The Academic Perspective

Periodically is back for season two. We are still going to be talking to you about all things periods and chemistry, but this time we have a twist. This year, we are very grateful to welcome guests onto the podcast from all over the UK. In our next six episodes, our guests will be talking to us about their experiences with menstrual and reproductive health, where we take a deep dive into topics ranging from endometriosis, pregnancy and the menopause to name a few.

Our guests represent a wide range of experiences, and are at different points in their career and we hope this will shed light on the impact that menstruation can have at all points in our lives. We still continue our quest to find out and talk about how menstruation can sometimes just get in the bloody way. This year, we'd like to thank the RSC Inclusion and Diversity Fund, the University of Oxford Chemistry Department and the EPSRC funded OxICFM CDT for supporting the podcast.

Hi and welcome back to a new episode of Periodically Season Two. Your hosts today are me, Charlie, and... Manami. We have another fantastic guest with us today, who we are very excited to introduce. Sat across from us today is the inspiring Dr. Jenny Burnham, who is currently a chemistry teaching specialist at the University of Sheffield. So Jenny, if you would like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm a chemist. I've been a teaching specialist at the University of Sheffield for quite a long time.

Nineteen years, that sounds like a long time. I've done a PhD, I've got two postdocs and they asked me to have a fascinating fact. So I firmly believe that boron is the best element in the periodic table by quite a long way. I would argue that I have a different favourite element, but Boron is pretty good! Boron is best!

So yeah, in today's episode, Jenny will be sharing with us her personal experiences with menstrual and reproductive health and how they've impacted her and her career, particularly her experiences with infertility and miscarriage, as just a quick trigger warning for the rest of the episode. In academia, the average appointment of assistant professors is at age around 37, and this is often the first permanent contract, but sometimes not even that.

Therefore, thinking about having a family can be delayed for some people, especially women in academia. On top of this, reproductive health can also be very complicated. In recognised pregnancies, there is a 15 percent risk of miscarriage, which unfortunately increases with age, along with other complications. All these factors can make family planning process harder and more complicated.

Often the expectations of academics in early years require the ability to travel, work long hours, and work short term contracts. Particularly with travel to conferences and changing institutions, which is sometimes a requirement of particular grants, can make things harder if you either have children or you're planning to have children.

We hope that this episode will shed some light on the challenges that researching and working in chemistry and academia in general can have on those who want to have both a successful academic career and a family. Jenny, thank you for joining us on the podcast today and making the trip down to record with us.

To start with, would you like to point out the first time you realised that menstrual health was impacting your life and career? So it kind of creeps up on you, the life choices. My chemistry career, I finished my PhD in Bristol and it took me to St Andrews, Germany and Oxford, after we all left Bristol and my now husband was based in Sheffield and long distance did not work well for us. So I had the choice of settling down with him or a chemistry career. So that wasn't a choice for me.

I wanted to settle down with him, so I took the first job in chemistry that came up in the Sheffield area. It could have been a graduate job at the civil service because they've got offices in Sheffield, or it could have been a post at Health and Safety Laboratory, which at its time was based in Sheffield, it's now moved out to Buxton. But as it was, it was a teaching assistant post in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield and I've been there ever since!

It was by accident, and when you're planning a career, that sounds rubbish, that you're, how did you end up where you were? Well, it was kind of an accident, but it's worked out really well and that's not very helpful for a young person looking forward, but that's why I ended up where I was. I was 29 when I moved to Sheffield, so I was getting old and I wanted security to start a family and I wanted to start a family.

So, for me and my upbringing, it's traditional, so you need a secure job and you need to be living with your partner and then you need to get married and then you do children. That's not everyone, but that was the way, my mind worked. So we got married when I was 31 and then children did not come immediately. So, I love teaching undergraduate students, students are awesome. Working with them is so much fun. I learn so much from my students.

However, my undergraduate students are not the cleanest in the lab, for perfectly understandable reasons. They are learning, so this is new to them and they're quite young, so they're sort of 19, 20 year olds and so going back to when I started, it was in the mid 2000s. So laboratory and chemical containment was not what we would expect in 2024. So for me, pregnancy and that oozy black stuff and the other chemicals that

were sort of, you could smell in the lab, they were completely incompatible and so working in the labs was not an option whilst I was pregnant. So I've had three pregnancies since I have been in Sheffield and my work identity has been really closely tied to teaching in the second year inorganic lab, that's me. But for three pregnancies, that's three academic years of work, my work at work was different.

