Access, Period: Making Menstrual Products Accessible for All
Getting the Design Right
Contributors: Zach Cheung, Elizabeth McKinnie, Robin Yeh, and Joyce Zhou
Many homeless and low-income women do not have easy access to menstrual products. On average, a woman spends up to $150-$300 a year on pads and tampons. Some of the high cost of menstrual products is due to the tampon tax, which still exists in 38 states. These high costs make it difficult for these women to buy their own products, but shelters are unable to provide an adequate supply. Without access to menstrual products, homeless women are forced to use unhealthy and unsafe alternatives, which when combined with no access to daily showers results in increased rates of reproductive and urinary tract infections. By not being able to maintain hygiene, many women are left feeling helpless, vulnerable, and depressed. We are interested in tackling this issue by making menstrual products more readily available to homeless and low-income women in public spaces.
Research Plan
We wanted to interview people who have direct experience with the issue of access to menstrual products to learn more about how it’s affected them and what their thoughts on potential solutions are. Specifically, we wanted to interview both homeless shelters and shelter users to understand the interaction between them. Interviewing shelters also meant we could ask about both their donors and their users.
We reached out to Mary’s Place, a shelter for women and families in Seattle, and surveyed the site director of Mary’s Place Day Center over email. She gave us valuable insight as someone who oversaw the Day Center and could comment on all aspects of it. We chose to survey her over email to get an overall impression of the problem. We followed up on this survey in person by visiting the Day Center and interviewing the Day Center site assistant and Annie (name has been changed), a woman visiting the Day Center. We chose in-person interviews so that we could ask a wide range of questions and ask follow-up questions. The site assistant gave us more detail about Day Center operations and could uniquely comment on the donors’ perspective based on her experiences with people asking her how they could help. Annie shared her experience outside of the shelter and commented on being sometimes reluctant to ask for help from the shelter.
To guide the interview process, we outlined a list of questions to ask specific to the background of our interviewees. Our questions for the shelter staff included the topics of general availability of menstrual products, usage of different types of products, the willingness of people to take products, donation needs, smartphone availability, and the best ways to learn from shelter users. Our questions for Annie covered her general experience with menstruation, where she obtained products most frequently and where she would like to be able to obtain products, her comfort with asking for products directly, and opinions on different types of menstrual products. We chose these questions because we wanted to find out which aspects of menstrual product availability might benefit most from a design solution.
Research Results
There were a couple of interesting observations we made during our design research process. In our interview with the shelter, we learned the ways that shelters currently provide menstrual products for women, how and what they receive as donations, and current issues surrounding the availability of products. Through interviewing Annie we gained a valuable perspective on her current thoughts on this issue, and we learned that most homeless people now have access to smartphones, which we intend to take advantage of when thinking about our design solution. We observed that both of our participants showed enthusiasm for having access to menstrual products in public restrooms, which provides easier access but maintains privacy. Most homeless women are very vocal about asking for products, although when asked for her preference, Annie preferred grabbing products from the shelter’s grab and go box over asking for products at the staffed hygiene counter. Another interesting observation was that reusable products aren’t popular at all among homeless women (mainly because reusable products are expensive and thus rarely donated), and Annie expressed discomfort using those products.
One of the themes that we learned about more in depth was the general problem of availability and accessibility of menstrual products. The staff at Mary’s Place mentioned that they run out of products easily and that both the quantity and variety of products is lacking. There are also not enough menstrual products available outside of shelters, such as in public places. Even though some type of menstrual product may always be available for women who come to the shelters, it isn’t always the product that they are looking for and sometimes women will go to multiple shelters to find the product they’re looking for. For example, maxi pads are in high demand and run out quickly, but shelters often end up with plenty of panty liners, which isn’t super helpful for women who are in their first days of their menstrual cycle. Sometimes the staff have to use their funds to buy more menstrual products. The biggest barrier is that donators don’t know what donations are most needed, and donators tend to avoid giving money because they don’t know what the money will be used for. When it comes to menstrual products, not very many people realize the shelters’ need for products and what types of products are needed most.
Our Design
The big takeaways from our research at the homeless shelter were that donators, shelter staff, and shelter users didn’t have a clear idea of the supply and demand of products which caused issues when homeless women would enter a homeless shelter wanting a specific product that the shelter did not have. We also learned that homeless women prefer to take menstrual products from a dispenser and would use dispensers if they were available in public restrooms. For our solution, we wanted a way to check what products are in which dispensers without having to physically be at the dispenser’s location. We also wanted to focus on accessing menstrual products in public restrooms.
Our design is a smartphone application and a system of dispensers that would be installed in public restrooms. The application includes a map of dispensers with information on each dispenser’s current product stock. The dispensers run on donations (which can be made by individuals or by shelters) and can sort the donations based on product type and dispense by product type so that women can obtain specific products such as maxi pads, panty liners, or tampons with applicators. In addition to handing out products, the dispensers would track the number of products within the dispenser and update the phone application with the information. One consideration we have to make is ensuring our dispenser system isn’t abused, since it will be in a public place. This means ensuring that donations are actually sanitary menstrual products, as well as clarifying that the dispenser system is meant for homeless and low-income women and is not simply a dispenser with free products for anyone to take.
Currently, when a homeless woman needs a product they typically will go to the store looking for cheap products, go to a nearby shelter to check whether or not they have the product that they want, or bleed through their pants. The storyboard above gives an example of a more ideal situation with the use of our dispenser design. With our public space dispensers being connected to an application, homeless women like Annie can locate a local dispenser near them and know whether a dispenser has the product that she needs even before she takes another step.
