“We’re Punished Because of Our Biology”: Ashley James on the Shocking Costs of Periods

I must’ve slipped into a time vortex because I’m suddenly 35 and closer to menopause than the start of my periods, yet every time I scuttle to the bathroom with a tampon up my sleeve, I’m thrown back to secondary school, embarrassed and ashamed of my monthly bleed.

Whether it’s tucking keys between our fingers when walking home alone or folding a pad into our palm, as women, our lives are made up of these small gestures. We learn early on to accept that this is just the cost of being a woman. There are literal costs too, and they aren’t cheap.

New research from period and cycle tracker Clue puts a number on it: £20,359 over a lifetime: that’s the estimated amount people who menstruate in the UK spend managing their periods. It’s a staggering figure, but once you start adding it up—pads, tampons, pain relief, emergency purchases, ruined clothes—it makes frustrating sense.

As Ashley James , who’s partnered with Clue to raise awareness of the ‘Cost of Bleeding’ and campaign for change, points out, £20k isn’t just about period products; it’s everything that comes with them. “Since having my kids, my periods are so heavy that I’m always having to replace bed sheets and clothes,” she explains. “And then I’m going through private healthcare testing… like that endometriosis battle that I think so many of us have to go through.” According to the same research, more than a quarter of people are now paying for private healthcare to manage conditions like PCOS or endometriosis, often because NHS wait times are too long. It’s a statistic that shows we’re living in a system where being able to function increasingly depends on what you can afford. “It feels like a financial luxury to be able to function,” agrees Ashley.

We tend to talk about periods as a personal issue, something we have to grin and bear, but the reality is more complex. Nearly 40% of people say they’ve cut back on essentials like food, bills or transport to afford period products. A similar number have resorted to makeshift alternatives like tissues or wipes. “That is so dehumanising… how can we expect women and girls to thrive when their dignity is robbed from them just because they cannot afford basic health needs?”

It’s been just over five years since sanitary products stopped being taxed as luxury goods. As recently as 2020, when the UK economy suffered a record annual slump and ‘austerity’ was shoehorned into seemingly every political speech, women were still paying a ‘tampon tax’ on essential healthcare.

For context, exotic meats, edible cake decorations, and Jaffa Cakes were all zero-rated for VAT. Tampons, by contrast, were subject to a 5% VAT rate, while period pants were taxed at 20% until 2024. “I think there’s a real lack of compassion and understanding about period pains and how much pain that is normal to tolerate,” says Ashley.

“How many of us feel empowered to say, ‘actually, do you know what, I’ve got really bad period pain, I’m not able to come into the office’?” Instead, we push through, and, over time, learn to second-guess our own bodies. I’ve seen this kind of internalised misogyny in real time when a colleague once asked to work from home because of her excruciating period pain (this was pre-pandemic), only for our female boss to audibly scoff.

In Ashley’s case, she lived with severe iron deficiency for two years without even realising, dismissing the exhaustion as the byproduct of work and motherhood. “I felt like I was really tired, but I kind of just put it down to being a new mum… and again I dismissed it,” she says.

The word advocate comes up repeatedly in our conversation. Not just Ashley’s need to self-advocate in healthcare settings, but everywhere. The time it takes to explain symptoms, to be believed, to push for referrals, tests, and, if we’re lucky, answers. Even with private healthcare, Ashley describes it as “still a bit of an uphill battle.” This is one of the least visible costs of menstruation: not just money, but time, energy, and persistence. Add in the mental load, the motherhood penalty, the medical gap, the gender pay gap, and it’s hard to name a space where women aren’t on the back foot.

“I just wrote a book, Bimbo, and it looked at shame and how society and patriarchy kind of strips women of dignity and confidence through shame,” Ashley tells me. “And I think often when something is seen as a woman or girls' issue… we very much view nearly everything through the male gaze and male comfort.” You can see it everywhere, from the blue liquid still used in adverts as a clinical stand-in for blood to the language of “hygiene” around periods, implying something inherently unclean; the instinct is to conceal.

Heaven forbid we make a man mildly uncomfortable.

As we trade teenage ‘shame’ stories—me with my school sleeve wadded with a pad, Ashley playing lookout so a friend could buy sanitary products without being spotted by boys—it becomes clear how early this conditioning starts, and how long it lasts. At 35, I still avoid light clothes if I’m on my period. Ashley remembers a moment she “bled through” on a flight as “mortifying.”

“I feel like it’s all very much seen as something that’s like a dirty taboo secret that we should do in silence,” she says. But silence has consequences; it impacts how seriously pain is taken and how quickly conditions like PCOS and endometriosis are diagnosed, as well as how policies are prioritised, or, more often, not prioritised. It’s why something as basic as access to period products can still feel precarious in objectively rich countries like England and Wales.

“We’re punished because of our biology,” Ashley says. “Which seems crazy when none of us would be here if it weren’t for periods.” There are structural shifts needed: better research, better healthcare, and more supportive workplaces. But there is also a clear starting point: free, accessible period products. “It’s a no-brainer,” Ashley says.

“When you think about the financial implications… how can we expect women and girls to thrive when their health needs are not being met because of money?” We’ve been taught to treat periods as something private, something to manage discreetly. The £20,359 figure doesn’t just expose the financial cost of that silence; it reveals how much we’ve been expected to pay, physically, emotionally, and financially, without question.

Sign the petition today to make period products free and widely available in England.