So I wasn't doing lots of lab teaching, I was doing lots of not lab teaching, marking and running the lab course from outside of the lab door. So I've been very lucky, and fortunate timing's just worked with my pregnancies to be able to arrange that just happens within the normal workload planning cycles of the academic year, it's just how it's worked.

So devastatingly for me, the first of these pregnancies resulted in a miscarriage and what was worse is that my miscarriage happened fairly early on in the pregnancy and it was in the summer. So the academic work for the next year had been assigned but I wasn't pregnant anymore and it was very obvious that there was a mismatch and it didn't help and it's just weird. I'm really sorry that this is something that you went through.

I think that there's a lot of stuff that we're not really thinking about, in terms of, you know, as you said, you'd actually planned to be pregnant and then when that comes around and you actually end up where you're in this situation kind of limbo, I guess, of assigned work that you're expected to do and then is actually, you know, something that you could do more of, that you wanted to go back into the lab maybe, and go a bit more back to normal, but that's already been sorted out.

I guess that must have been really hard to go through. Going on from this, is there anything that you think that either the society or the workplace could have done to make the experience that you had easier and hopefully for other people that might go through it. We need to talk about miscarriage more when it happens. It's quite common. You can look up the stats. I think it's one in three pregnancies end up in miscarriage. They're nodding, so yes.

It needs to be normal, it needs to be not a taboo subject. So I felt very ashamed that I'd lost my baby and no one should feel ashamed if they lose a baby, it happens, it's common, it happened to me and the more you talk about it, the more you find out, oh, well, it's happened to someone else too and therein we find support for, oh yeah, it happened to me too. It's really shit, isn't it? I also think that higher education need to support pregnancy earlier on in the academic career.

I was 33 when I miscarried. It was a bit of a surprise. I was in the hospital and I saw on the notes there was F33. I was like, Oh, I'm 33 years old. It was a bit of a surprise, I'd not been keeping track. Risk of miscarriages is lowest for under 30s and it rises pretty rapidly after that. So it should be normal for chemistry academics, male and female, to start their families earlier than I did. Those would be two things.

Being able and being normal to start earlier, you're less likely to miscarry and just talking about miscarriage in society normalises it. It's not that secret thing that happened.

I think that with the point you brought up about kind of addressing this earlier is something that I as someone who's going to be 27 soon and not quite sure my like people in my family have started to have babies and stuff like that, not sure I do yet, but I would really like to know that if I wanted to carry on with a career in chemistry academia, how that would be kind of compatible with me perhaps wanting to start a family and that is just something that unless we talked

about, I've had really good experience because I've been able to talk to people like you and ask for your advice, but it's not something that is kind of talked about enough and I think sometimes people almost want to shy away from it because they're like, oh, it's maybe a bit complex or actually, you know, we, kind of want these people just to keep working and working and if we don't tell them about it, then maybe they might not need the help that we should be giving them.

I don't know if the onus is on some kind of institutions to try and start thinking actively about this and then also if they try again and make it a bit more of a environment where this is, you know, comfortable to talk about and more normalized then people are going to feel more comfortable, people are going to be happier at work, you know, they're gonna, yeah, probably be a lot happier in the long term, if you give them some support early on.

One of the things that I found mind blowing, the way you keep in context, so this is context, one of the first tutorial groups that I taught when I first arrived at Sheffield, so bearing in mind I was 29 and so the students would have been 10 years younger than me. I have since found out that one of those, one of those students has got a child that is the same age as one of my kids. This guy, he finished university, he went and got a professional job, settled down, had a family.

Ten years ahead of me in the whole family thing, that's mind blowing for me. Wow. Yeah, there's a lot to consider and it's really interesting hearing you say that.

your side of it because, you know, we're going to be experiencing this at some point and yeah, what you said about miscarriages needing to be a less taboo topic is so true and we just don't learn about it enough and it really needs to be brought up more and mentioned and yeah, something I find interesting which Jenny brought up is how experiences with reproductive and mental health are correlating with points in which we lose a lot of female talent in academia.

