Smashing stigma with a period podcast

Manami Imada felt a wave of period cramps come over her as she waited to enter the room to take a major exam at the end of her first year studying chemistry at the University of Oxford in June 2022. “I was crouching on the floor because I just couldn’t stand up,” she says. She told the proctor that she felt ill, “but then I couldn’t really do anything about it. So I just went into the exam.” The pain made it difficult for her to focus. Imada ended up failing the exam and having to retake it later. “Half of the population have [periods] and just get told to just get on with it,” Imada says. After her exam experience, she says, she didn’t want to stay quiet about how having a period affects her life as a chemistry student. “I wanted it to be a thing that we