venue, so in honour of Women’s History Month (which for us is every month), I’ve curated a small interview series to share with the Anomalous community.
Last year, we hosted Wellbeing of Women for a Team Day. The enquiry reference was: “WoW” which I remember assuming stood for World of Warcraft. I was, obviously, very wrong.
Wellbeing of Women is the only UK charity funding ALL of women’s reproductive and gynaecological health. I sat down with campaigns and policy manager Rebecca White to discuss their groundbreaking work in women’s healthcare.
Only blue quoted text is the opinion of Rebecca White (marked RW), the rest is my own.
60 YEARS OF WELLBEING OF WOMEN
WoW is celebrating its 60th year in 2024 (but they don’t look a day over 21 😜).
RW: We’ve got this achievement timeline on our wall. When I look at it, I’m just honestly flabbergasted at how much every single woman in the UK today will have been affected in some way by the research we have funded in our 60 years
Some of this ground-breaking work includes:
Establishing the role of folic acid in pregnancy
The use of ultrasound (imagine pregnancy without it!?)
Discovering the link between HPV and cervical cancer
RW: So those really big breakthroughs, Wellbeing of Women have been responsible for. I feel really proud to work somewhere that's been flying the flag for women’s health for a really long time.
You can find out more about WoW’s impact on women’s health here.
THE “Just a period” CAMPAIGN
A recent WoW project is the Just a Period campaign, with a mission to generate a normalised attitude to periods and tackle the taboo that surrounds them.
RW: So what we know is that so many women and girls are experiencing debilitating symptoms: heavy bleeding, mental health symptoms, pain.
Rebecca revealed that the use of the term “severe” pain may make certain women feel that their pain isn’t “severe enough” - raise your hand if you’ve been a victim of this! ✋
RW: What we’re finding is, when people speak about these things and go to their workplace, school, their partners, even their doctors, they’re told it's “just a period” and “it's just part of being a woman.”
And we’re saying, actually no, it’s not normal. If you are having symptoms that are impacting the way you live your life, or that mean you have to change your daily routines, you shouldn’t have to live with those symptoms.
And there are treatments that can help.
So we try to encourage women and girls to recognise if their symptoms aren’t normal, or if they’re impacting their lives, and give them the tools to empower them to seek help and make sure they get the help they need.
This campaign is a shining example of WoW’s work to save and change the lives of women.
Periods are as natural as it gets, and they’ve been around since the dawn of humankind.
If we can’t begin to generate a feeling of comfort, normalisation and, dare I say, PRIDE around a critical variable for human life itself, then stop the world. I wanna get off.
The reality of this country’s health equality is still nowhere near what it should be, but its of great comfort to know that WoW are doing important work to close that gap.
Find out more about the Just a Period campaign here.
The importance of safe and inclusive spaces for women
At Anomalous, we pride ourselves on being a safe and inclusive space for all walks of life; I was interested to know what WoW considered when thinking about safe spaces for women from a healthcare perspective.
Rebecca shared that a key pillar for Wellbeing of Women is “tackling the shame, stigma and silence that surrounds women’s health”. This unfortunate concept isn’t helped by the fact that most systems, spaces and even infrastructure are designed with the male body in mind.
RW: You can feel very uncomfortable in these places and feel as though you have to hide. It's a mental workload.
It also means we aren’t speaking about it, so we could have really heavy debilitating periods and we’re hiding from it instead of speaking about it.
And if you look at the way infrastructure is designed: if you’re someone with a heavy period and you use a moon cup, you don’t wanna be in a toilet space where you have to come out of the cubicle, go and wash it, and then come back in.
So even the way that spaces are designed are not built for that kind of female body default.
I did a quick mental count before happily realising only two out of nine toilets at Anomalous don’t contain a private sink. This level of privacy is crucial, however, and easily forgotten in most public bathrooms.
It seems that tackling this shame, stigma and silence is the key to increasing inclusivity and safety. If women don’t feel empowered or confident enough to seek help, they won’t have access to the ground-breaking research that WoW has funded.
RW: We’ve been pioneering research for the last 60 years and made some major advancements; but if you’re not getting women seeking help in the first place, then you’ve created a blockade before you even get to medical problems being dealt with.
A critical part of increasing inclusivity for women comes down to understanding, which can be achieved through education - and not just for the people who experience the symptoms themselves.
RW: We don’t need to talk about the scary symptoms at the very early stages, but we think that young girls should be taught around what’s normal, to look for things that are abnormal and get that help. Boys need to understand that stuff too.
Because you’re gonna have either a girlfriend, a mum, a daughter or a sister. You’ve got women in your life - you might line manage someone who has these issues as a man, and it’s your responsibility to understand those issues and be as supportive as possible and to help every woman thrive.
What’s next for Wellbeing of women?
It was a privilege to chat to a key member of such a trailblazing charity. In a world where it’s often a struggle to be a woman, I felt very uplifted after speaking with Rebecca.
It’s nice to be reminded sometimes that there are teams of people fighting your corner, and dedicating their lives to ensuring that we do better as a society for women.
Thank you, WoW!
RW: We’ve been around for sixty years and had some amazing, ground-breaking research in that time, more recently, establishing that the Covid-19 vaccine is safe in pregnancy.
We’re also pioneering the first ever non-hormonal, non-surgical treatment for endometriosis which could be game-changing for millions of women.
But beyond research in our 60th year, we still know that the UK has the biggest gender health gap in the G20, and we think a huge part of this comes down to the stigma that surrounds women’s health, which leads to shame, which leads to silence.
We’re committed to tackling shame, stigma and silence in our 60th year. We wanna get everyone speaking about women’s health issues, bringing all of those things that are traditionally kept hidden away out into the open.
Waving our tampons proudly, speaking about heavy menstrual bleeding, discussing brain fog around menopause or the fact that you might get hot flushes. Making it okay to have urinary incontinence, or to talk about how we can strengthen our pelvic floors.
All of these issues that have plagued women and kept them silent, lets get them out there so we can talk about it and get more women the help they need as soon as possible.