Jenny, do you have any thoughts on why we see the first drop around the transition from postdoc to an early careers researcher? We're not stupid, we're quite clever and quite bright because we have the potential to be awesome thinkers because that's what an academic is. So there's a fabulous report, it's called the RSC Breaking the Barriers report. It's excellent, somewhat shocking read about where female talent in academia is lost.

It's published a few years ago, it's pre pandemic so it dates it, but the messages in it still hold true today. You'll read it anyway, yep, yep. Parenthood and the challenges associated with care of children underpin all of the top factors obstructing progression of women in academia. There's the unattractiveness of short term contracts.

I wanted stability, I didn't want to be hopping around looking for a new job every six to nine months, long working hours, how many people spend 10 hours a day in the lab? Well, that doesn't work if the school hours are shorter than that, balancing of responsibilities, you can't just go home and work on a paper because you've got Other things to be doing when they're really small, you've got bedtime and you've got the cooking and the cleaning and it just doesn't work.

You need to be able to balance them and that's a challenge and it just makes the job of being an academic harder and there's societal challenges.

I'm very fortunate, my husband is awesome, but for many people there's gender inequality just as a societal norm, the man works full time and is out of the house and the woman picks up most of the administration to do with the child and the taking the days off when child is ill and so there's the cost of child care which is getting higher and the fact that government subsidy, so political warning, governments, they're all blooming men, aren't they?

Paid for childcare places are only paid for in school term time. Yay! 30 weeks of the year, like there's 52 weeks in the year gentlemen and then there's the availability of childcare and also where the childcare is. I made a mistake, we had a fabulous childminder and she retired and there was a gap between convenient childminders where we lived. So I put my daughter into nursery and it was a nursery on my way to work.

Great, I'll drop off my daughter on my way to work, go to work, pick her up on the way home. It was all fine until I became really quite poorly. I got an infection and I couldn't drive and all I wanted to do was sleep.

So I had the choice of stay home and look after a toddler or go to work somehow with the toddler because actually work was the less option and so the mistake in there is the fact that because of geographically where the nursery was, my husband couldn't drop her off within the drop off time and get to work on time and he couldn't pick her up at the end of the day for the same reasons, so it hadn't even occurred to me until it happened. So there we are, we are not stupid.

In the UK system, you've mentioned it, Charlie, you come to the end of your PhD, we come to the end relatively early, we're still sort of In our 20s. In some societies where everything takes a bit longer, undergraduate courses are longer and then you do a longer master's and then you, PhD is longer, it's more normal to see pregnant PhD students in the lab.

That's just the way it is, but we don't do that in the UK and so that's a thing that some people in your position are faced with the, Oh, I've got the choice. It's either I do a career or I have a family. You should be able to do both, but it's not something that you see very often. So it's not something that you think about. The delights of being a chemistry academic, proper teaching and research academic, is you don't walk straight from your PhD into a lectureship.

I did meet someone, she was a biologist, and she did do that. Oh wow. I know, look at your reaction, oh wow! So, we're expected to do two postdocs.

It's frowned upon to do postdocs in your same institution, you're expected to go somewhere else and if you look at the geography of the UK, you don't get a lot of high quality research institutions all clustered in the same place, unless you're in the, what's it, the central belt in Scotland and you can sort of commute between Glasgow and Edinburgh, or you're in the London area and then you've still got commuting time, so that's really hard.

So you're expected to move institutions which means you're expected to travel. It's okay when you're moving one person, but if you're moving a couple, it's harder and if you're moving a couple with kids, it's harder again. So, you know, we're not stupid, I'll come back to that, we're not stupid. You can see this coming, so people step off the career ladder from that. We're also expected to travel for work.

I'm really happy I've come down to Oxford today, it's really exciting, I've been able to do that because someone else is looking after my kids. If you think about the normal course of being an academic, they go off and they give seminars. So that's a day's travel and seminars typically in the afternoon.

