The government in February lifted the ban on the sale of menstrual cups — which prevent leakage during menstruation — following an online campaign launched by 35-year-old Tseng Ying-fan (曾穎凡).
Tseng in an interview earlier this month said that she was moved to bring more choices to women in Taiwan after seeing the large variety of feminine hygiene products in the US during her stay there as an exchange student.
She discovered that about 90 percent of women in Taiwan relied on menstrual pads, while only about 0.02 percent used tampons, based on sales figures.
The numbers reflected a problem with social values in the nation, she said, adding that she hoped to bring more insertion-type feminine hygiene products to the Taiwanese market.
Tseng said the challenges she faced were due to a general misunderstanding about the products.
She said her mother asked: “If you start selling these things in Taiwan, will there not be less virgins here?”
Tseng successfully brought tampons to the local market for the first time in 2010, saying at the time that she worked hard to achieve a 2 percent market share.
In 2015, she set out to bring menstrual cups to the market, but met with objections from her father — the biggest shareholder in her company.
The menstrual cup, invented in the US in 1937, is made from medical-grade silicone and can be sanitized and reused.
Tseng said her father was concerned about the implications of women using cups and also afraid it could destroy Tseng’s hard-fought achievements in tampon sales.
Tseng launched an online crowd-funding campaign in which she posted designs for “the first menstrual cup designed by a Taiwanese woman.”
She said she was shocked when she achieved her investment goal of NT$3 million (US$99,980) in just three days, and after three months of raising funds, she raised NT$10 million for the project.
Tseng ran into a second challenge when we she started looking into how to market the cup and discovered that it was classified as a medical device in Taiwan, meaning it would require clinical testing before it could be sold.
Tseng took to the National Development Council’s online public policy participation platform, where she requested that the menstrual cup be treated as a consumer product similar to tampons.
By July last year the motion was seconded by 6,100 people and the product was given approval by the Ministry of Health and Welfare for sale in February.
“A woman will spend about NT$70,000 on sanitary napkins over the course of her life. Conversely, a menstrual cup can last 10 years, meaning a lifetime expense of NT$5,000. This is to say nothing of the benefits to the environment,” Tseng said.
Tseng said her next goal is to promote the idea of part-time work for women, with the aim of allowing mothers to return to the workforce with a flexible schedule.
“I want Taiwanese women to have more choices and I want them to understand that they can be more active in fighting for their rights — not just waiting for good things to fall into their laps,” she said.
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