“Your period is a financial burden on the organisation,”
Obviously, this story is a long one, but that was the crux of the matter. I sat across the table from the narcissistic female manager who delighted in victimising young, intelligent, articulate women, and was stunned. The statement hadn’t come from her. It had come from the seemingly reasonable female Human Resources manager.
I had poured all my energy into my work. I was very good at it, and the data and the feedback reflected that. It was the reason my manager had been gaslighting and bullying me for the past three years, along with anyone else who showed the slightest sign of intelligence; seven resignations in three years tells it’s own tale.
I had come to expect that from her.
I wasn’t prepared for the HR woman.
She frowned at me.
“Can’t you just take some panadol?” she asked.
It was clearly not the time to point out that I had been given five different kinds of painkiller and advised to take them all at once, and to pop in to the hospital for morphine where necessary. One doctor had described my pain as ‘worse than labour’. I came to work on all the days when I could stand upright, and really only missed a couple of days every few months due to inexplicable primary dysmenorrhea.
The fact that I was very good at my job was irrelevant. My manager wanted me gone.
Union delegates told me that it was ludicrous; she couldn’t fire me for having bad periods.
They missed the point.
She had never wanted to fire me.
She wanted me to resign.
She had made my life a living hell. She made no secret of the fact that men were her favourite kind of human, and it was widely acknowledged that if you were young, female, and capable, you were top of the ‘who to victimise today’ list. She sucked the joy out of my dream job.
But all the gaslighting and manipulation, all the overt and covert bullying, all the times she backed me into a corner or told me I was inadequate vanished in the moment that the Human Resources woman spoke.
This was a woman who didn’t know me.
I did resign. I really had no choice.
I have now been symptom free for several months.
Perhaps this condition vanished as mysteriously as it appeared. Or perhaps it is significant that it started after I began working for a woman who enjoys victimising other women. I have no way of knowing for sure.
It was never a situation I could resolve. Countless others have tried and failed.
My only consolation is that it was not my manager that tipped me into resignation; it was the sexism of a woman I didn’t know.