So you're getting back relatively... well after 3:30, you're getting back, so after school pickup time, or you're traveling overnight because the place that you're going to is harder and then you're traveling for conferences and you're traveling for PhD vivas and all of this is related to your normal course of research work, but that travel element, that sort of nipping off for a day here or there, becomes really challenging when you have to factor in the logistics of I've got a small child

to look after, or a medium sized grumpy child that I need to ensure it has something related to a not chocolate diet. Add in the institutions in the UK are geographically widespread, it's unlikely you're going to be living, well maybe you will, but it's possible you're not going to be living in a city or a large town with easy access to grandparents. So where's that overnight stay coming from? And it's not impossible, it just adds to the complexity. So what does I call it?

I call it the challenges of balancing responsibilities. This is the challenge of balancing the responsibility. Who does the drop off and pick up? Who does the care when the work is lasting more than the normal day? So, support networks are essential when you have a child and moving away from work takes you away from that.

I work part time. This was a choice I made when I became a mum. It's what the mum does. We had a conversation, actually, me and my husband, do you want to work part time or shall I? And he was like, ooh, maybe you should, Jenny. Okay. Yep, I'm quite happy to work part time. Just thought I'd raise it. I like working part time and it's made being a mum much easier and my kids, it means I can help my kids do after school activities.

So they've learned to swim in the after school swimming programme and do other clubs and activities and I have been able to spend time with them and working part time has really helped balance the demands of running a house and a family and working in a quite intense job.

I think that's really important to go from how you're talking about the RSC Breaking Barriers Report where, you know, they kind of pinpoint these issues that I guess minority groups and particularly women are facing within progressing in chemistry academia and it to be so much centered around the possibility of wanting to have a family and to start a family and then also to, you know, maintain that and continue with your progression on and I think all the points that you talked

about were things that are so massive and as you say we're not stupid we can see these coming and that seems to be why we're like oh actually if I do want to have a kid in like a couple of years time then maybe I need to do a postdoc in the UK as opposed to a postdoc in Europe but then it's like but the research that I want to do is better in Europe and not maybe somewhere near to where my mum and dad live or something like that.

I think that's like something that is really resonating especially at the moment with me and the fact that you say you know these support networks are essential and a lot of the time people's support networks not always but they do come from family and being close to them is really important and sometimes really essential to be able to, as you say be able to say, Oh, can you come and just look at the kids cause I'm late from work today and yeah, I think when you said that you had the

opportunity to work part time, I think is something that is really great and it's a great option to be able to have. But I think that's something that also we don't know that is an option a lot of the time and I think that's really good to point out, you know, that we can ask our institutions that I would like to work part time and this is why, and I will continue to do all the things that I want to do, but I'm also going to look after my family at the same time.

So yeah, thanks for highlighting all that. It was really, interesting. So I guess it's kind of the drop off that we see in this leaky pipeline, kind of between postdoc and going on to be an early career researcher. But we've also seen that there's a big drop off kind of a bit further along that pipeline, which is getting women into senior management roles. So things that are like heads of department or, you know, those senior leadership situations, we see another drop off.

So do you have any thoughts on why this one is also happening as well? Because we might be able to address the first one, but now we also need to make sure that, you know, we have the longevity of these careers for these women that do actually even make it past the first drop off point.

When the Breaking the Barriers report was written, I looked it up, nine percent of professors were women and things have improved, but not by much and across the UK, they look at their gender pay gap and we have gender pay parity up until child bearing age and at that point things split and men continue and the gender pay gap widens at that point. For me, I know you're saying part time work sounds great. Part time work is a problem for me and my career.

I like part time work but I am coming to realise I've been working part time for 13 years now and I'm coming to realise that it's perhaps damaged my career to the extent that I will never make the next step. So I am senior lecturer level associate professor, I think that could be as far as I get. I'm going to give a health warning here, the problems are much worse for mums who take a career break when their children are born and I can see the logic because we're not stupid.

It's like, why on earth would I carry on working when all of my money and a bit more is going to pay the childcare? So in the immediate term, financially, it's sensible, but you step off the career path completely.

