What do Engineers and Menstrual Health Advocates Have in Common?

All over the world, women and girls share a common bond: our monthly period.

This natural process creates different challenges for each of us, depending on our individual bodies, income, geography, education level, and culture. When it comes to addressing global health and education issues related to menstruation, communities share a common obstacle: stigma. One way we shatter this stigma is when men speak up and step up, just like they did at Apergy Corporation.

Apergy Corporation which is headquartered in Texas, works to provide highly engineered equipment and technologies to help drive safety and efficiency within the energy industry. Yet, that is not all they do! Recently 140 Apergy team members took some time out to assemble DfG Kits. The team was attending a Continuous Improvement Conference where, with the help of DfG North Orem “Q” of Utah, they turned Kit making into a teamworking challenge.

According to one DfG volunteer, Ann Laemmlen Lewis, “each table had instruction cards and all the parts and pieces needed to build 30 Kits. They [the Apergy team members] had 5 minutes to figure it out, then 5 minutes to evaluate and plan.” After that, they got to work! Four cycles of this process and a few hours later, the engineers had assembled an impressive 1,042 Kits! Not only did they take on the challenge of quickly learning and executing Kit packing on their own, but they also happily jumped on the sewing machines and worked on many other Kit components throughout the day.

Way to find innovative ways to help shatter shame, Apergy!