Women’s Bodies and the Architecture of Work

I was recently talking to my daughter, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience, about her career. During our call the conversation drifted from lab schedules to life planning. Like many doctoral students, she was mapping out her future in milestones. This included finishing her Ph.D., securing a job, establishing her career. Then she paused and asked a question that is not discussed in career counseling:

“Mom … when am I supposed to have a kid?”

She was not being casual. She was trying to reconcile her biology with the professional architecture of work. Not during the Ph.D., because it is hard to have a child when doing your coursework or dissertation. Not during the job search: Employers might hesitate, even if no one says anything aloud. Not early in a tenure-track role: Those years demand uninterrupted productivity. Each phase of academic life appeared incompatible with pregnancy and early-childhood caregiving.

Years earlier, I had invited a colleague—an exceptional academic, a full professor and a proven leader—to join a team I was building. She hesitated because she was navigating menopause. She spoke candidly about brain fog, fatigue and fluctuating cognitive energy.

“I want to do this,” she told me, “but I’m not sure my body will cooperate right now. If you believe I can still deliver, I’m willing. I just want to be honest.”

Although these two women sit at very different points in their academic careers, they reveal the same tension: Women’s bodies do not neatly align with the timelines and performance expectations embedded in our institutions. Despite how common these experiences are, they remain largely absent from professional dialogue.

At first glance, raising questions about women’s embodied experiences may seem out of step with the moment. We have made tremendous progress in higher education in supporting motherhood. This includes lactation rooms, parental leave policies, tenure-clock flexibility and other caregiving accommodations. These advances matter and should be celebrated.

Yet motherhood is only one dimension of a woman’s embodied experience. Many women who are not parents navigate cyclical physiological challenges, hormonal transitions, chronic conditions and life-stage changes that affect energy, cognition and comfort, often on a recurring basis for decades. These realities do not pause for academic calendars or workplace deadlines, and they are rarely acknowledged in our institutions.

While there have been numerous studies that have addressed changing trends at work such as virtual work, remote collaboration, the impact of AI on workplace productivity and so on, very little organizational research has gone into understanding what an inclusive workplace for women looks like. Talking about menstruation, hormonal cycles or menopause can feel oddly antiquated in 2026, as if we are revisiting debates settled long ago. Yet this topic has not been adequately addressed in the past six decades–plus.

This is not just in higher education. The pressure to silently bear with their bodies and meet performance expectations begins for girls long before professional life or higher education. It begins in the halls of elementary schools. Once girls enter puberty, many experience severe menstrual pain, fatigue, mood swings or migraines. However, they are expected to perform in physical education and other strenuous classes as though nothing is happening. Educational systems typically treat these experiences as isolated, private illnesses. If you are having a few bad days, take a day off or two. The messaging is clear. Girls learn these lessons early. They learn that your body is a private matter, that discomfort is normal and to be expected, and that you have to perform to what schools, teachers or systems expect of you to get a good grade.

By the time women enter higher education and the workforce, this expectation is internalized. We learn to push through discomfort and normalize strain. Because we meet performance expectations, institutions assume nothing structural needs attention. Anyone who needs them can of course take sick days, except that there are no additional sick days for women. Furthermore, if we take them, performance and deliverables will suffer. Therefore, anyone taking sick days, month after month, even for legitimate reasons, may not be seen as a committed employee. Similarly, a girl that misses school days every month is going to miss instruction and learning. Thus, the options for women from a young age are a) to persevere despite your body or b) to be seen as uncommitted, mediocre and therefore not successful.

This is not a conversation about favoring women at the expense of others. Workplaces must also thoughtfully support people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, caregiving responsibilities and diverse life circumstances. Fair institutions must accommodate many forms of human variability and attempt to do so consistently. Recognizing women’s embodied realities expands our understanding of what human-centered design truly entails.