If you choose to go back on, you get back on at the same point that you left it, but maybe five years have passed or even worse you've managed to work up the grade a little bit and you step off and you get another postdoc job but they put you back at the lowest end of the grade so you actually end up worse off and so in the long term if you stop work, you never make up that difference, whereas maybe if you don't spend quite as long time working part time, or if you've got enlightened

management, then they can support you to grow your career proportionally and that's what I'm realising now has not been able to happen for me. So there's another thing, menopause. We talk about the change going through the change. But menopause is now. talked about more in the media and the idea of the perimenopause, rather than just the change, which makes it sound like a snap because it's not like that. Perimenopause is not instant, it lasts for about 10 years.

It sneaks up on you, so you don't realise it started until the symptoms become noticeable that you're like, Oh no, I've actually got a problem. Yeah and it starts sometime in the mid forties, mid to late forties.

I'm 49 now, that's a big number, my symptoms of perimenopause have included crippling anxiety, disturbed sleep, overheating at night, and they're all linked, it's like a vicious circle, so women get grumpy, they get angry, they find things hard, and it creeps up on you until you realise, okay, I've had got a problem, but things have already become hard before that. Ironically, because of the timescales of academia, the perimenopause, late forties, is likely to happen just ah!

About the time you're trying to get your career back on track after having dealt with the I'm having a kid late in my life and when you're feeling just rubbish and tired, the last thing you can really find the energy to do is to leap into a campaign for I need to do that and that and this and you must give me that opportunity. I'm just tired and so it's not great for the career.

There's another point where whilst people can stay in academia, they don't make the leap to the greatness, which is the professorial level, which, you know, it's metrics, it's numbers, we like numbers, we're physical scientists, and we can count very well. Why are the numbers low? Well, the reasons are manifold. We're still there, women, but we're just not quite there.

Yeah, it sounds like you kind of have, not problem after problem, but once you kind of get over the having a baby and then the childcare and then you get the perimenopause and then the menopause and then it just kind of, you don't get a break, do you, from... It all sounds really bad, doesn't it? It does! I've got two awesome kids. They can be grumpy, but they can be amazing.

I work in a lovely department with amazing colleagues, I love my students, I could step out and do a different job, but I don't want to because my job is so rewarding. So there are benefits, like financially, I'm not the professor yet, but there are good bits. Yeah, it's good to hear that there are the positives as well, because it can sound like, quite a lot. You're focusing on the bad bits.

Yeah, there are good bits. Thank you Jenny for making that point. With both of these situations in mind, regarding for trying a baby and then the menopause, are there any reasonable adjustments that you would like to see more in academia or just in the workplace generally? Adjustments. That sounds like evolution slowly, natural selection. I don't want evolution, I want revolution.

For a truly equitable workplace in academia, we need to accommodate every person, regardless, at all stages of their life. There are lots of good sounding words floating about, reasonable adjustments and yet those at the top remain the same. My EDI campaigning friend calls the male pale and stale, which I love. So good. I enjoy that!

Yes, so I want a universal design for academia that includes security in employment or in career track from the start, associated with freedom of movement, more jobs available in more institutions, so you're not waiting for the one job in the one place, or so that families can move easier and that families don't have to be, man and woman and two kids, families come in all shapes and sizes these days, but a universal design that allows for that flexibility will benefit everyone.

We need visible diversity and visible diverse success, because then the people in your positions will go, Oh yeah, so and so's, I'll just chat to them about it, or you don't even think about what the choices are because you've got the examples of them and okay. You're not breaking the barriers, you're just doing something that's normal. We need good mentoring and good encouragement for all. I love my students.

I'm a facilitative teacher, my students are awesome and I try to enable their awesomeness and that works for colleagues as well and that should be what line management does, everyone should be encouraged and challenged to not step off the treadmill. How can you actually get this to work? So we need supportive careers and fair allocation of the time consuming administrative roles. When you work part time, you find that the things that everyone does take up more of your time.

So if you have to sit in a meeting and listen to your head of department talk, I don't get to do 0.6 of that, I still have to do the whole lot, but that's a bigger chunk of my working day.

Allocation needs to be aware of that and we need investment in and reward for quality and potential and not just the quality that's built on an amazing track record and I know what to write because I'm awesome and I've got ninety four research grants and five hundred papers to my name, so I talk the talk, but the quality is actually that's a really good idea, it's not expressed very well and maybe we need to interrogate it a bit more, but that's

an initiative worth funding, even though the words using to describe show a lack of expertise in the writing of it. So, yeah, universal design. I'm a woman, part time, that should be irrelevant, I'm a white woman part time, I could be a full time black man and we should be able to do the same things.

