Despite commanding the resources and prestige of an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania has consistently failed to meet the needs of women and other gender minorities. Student organizations have been advocating the extension of basic services for years, but have been met with little action from the university.
Menstrual Product Access at Penn
Around half of Penn’s population needs menstrual products—but the purchase of the menstrual products distributed across campus isn’t funded by Penn itself. Instead, funding for menstrual products comes from the budget of individual centers or departments at Penn—this piecemeal funding structure means that access to these products depends on your major or Penn affiliation. A student’s ease of access to menstrual products should not depend on the buildings a student is most frequently at. A school as well-resourced at Penn should not push the responsibility for healthcare access onto individual centers and departments.
The lack of university-wide free menstrual products disproportionately impacts students from marginalized backgrounds. Research shows that this impact manifests in the form of missed classes, decreased academic performance, and increased stress. Penn’s inability to provide menstrual products university-wide is yet another barrier to equal access to academic success at Penn. University-wide free menstrual products are crucial to make Penn an equal opportunity institution.
To address this, the student group Period@Penn launched a pilot program in 2022 that placed 6,300 menstrual products in high traffic areas around Penn’s campus. The rollout of university-wide menstrual products at other schools took place after similar pilot programs—the hope was that Penn would also follow suit. Despite the initiative’s positive reception in the community, however, it was never taken on permanently by the University.
In 2024, the Penn Association of Gender Equity (PAGE) and 29 other student organizations issued the menstrual equity statement, which calls for the university to mandate the provision of free menstrual products across campus. In the two years since the demand was made, however, no university-wide action has been taken.
As of 2024, six out of the eight Ivy League universities provided free menstrual products across their buildings and bathrooms. Instead of being a leader, Penn has chosen to consistently remain steps behind its peer institutions.
Ensuring that menstrual products are available across campus is not just a matter of convenience—it is a necessity. Though there are many logistical challenges involved with keeping menstrual products stocked in buildings, such as each building having its own maintenance system, this is a challenge for Penn themselves to address. Logistical difficulties of Penn’s own making are hardly an excuse for the administration’s continued lack of care for student demands. Penn can take a vital step towards gender equity and security by ensuring that free menstrual products are broadly available on campus.
Plan B Access at Penn
The Wellness Vending Machine, located on the third floor of the ARCH building, distributes a variety of products, including COVID Rapid Tests, over-the-counter medications, menstrual products, and condoms. As a result of continued student demand, Wellness at Penn collaborated with organizations such as the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women, the Undergraduate Assembly, the Graduate and Professional Student Association, and Penn Reproductive Justice to implement the Vending Machine.
Perhaps the most well-known product at the Vending Machine, however, is its boxes of Plan B. This system allows for students to get Plan B without directly interacting with another person.
Though this is a step in the right direction, the promise of “accessible Plan B” exists more in rhetoric than in reality. One of the biggest complaints with the Wellness Vending Machine is the frequency at which Plan B is restocked. Unsurprisingly, Plan B is one of the vending machine’s most popular items—the cost to buy it at the CVS near Penn’s campus is $49.99.
The rate at which students take Plan B, from the Wellness Vending Machine exceeds the rate at which it is restocked. The responsibility to keep the Wellness Vending Machine stocked and functioning relies on just a few staff members. More attention must be dedicated to the proper functioning of the resource to support student needs.
Faced with shortages at the vending machine, many students seek out Plan B at either the Penn Women’s Center or the LGBT Center. These centers, however, are not authorized by the University to hand out Plan B. While students have the option to get free Plan B at Penn Wellness, this is often unfeasible for students who need to keep their decision to get Plan B private. The conjunction of campus shortages and privacy concerns means that students must often purchase Plan B themselves, placing the dual burdens of cost and access on individuals. Penn must ensure that students have reliable access to Plan B year round and be able to obtain it in a private manner.
Penn Reproductive Justice, a student organization, has an anonymous Plan B delivery service that operates throughout the school year. Programs like these, however, are limited in their efficacy by the very fact that they are student-run—to function effectively, they must exist alongside a more robust, university–supported effort to make Plan B available to students. Medical care is a human right, not a burden to be pushed on to Penn students themselves.
The path forward for Penn is hardly obscure. Some potential solutions floated by student groups (and ignored by the administration) include demands for Penn to:
- Commit to providing free menstrual products funded by the university across campus
- Increase the number of wellness vending machines on Penn’s campus in central locations such as the Penn Women’s Center, the LGBT Center, and Houston Hall
- Allocate additional funding to purchasing Plan B for campus distribution
- Develop a larger committee (composed of students and staff) to maintain and stock Plan B in vending machines
At a university as well-resourced as Penn, free menstrual products and reliable emergency contraceptives should be basic necessities, not luxuries. Penn must take immediate action to support gender equity on campus and commit to being an equal opportunity institution not just in rhetoric, but in practice.
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