Breaking the Silence: Women's Reproductive Health in the Workplace Through Collective Voice

Melike Artar Bıyıklar and Yavuz Selim Balcıoğlu

Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, vol. 32, issue 6, 2353-2368

Abstract: Women's reproductive health has historically been marginalized within professional environments, regarded as a personal matter rather than a collective institutional issue, and predominantly excluded from organizational policies. Notwithstanding the direct influence of biological phenomena such as menstruation, maternity, and menopause on women's occupational experiences, these subjects have frequently been rendered obscured or deemed inappropriate for discourse in professional settings. This investigation scrutinizes public dialogs on professional social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn, to assess women's encounters with reproductive health and the intersectionality of these experiences with workplace policies. Employing a mixed‐methods framework, the research evaluates 52,592 comments on LinkedIn through both thematic and sentiment analyses. The outcomes reveal that women are increasingly participating in public discussions regarding menstruation, maternity, and menopause, and that such dialogs are significantly contributing to heightened awareness among employers. Drawing on social amplification theory, the study demonstrates how personal experiences shared online are reframed into collective narratives that challenge organizational norms. Simultaneously, feminist organizational theory provides insight into how these voices expose the structural exclusion of embodied female experiences from workplace design. Sentiment analysis indicates that a considerable proportion of these conversations arises from adverse experiences, thereby underscoring the inadequacy of institutional support for women's reproductive health. Concurrently, thematic analysis elucidates an escalating demand for policies including menstrual leave, flexible work arrangements following maternity, and support programs for menopause. The study positions these findings as indicators of a shifting organizational paradigm. Amplifying women's narratives emerges as a critical driver of policy reform, yet systemic change necessitates both cultural and institutional transformation.

Date: 2025
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