I totally agree with having the visible diversity because even as a student we kind of think, oh that we have a female lecturer and we shouldn't be feeling like that, it shouldn't be an excitement because it's so rare. I think, as you said, it does need a revolution, I am very much in favour of this revolution.

I think what is trying hard is that like, it almost feels like it's a kind of etching away process at the moment and it's always the people that have had, I guess, the unequal experience that are etching away and putting in extra effort and extra work to try and make it happen because they want to see something that's comfortable for them, and they know that will help other people.

But at the same time, we need people that maybe who haven't had this experience to try and think outside the box, think about your friends, your family, your colleagues, who might be having this experience and really try to put that into when you make decisions as well, are you thinking about everyone? And hopefully that will mean that, you know, this takes the self advocacy out of those people that are already having to do a lot more work in order to try and make it comfortable for themselves.

But it also means that you will start making decisions that will be even more rewarding to your colleagues, they will respect you and they will feel like you're in a very comfortable institution where change can happen, which I think is really nice and I do agree that this, revolution, it will come, it's definitely got to come, because, I want to carry on with this job, so it's gonna happen at some point.

But yeah, just to take it back to a slightly earlier point, when you mentioned that you were trying for a family, I just wanted to ask how was your menstrual health impacted in this time? Because I think that's something that, yeah, we don't also don't really know much about and be great to hear from you on that. So I got married, came off the pill, baby didn't come instantly. There's issues with that, but I came off the pill, right?

So pill birth control, it's what it's there for, we use it for many things, birth control is only one aspect of the pill. So, You come off the pill, and then you're hit with hormones! Hello! Periods! All of the rubbish things that the pill's sort of evened out, or the birth controller's evened out, and you haven't noticed whilst you've been on it and they come back in full force, so that's a thing. Coming off the pill does not mean instant pregnancy.

You hear the stories, Oh, I came off the pill and then I was pregnant. You read in romance novel, Oh, I was on the pill and I'm pregnant, how did that happen? So, you know, that's not how it happened for me.

So after six months, I went to my doctor who looked slightly embarrassed and said, well, amenorrhea is normal for periods of six months and maybe a year after you come off the pill and amenorrhea means no periods, so that's normal and then when my periods restarted, I didn't get instantly pregnant. So I'm quite old at that point and maybe I wouldn't have got instantly pregnant at 19 coming off the pill, but I wasn't 19. I was older than that and there's a monthly anticipation, am I pregnant?

Disappointment, oh no, I'm not, cycle and emotionally, that really takes its toll and you're thinking each month, am I pregnant? No, I'm not. Am I pregnant? No, I'm not and I'm getting older, and this has gone on for some months now and I'm getting older and you're getting more anxious, and anxiety isn't good for pregnancy either, so it's not great.

That was a consequence of me waiting and the decisions, well, it's just how it happened, but here we go and another thing they don't tell you after you've had your baby and periods come back, one of the things they don't tell you is that they come back with a vengeance.

They come back and they're much heavier and more painful and you can kind of work that out biologically, it kind of makes sense and so I wanted baby number two, so I didn't go back on the pill and so I was putting up with this and the worst is a full day in the teaching lab.

So we do full days, three and a half hour with an hour for lunch, another three and a half hour and there's the discomfort, just generally not feeling great, the lower back ache when you're on your feet, it's bad enough anyway, oh lab stools are amazing. And then there's the dashing to the loo to change the protection and hoping that it hasn't leaked. Spare clothes at work are a must. So yes, that's one of the things I don't tell you. Surprise! Yay!

Well, you know, women, we just get on with it, don't we?

Thank you for sharing these points because, you know, it's really good for us to hear and you just don't get taught these things and we really should because it really impacts your life and a lot of people are going to go through this and people listening to this podcast hopefully will know that if things like this happen to them, it's normal and we spoke about the experience of going on the pill and the trial period and how troubles come with trying to find the right pill for you.

