We are equal, but we are not the same. It's time employers caught up.

If you are a woman, or you have women on your team, this is for you.

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend at the top of one of the world's leading period care companies. I asked him: "You know about the different seasons of the female cycle, right?"

He looked at me blankly.

I wasn't surprised. It's a gap that runs deep, even in industries built around women's health.

I explained it to him like this. Men operate on a 24-hour hormonal clock, they are like the sun. Cortisol rises in the morning, melatonin comes in at night. Consistent, predictable, day in and day out. Women are fundamentally different. We run on a 28-day cycle, more like the moon. We also move through four distinct seasons within our body every 28 days. Each one is asking something different of us, not just physically, but mentally and creatively too.

Workplaces, almost without exception, are built around the male model.

His response floored me: "But the women on my team are actually more consistent than the men."

Of course they are. Women are extraordinary. But what I said to him was this: they are almost certainly overriding their biology every single day to show up that way. And there is a cost to that consistency. Stress. PMS. Painful periods. Burnout. I can speak to this personally from years in corporate, pushing hard regardless of where I was in my cycle, with no framework to understand why some weeks felt effortless and others felt like wading through concrete.

I want to be clear: I am not suggesting women can't perform at the highest levels. We do, constantly and brilliantly. What I am saying is that when we perform against our nature, without acknowledgement and without support, our health eventually pays the price. And so does our long-term productivity.

Some companies are already onto this. Modibodi is leading the way in Australia, and offers ten days of paid leave for menstruation, menopause or miscarriage. Japan and Indonesia have protected menstrual leave since the 1940s. These policies matter.

But what if the bigger shift is actually simpler than policy change? What if it doesn't require extra leave at all?

What if women were simply encouraged to plan their work around their cycle? What if a conversation with your manager about intentionally doing less in one particular week of the month, softening your output, skipping the hard deadline, was not just accepted but normalised? And equally, what if the weeks of high creative energy and expansiveness were recognised and channelled into the work that benefits most from that state?

That's not radical. That's just working with biology instead of against it.

Once you understand what a woman needs at each stage of her cycle, it's genuinely not complicated. It just requires us to start having the conversation. It's why I've written my upcoming book. Drawing on traditional Chinese medicine wisdom, it offers a simpler way to understand and honour what your body is asking for. Because once you do, this stops being complicated. It becomes obvious.

I imagine workplaces where women plan their cycle alongside their work calendar. Where they speak openly with their managers about the weeks they'll hustle and the weeks they'll soften. Where the full range of feminine energy is seen not as inconsistency, but as an asset.

We are just not small men. We never were. And the sooner our workplaces understand that, the better the outcomes will be for everyone.

Is this a conversation your workplace is ready to have?