A few years ago, as I was attending a U.N. Commission on the Status of Women panel on barriers to development for women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa, I became struck with sudden abdominal cramps. I rushed to the bathroom knowing that my period had come early. Unfortunately, the sanitary napkin dispensers in that building had never been set up and stocked. Building administrators simply left them empty when the coin function did not work, as they balked at the idea of providing tampons for free, a nurse explained apologetically. As experts presented data on how lack of access to sanitary napkins impeded girls' school attendance, one could not find any inside the United Nations annex.
The irony was not lost on the women from every continent who gathered in the bathroom during a break, where a lovely woman from Nigeria provided me with a pad.
Of course, the wide gap between the rhetoric about women's equality and the lived reality of women is not unique to the United Nations. When I was 13, my feminist grandmother chastised me for throwing out a used pad in the bathroom trash can. She insisted it would scandalize my grandfather or younger brother if they knew I had my period.
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