But we never even considered coming off and you know, the fact that it can take quite a long time, usually around three months for your symptoms and your menstrual cycle to come back and you just don't even think about that, I guess, sometimes and a lot of us, go on the pill when we're teenagers and then go on it for a prolonged period of time and then when you come off the pill, your body's completely changed. It's not the same as when you were 18 and you went on the pill.

So you can't even predict what's going to happen when you come off. So I think, yeah, it's very hard to adjust to all of these changes and it's really good to hear the experience of someone who has been through the opposite end of the pill experience to what we spoke about.

I think, yeah, as Manami said, it's something that, where I was like, oh my gosh, we finally found a pill that works for us and then when you think, oh, I actually might need to come off this, it might be that because you want to start having a baby or the pill that did work is actually not working at all for you anymore and then you're like, oh, yeah, because I actually came off the pill, and then it took, I think, over a year for my cycle to get back to

normal and like, luckily for me, that was just because I came off it because of some mental health considerations. But I was like, this is going crazy and when I went on the pill, I was 16, 17. So I was just there like, did I even have normal periods before? Like, am I just weird? Like, what's going on? And then it did start to settle down. So I think that, yeah, this opposite consideration of coming off is great to hear and yeah, good to know as well for the future.

Finally, I'd just like to ask you, Jenny, if you've got any advice for those of us thinking about going into teaching at universities and perhaps how we can tackle this with our reproductive health and particularly with some of the issues that you'd shared with us today. My advice is to work the system. The system's different, I could tell you how it has been for me and at Sheffield it will be different now to when it was when I had my kids.

But know what the system is and find out how you can work it to your advantage. What is the funding? Ask for it, what are the options? If something happens unexpectedly, great! How can you deal with it? So what systems are in place? And if they're not in place, well, they probably should be. So systemically, who can help you do it? You don't have to necessarily do it for yourself. Another thing is you need good support networks.

So if you're having children, you need the child care support, you need the support of the other family members, maybe you have a dog, who's going to walk the dog? You know, you need to know what your support networks are and you need more support networks, the more your life diversifies.

So, as a parent, you need parent support networks, dads need dad networks, just like mums need mums networks and you need them outside of your work as well as within your work and you need people who can just drop everything and collect your child from wherever it is because the train's been cancelled or the road is flooded or something else has happened. So the support networks are really important.

In terms of academia, you look around and you find women tend to collaborate in research and my feeling is that because women stereotypically, work well with other people, if you collaborate and you take a break, six weeks for an American style maternity and then you're back in, or minimum maternity, the research doesn't stop if you're collaborating, because your collaborators are sort of continuing it and you can step back in.

So collaboration, you get good research out of it, like strategically, it's good because then you step in and you don't have to start your research career all over again. So I recommend collaboration. Find your allies and identify those people who are not allies and beware of women because those people who've struggled may well think, well, I did it, so buck up, get on with it.

So there will be people who are maybe not allies and that may change, that person may change from being a not ally to being an ally, just through a conversation and then I've written on my notes, plan, plan, plan and I thought about this after I wrote my notes and I was like, no, don't plan, just go with it. If you plan, you end up at 33 in hospital with a miscarriage going, how did I get to 33 in hospital with a miscarriage, what's going on here?

Do what works at the time and I would like everyone to be happy in the choice that they've made. There is no one right way of doing things, except that there are many right ways of doing or many good ways of doing things and just go with it. We put loads of pressure on people to make the right choices, so that's my advice. Thank you so much, Jenny, for sharing your experience and talking to us about quite personal experiences.

We've learned so much and it was such a pleasure to have you and have a lovely chat with you and I think the real take home message is that reproductive health is impacting us in all different times in our lives and if we talk about it more, then hopefully we can better understand menstruation and the reproductive health leading to a world where those with periods and menstruation can not be held back in their careers.

If you would like to find out more about the Breaking the Barriers Report by the Royal Society of Chemistry, then it is on their website and if you would like to learn more about Periodically, please visit our social media @periodically_ox. Again, we'd like to thank the RSC Inclusion and Diversity Fund, the University of Oxford Chemistry Department, and the EPSRC funded OxICFM CDT for supporting the podcast.