Anyone who wants to explain the gender pay gap with menstruation or menopause is not selling a sober analysis, but an elegant lie. Why biological attributions are not a fair justification for pay differences – and what really lies behind the pay gap instead.
Teaser
Sometimes you just have to say an absurd idea loudly enough so that everyone can hear how absurd it really is. The notion that women might earn less because they perform worse during menstruation or in menopause belongs exactly in this category. It sounds pseudo-rational, but in truth it is only a modern packaging for a very old reflex: to reinterpret structural inequality biologically so that no one has to talk about rules, power and fairness anymore.
Good news from HR
At last, salary is really calculated fairly. No longer according to responsibility, results, experience or value contribution, but according to the great triad of the new barstool economics: monthly deduction, menopause discount, fair market.
The HR system of the future will no longer ask only about qualifications during onboarding, but, as a precaution, also about cycle, hormone status and life phase. Those who are currently having “heavy days” get a small deduction. Those who are in the perimenopause automatically slip into the category “limited resilience”. And somewhere in the background the market nods contentedly and whispers: completely neutral, completely objective, completely fair.
Of course this is grotesque. That is precisely why it is worthwhile to articulate this logic once in all its full ugliness. Because only then can you hear how absurd it really sounds.
Where the real lie begins
As soon as the matter is openly on the table, it becomes visible what this is actually about: the attempt to ennoble structural inequality retrospectively through biology.
Not discrimination, not role division, not lack of transparency, not historically grown imbalances are supposed to explain the pay gap, but the female body. The old devaluation only appears in the costume of cool reason.
And that is exactly where the lie begins.
Before we turn biology into a price tag
Before we turn biology into a price tag, it is worth taking a sober look at what we really know. The first claim is that women make worse decisions during certain phases of the cycle and are therefore on average less “marketable”.
The entire error in thinking is already contained in this formulation. From individual complaints, which can be real, a sweeping statement about an entire group is silently made. Human variance is turned into a value judgment that applies collectively. Reality is turned into ideology.
Menstruation is not an economic category
Yes, some women experience pain, fatigue, irritability or concentration problems during certain phases of the cycle. That is real and should be taken seriously.
But this does not provide solid evidence for a general, cycle-dependent cognitive underperformance of women. Anyone who turns the sentence “Individuals experience complaints” into the sentence “Women underperform in a biologically predictable way” is not describing the world, but bending it to fit.
In other words: an overarching market thesis is being constructed here out of individual strain. That holds up neither logically nor socially.
Menopause is not a discount code
The second claim works in a similar way: the thing with perimenopause and menopause. Here too, the starting point is not entirely made up.
Many women report sleep problems, hot flashes, exhaustion, concentration difficulties or a diffuse brain fog during this phase of life. These experiences are not to be ridiculed. They are to be taken seriously.
But even then it is still a long way from being permissible to derive from this a kind of economic discount code for women’s work.
Because even where strains are real, this does not mean that an entire group should therefore be priced in as permanently less capable. Firstly, these phases progress very differently. Secondly, possible limitations depend heavily on contextual factors: sleep, stress, work environment, general state of health, private burdens. Thirdly, the appropriate response of a reasonable society to human strain is not a hidden price reduction, but better framework conditions.
Anyone who constructs inferiority out of a need for support is not revealing scientific sobriety, but a primitive understanding of justice.
The trick with the “fair market”
This also makes it clear why the narrative of the “fair market” is so convenient and so wrong at the same time. It shifts the problem from society to nature.
If women earn less, then this is supposedly not due to unequal rules, but to an allegedly neutral assessment of their performance by the system. Then no one would be responsible. Then everything would be just supply and demand. Then the pay difference would not be the result of power, norms and structures, but only the unsentimental truth of the market.
That is exactly the trick.
Markets are not moral authorities
Markets do not pronounce truths about dignity or justice. They produce prices within rules, expectations, power imbalances, information situations and cultural patterns.
What looks like a neutral result is often just congealed history. What sounds like objectivity is often just convenience dressed up in numbers.
If salaries are non-transparent, people do not negotiate on an open field, but in the fog. If certain professions in which particularly many women work are historically paid less and valued lower by society, then this is not a neutral market observation, but a value judgment stabilized over decades.