While organizations are evolving to provide employees with resources such as employee resource groups, access to meditation and wellness programs and employee counseling, recurring physiological realities, particularly those associated with women, are still treated as stigmatized private inconveniences to be managed individually. They are siloed in academic conversations about gender, or a conversation between friends, but rarely integrated into mainstream discussions of workplace design and performance.

On this International Women’s Day, I ask all of us institutional leaders to think about this question:

What is one intentional step we have taken to recognize and support the embodied realities women navigate from the moment girls enter puberty?

I am not asking about a special concession that we make to accommodate someone who requires extra compassion on any given day. I am asking what we can do to create environments where predictable biological strains do not translate into hidden performance penalties. I do not have all the answers. My hope is to start a conversation wherein we use our collective wisdom to find solutions.

I write this reflection from a place of gratitude and responsibility. I have the privilege to be among the 30 percent of deans of AACSB-accredited business schools who are women. In an unusual and fortunate circumstance, my entire dean’s leadership suite is composed of women. I do not present this as a model to replicate in other institutions, but as a reminder of how representation shapes perspective. When women occupy leadership roles, conversations about embodied experiences become easier to surface.

In our dean’s suite, we speak openly and matter-of-factly about the realities women navigate at different life stages. This signals that others from our college can come talk to us openly. Of course, not everyone does, nor do they have to, but it opens up the space for these conversations. Far from diminishing professionalism, these exchanges feel grounding and refreshing. They remind us that leadership does not require disembodiment; it requires clarity about the human realities that affect how we accomplish our work.

In one small but telling moment, our campus heating system was running unusually warm during a leadership meeting, and a few of us found ourselves laughing as we tried to determine whether the room was actually overheated or whether our bodies were staging their own internal climate adjustments. The humor was immediate and shared. The moment passed quickly, but its ease mattered. Moments like these may seem small, but they point to something larger: a professional culture where embodied experience is simply part of the reality people bring into their work.

Addressing this gap does not require lowering standards or encouraging disengagement. Institutions must function, and work must be completed at the highest levels of excellence. The challenge is to design systems that acknowledge human variability while preserving accountability and excellence.

Some practical interventions could include:

• Flexible attendance policies and work structuring around women’s bodies. The 9-to-5 workday was introduced in the 1920s, when males were a majority of the workforce. Given that we have many more women in the workforce since then, it is time to revisit 9 to 5. Having flexibility during the day and certain times of the month will go a long way in making the workday equitable for women.
• Health literacy programs to normalize conversations about women’s health.
• Leadership training that equips managers of all genders to respond to all embodied realities professionally and without stigma.
• Cultural messaging that says that using health accommodations does not signal lower productivity.

Women teach and research on many timely topics while navigating their own uncomfortable physiological realities, which rarely enter policy conversations. If we can revisit structures of the workplace to account for these physiological realities, the possibilities are endless. Maybe we can address some of the persistent challenges in higher education like the “leaky pipeline” phenomena where more than 50 percent of assistant professors are women but only a little more than a third become full professors, or the fact that, as one study of 130 research universities found, women make up 39 percent of academic deans, 38 percent of provosts and just 22 percent of presidents. I realize that other factors contribute to these numbers, however, the number of women who choose to drop off tenure-track or administrative ladders due to the inconveniences of their bodies cannot be discounted.

I think back to my daughter’s question—young women entering professional life are still being asked to privately reconcile their bodies with systems designed around uninterrupted productivity. Experienced women are still questioning whether biology compromises credibility.

As we mark International Women’s Day this Sunday, my invitation is to evolve our understanding of how our bodies belong in the workplace. Designing institutions that acknowledge embodiment aligns the lived human experience with the environments in which we ask people to perform. This allows every body to feel included in the workplace. Women’s bodies are not stigmatized inconveniences to be managed in silence. They are the foundations from which intellectual and professional excellence emerges. Institutions strong enough to recognize that truth are not lowering expectations. They are strengthening the foundation on which excellence is built.