Mission & History
Period Equity is a legal organization dedicated to leveraging the traditional tools of policy and legal advocacy, along with thought leadership and media strategy, to achieve menstrual equity.
Our focus is on three core issues—simply stated, “the tax, access, and safety.” We believe that in order to have a fully participatory society, we must have laws and policies that acknowledge and consider menstruation. This necessarily includes ensuring that menstrual products are safe, accessible, and affordable for all who need them.
These are the very tenets of “menstrual equity,” the phrase and frame co-founder Jennifer Weiss-Wolf coined. She wrote the book on it, Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity, published in 2017 and lauded by Gloria Steinem as “the beginning of liberation for us all.”
The Tax: Since 2015, when Cosmopolitan joined our nationwide petition challenging the tampon tax, nine states (CT, FL, IL, NV, NY, RI, OH, UT, and WA) and two cities (Chicago and Denver), as well as Washington, D.C., have permanently eliminated the tax; a tenth, CA, temporarily suspended it. Scores more have introduced legislation to do so. Period Equity launched a nationwide litigation strategy, too: we spearheaded the 2016 lawsuit that led New York State to eliminate the tax; now we have mobilized the legal community and are poised to raise cutting-edge constitutional claims in remaining states.
Access: We catalyzed this agenda in 2016 when we worked in close coordination with the New York City Council on its menstrual equity legislative package requiring free menstrual products in schools, shelters, and jails. Those policies have since been replicated nationally, including in dozens of municipalities and states (AZ, CA, CT, IL, KY, MD, NH, NY, and VA, among others). Congress and the president embraced access, signing into law the first ever federal provision: The FIRST STEP Act of 2018 requires free menstrual products for those incarcerated in the federal prison system. Legislation allowing people to set aside pre-tax dollars to buy menstrual products—a policy we proposed in a 2015 New York Times op-ed—was introduced in Congress several times and then finally passed as part of the 2020 COVID-19 emergency stimulus package.
Safety: Period Equity collaborates with scientists, non-profits, and private attorneys to research litigation strategies, including Proposition 65, directed toward warning consumers, making products safer, pushing for long-term testing, and enabling institutional procurement of safe menstrual supplies, particularly for schoolchildren.
Period Equity goes beyond framing policy interventions: we keep these issues in the news. Working with journalists from around the world, we pitch and place hundreds stories and write many of our own, catalogued on Our Headlines and Our Bylines pages.
We partner with law firms, law schools, legal scholars, national organizations, and grassroots groups to produce resources and advocate for change. And we travel across the U.S. and around the globe to give talks about menstrual equity, participate in panels and protests, and speak out publicly on these and related issues.