If women shouldn't make "critical decisions" on their period, how do men explain these ones?

According to Sarah Macarthur-King, an Australian executive coach who runs Invictus Coaching Solutions, women are ignoring one crucial issue when it comes to leadership.

Forget the glass ceiling, forget biases against women in the workplace, forget trying to manage family life and home life like some sort of octopus. What women really need to talk about is their period.

You see, Macarthur-King recently wrote an article for HerCanberra claiming pre-menstrual tension interferes with women’s abilities to make critical decisions, and encouraged those in leadership positions to “enlist someone you trust to run it by for a sanity check.”

The second sentence of her article reads, “last time I checked, ‘psycho’ is not a leadership quality.”

HAHA-HAHAHAHA. Good one!

"I’ve noticed in the last six months, a pattern of madness that grips me in my business. This pattern takes the form of about three weeks of genius, of creativity, of social spontaneity, of gratitude and excitement; followed by a week of frustration, doubt, lethargy, procrastination and analysis-paralysis," the article continues.

If I didn't know better (I... I do), I'd say Macarthur-King was drawing on entirely anecdotal evidence.

I'd also say anecdotal evidence is intrinsically unreliable, and essentially goes entirely against proper statistical and scientific methodology.

But pfft, let's be honest. What would I know, I could be on my period!

Nevertheless, since we seem to be reverting back to a world where anecdotal evidence that reinforces sexist stereotypes is worth advocating (has anyone questioned whether she was on her period when she wrote this? That could be a problem), I'd ALSO like to share some telling anecdotes.

Because you know who also make bad decisions? Men. And you know who don't have periods to 'blame' for them? Men.

And let's not get stuck in business and the leadership decisions of managers and CEOs. Oh, no. Let's look at this on a larger scale. Let's consider WORLD leaders.

Arguably the worst series of leadership decisions ever made were the work of Josef Stalin, who, as a completely unrelated side note, was kinda hot when he was 15.

It's estimated more people were killed under the leadership of Stalin than under the leadership of Hitler (who also, incidentally, made criminal leadership decisions that irrevocably damaged the course of human history.)

In Cambodia in the 1970s, Pol Pot established a totalitarian dictatorship in which he forced those living in cities to move to the countryside to work on farms or forced labour projects. He put his country in such a state of horror and ruin that with the combined executions, malnutrition, poor medical care and appalling working conditions, it's estimated 25% of the Cambodian population died.

Then there's George Bush's atrocious foreign policy decisions, and Donald Trump, who wants to build a friggin' wall to keep the Mexicans out. Great decision making there - it's obvious he doesn't menstruate!

Oh, and if we really want to talk about bad decision making, let's spare a thought for Anthony Weiner who, despite his unfortunate last name, continues to make the most bizarre and humiliating personal decisions as though he's constitutionally incapable of learning.

Men have been responsible for the most cruel, devastating and atrocious leadership decisions in human history. Women have only had the opportunity to hold leadership positions in the last century, and in that time, we've been subject to sexist stereotypes that continue to get in the way of us reaching our full potential.

Women can make bad leadership decisions as well as men can - but our anatomy, our biology, and our periods are not to blame. For any anecdote you can share about how PMS has affected your leadership, I can give you hundreds more about how men have made terrible decisions in contexts where they were made to feel like they had absolute power over people whom they believed were innately inferior to them.

Sexist stereotypes are likely to have a far greater impact on women's leadership than PMS ever could.

So thank you, Sarah Macarthur-King, for conducting a human experiment on yourself and concluding that your period leads you to "fall down in a messy heap of emotion and frustration." But your argument leaves us with a much greater question: what's the excuse for men?