If care work is organized on a massive scale in private and women in particular pay for it with part-time work, career interruptions and slower promotion, then this is not the fair price of their work, but the price of a system that pushes necessary work out of the visible value model.
The gender pay gap is a structural phenomenon
That is precisely why the gender pay gap is not a monthly phenomenon and not a menopause effect. It does not measure two bad days a month. It does not measure individual daily form. It also does not measure secret hormonal stock prices.
It describes lasting differences in pay, career dynamics, employment histories and evaluation standards. Anyone who explains it with menstruation and menopause confuses anecdote with system and biology with ideology.
Why this logic is so selective
It is striking how selectively this logic is applied. No one seriously suggests systematically adjusting men’s salaries downwards for sleep deprivation in fathers of small children, for stress-related irritability, for back problems, migraines or other temporary performance fluctuations.
No one demands a “male strain deduction”, because linear gainful employment can also function at the expense of health, pressure to be present and emotional narrowing. But as soon as it is about women, the debate jumps astonishingly quickly from individual reality to group-based price logic.
And that is precisely why it is not neutral.
The modern form of an old reflex
What is being sold here as a rational explanation is in truth an old cultural reflex: the female body is not supposed to simply exist, but to constantly testify economically against itself.
Its phases, its rhythms, its strains, its proximity to reproduction are not regarded as part of human reality, but as material for value deductions. The modern form of this reflex is no longer openly crude, but well-groomed, number-friendly and seemingly sober.
That is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The greater political relief
Because the lie does not only consist in the fact that the biological explanation falls short scientifically. The greater lie consists in the fact that it provides political relief.
If the pay gap can be made biologically plausible, no one has to talk anymore about care work, role models, promotion mechanisms, presence culture, salary transparency or discrimination. Then a changeable order suddenly becomes an allegedly natural one.
This is not enlightenment. This is depoliticization through pseudo-sobriety.
The better question
The better question is therefore not: How do we retrospectively make existing pay differences biologically plausible?
The better question is: Which rules would actually make performance fairly measurable?
What constitutes a fair working world
A fair working world evaluates performance as closely as possible to the actual result and the specific role. It does not confuse presence with impact and volume with competence. It recognizes that human performance is always context-dependent and that good organizations must be built precisely for this.
A fair working world does not treat health as a hidden penalty category. It organizes work in such a way that people can remain effective in different phases of life instead of turning their fluctuations against them. This is not a special program for women, but an expression of civilized productivity.
A fair working world makes care visible. It does not pretend that children, caregiving, nurturing and family coordination take place outside economic activity. It understands that employment biographies are not less valuable because they are linked to real responsibility.
A fair working world creates transparency. Because where salary bands, evaluation standards and development paths are comprehensible, the chance decreases that prejudices disguise themselves as constraints of fact.
Why this also helps men
All this does not only help women. It also helps men.
Because the same system that devalues women through biology often pushes men into the opposite coercive image: always available, always robust, always linear, always unbroken. That too is not freedom, but only the other half of the same bad deal.
What our daughters should learn from this
That is precisely why this debate is so crucial for the next generation. Our daughters should learn how to recognize elegant lies. They should sense that not everything that sounds technical is also true. They should know that biology is not a price argument.
That differences do not automatically create hierarchies. And that a market is not just because its judgments appear in table form.
Four questions against convenient myths
So if someone later explains to them that certain pay differences are merely the rational echo of female biology, they should be able to ask a few simple questions:
• How big is the alleged effect really?
• Does it affect individuals or an entire group?
• What role do sleep, stress, working conditions, division of roles and institutional rules play?
• Why, of all things, should a real strain lead to a value deduction and not to better organization?
That is exactly where the intellectual hygiene we urgently need begins.
The real point
The most absurd lie about the gender pay gap is not merely that people want to explain it with monthly deduction and menopause discount.
The most absurd lie is that this explanation is supposed to appear reasonable. It is not reasonable. It is only convenient for all those who do not want to change the rules.
Conclusion
Our daughters should not grow up in a world in which their bodies are treated as a secret counterargument to their worth. They should live in a world in which performance is assessed fairly, strain is classified humanely and dignity is not discounted.
Not monthly. Not hormonally. Not market-conform.
